Tablet Bearing All but One Commandment to Be Sold

The oldest known stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments, dating from 300 to 800 AD, will be sold in New York this month, Sotheby's auction house said. The 155-pound, two-foot-tall marble slab inscribed with the commandments in Paleo-Hebrew script will be auctioned on Dec. 18. The tablet was unearthed during railroad excavations along the southern coast of Israel in 1913 and was at first not recognized as a historically significant artifact. It was used as a paving stone at a local home "with the inscription facing upwards and exposed to foot traffic" until 1943 when it was sold to a scholar who grasped its significance, Sotheby's said.

The text inscribed on the slab follows the Biblical verses familiar to Christian and Jewish traditions but omits the third commandment against taking the name of the Lord in vain, reports the AP. It includes a new directive to worship on Mount Gerizim, a holy site specific to the Samaritans, Sotheby's said. The auction house calls it "an extraordinary treasure from antiquity, inscribed with the moral code that underpins Western civilization." Sotheby's estimates the tablet will be auctioned for $1 million to $2 million.

(More Ten Commandments stories.)