Sotheby’s Samaritan 10 Commandments and the Antiquities Market: Caveat Emptor

On the auction block at Sotheby’s is an inscribed stone billed as “the Ten Commandments Tablet, 300-800 CE.”  (https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/the-ten-commandments/ten-commandments-tablet-300-500-ce).  Within Sotheby’s narrative (i.e., sale catalog) about this inscribed stone, the descriptors are ostentatious and glowing: “The Earliest surviving inscribed tablet of the Ten Commandments, incised during the late Roman-Byzantine era, The Holy Land.” And the next phrase is similar: “The Only Complete Example OF A Ten Commandments Tablet From This Early Period” (this capitalization is Sotheby’s not mine).  In terms of further details, it is described as a “white marble tablet, approximately 24 7/8 x 22 1/8 x 2 3/8 inches, weighing approximately 115 pounds, neatly chisel-inscribed with the Mosaic Ten Commandments in their Israelite Samaritan version, 20 lines in a Paleo-Hebrew script.”

Then, rather than focusing on this tablet itself, the Sotheby’s catalog begins to focus on the significance of the original Ten Commandments, the ones which Moses received on Mount Sinai (which this stone definitely isn’t!).  Here are some of the words from Sotheby’s sale catalog: “The Ten Commandments are by any measure one of the most widely known influential tests in the vast canon of the world’s written word….described in their earliest recordings as being spoken directly by God to Moses.” Then Sotheby’s grandiose verbiage continues: “Dating to the Late Byzantine Period, this remarkable artifact is approximately 1500 years old and is the only complete tablet of the Ten Commandments still extant from this early era.”  The fact of the matter is that even if one accepts Sotheby’s dating to 1500 years ago (which I really don’t), then that’s still almost two thousand years after Moses himself (whom most of us in the field of biblical studies would put in the 1200s BCE).  Perhaps Sotheby’s might have mentioned that little fact.  The rest of the sale catalog’s description focuses on things such as the Samaritans (who are indeed a very important group), the Crusaders (who certainly are important as well).  But the references to Moses and the original Ten Commandments certainly strikes me as pandering.

Within this version of Sotheby’s sale catalog (the first listing was painfully brief and omitted so many of the basic details, so Sotheby’s took another stab at it and augmented their catalog statements, hence the current version of the listing), there is reference to an “origin story” for Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments.  Here it is: “According to the seller, his father found the Tablet in 1913 during the excavation for the railroad and transferred it to his home where he placed it at the threshold of one of the rooms of the inner courtyard.”  Then, the Sotheby’s catalog states in 1943 “An Arab man from Yavne” sold Jacob Kaplan the “white marble Tablet with an inscription engraved upon it.”  A paragraph or two later, the Sotheby’s catalog says “according to further information received by Jacob Kaplan, the Tablet was discovered buried to the east of the center Jama Mosque in the same spot where a church and a Samaritan synagogue on e stood.”  Basically, this story is first told in 1947, in tandem articles published in the Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, one article by Kaplan, and one by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.

Both Kaplan and Ben-Zvi seem to believe the story they were told. Indeed, to some today, this “origin story” may seem credible, and even quite beautiful.  That’s the way that Sotheby’s seems to want it to sound. And Sotheby’s seems to assume these stories about the putative origins are true.  But let’s consider some cold hard facts, point by point.

The fact of the matter is that this inscription was not found on a scientific archaeological excavation.  Rather, it was sold on the antiquities market.  Period.  That’s all we really know. The seller had a putative “story of origins,” and Kaplan and Ben-Zvi believed that story.  But the fact remains that it was not found on an archaeological excavation. And with inscriptions from the antiquities market, the seller always has a story.  And the story the sellers (or forgers) tell is almost always a tall tale, which has been spun so as to convince the buyer that some inscription is ancient and that it was pulled from the soil of some archaeological site.  Sometimes such stories are not entirely false, but sometimes they are.  And it’s not always easy to tell the difference, since those hawking their wares on the antiquities market are not always the most scrupulous with regard to facts.

Here’s a recent example of a tall tale, very much in the news during recent years, a fraudulent “origin story.”  Prior to the opening of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., the Green family, or those working on behalf of the Green family, were told about some priceless, fragmentary Dead Sea Scrolls.  These were from the Kando family, or so the story went.  And Kando was indeed the antiquities dealer who brokered the sale of the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls which were found by Bedouin in 1947, and so the story had an aura of authenticity.  And through the years since 1947, it was consistently said (within the field of Qumran Studies, Biblical Studies) that Kando had not sold everything, and that he still had some actual Dead Sea Scrolls around, scrolls which were as ancient as all of the other Dead Sea Scrolls from the region of Khirbet Qumran.  Those working on behalf of the Green family ostensibly believed this story about these Dead Sea Scroll fragments which were up for sale on the antiquities market.   They believed that these were from the Kando family’s stash of Dead Sea Scrolls.  That is, they assumed that this story about these new (i.e., recently surfaced) Dead Sea Scrolls fragments was absolutely true.  Millions of dollars were reportedly paid for these Dead Sea Scroll fragments.

But prior to the opening of the Museum of the Bible, doubts began to be raised about these Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.  When I walked through the Museum of the Bible prior to its grand opening (in 2017), I suggested that the verbiage on the scroll-fragments exhibit should be changed to suggest that these might be modern forgeries.  A number of scholars had been suggesting this. It was my view as well.  The Museum changed the signage before the Museum opened a few days later, making it clear that some within the orbit of the Museum were fearing that some or all of these Dead Sea Scroll fragments might be modern forgeries, not ancient Dead Sea Scrolls fragments at all.

Much to their credit, the Museum began to work diligently on determining whether or not these Dead Sea Scroll fragments were indeed ancient.  And the final report by ArtFraudInsights was submitted to the Museum in November 2019.  The verdict was definitive.  None of these Dead Sea Scroll fragments was ancient.  The medium (leather) was ancient, but the writing was modern. The origin-story about these Dead Sea Scrolls fragments was a complete and total fabrication.  Not long after this, I was among the handful of scholars presenting on March 15, 2020, when the Museum formally announced the conclusion: all of these Museum of the Bible Dead Sea Scroll Fragments were modern fakes, made by a modern forger. As for me, my presentation that day was entitled, “The Museum of the Bible’s Forged Scrolls: Part of a Long History of Textual Forgeries.”  In this case, there was a great story about the putative origins of these Dead Sea Scrolls fragments (from the Kando family), but the story was as fake as those scroll fragments.   The moral of the story: there is a price for gullibility.  Never trust the “origin story” which someone recounts, especially if the person telling the story is trying to sell you something. Caveat emptor is pretty good advice.

And this wasn’t the first time such a story had been told about some inscription which had surfaced on the antiquities market.  Although such stories go back many centuries, and even longer, let’s consider a couple instructive stories.  In ca. 1868 the Mesha Stele was discovered.  It’s a great inscription, from the ancient Moabites, well known from the Bible.  This inscription dates to the 9^th century BCE.  It’s stunning, and it is certainly ancient.  And not long after it was found, an antiquities dealer named Shapira said that there were some more inscriptions on stone and pottery which were being found in the same basic region.  He sold many hundreds of them (indeed, thousands).  But they were all fakes, and the French archaeologist and epigrapher named Clermont-Ganneau was the person who demonstrated this most persuasively, and particularly rapidly. I’ve spent a fair amount of time analyzing the Shapira forgeries through the years.  They’re fascinating modern fakes.  But they are still fakes.  And again, more recently, the Tel Dan Stele Inscription is a stunning and particularly important Aramaic inscription from the 9^th century BCE.  It was discovered on excavations at Tel Dan in 1993 and 1994, and it is certainly ancient.  And less than a decade after the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele, the Jehoash Inscription surfaced on the antiquities market.  It purportedly came from the region of the Temple Mount. That was the “story of origin.”  But it is a blazing modern forgery. The origin story was as fake as the inscription.  The inscription is an homage of sorts to the Tel Dan Stele, as the modern forger of the Jehoash Inscription was trying to model some of what he did on certain features of the Tel Dan Stele Inscription.  And the same is true for the so-called Moussaieff Ostraca. These are modeled on ancient Old Hebrew ostraca, although the modern forger tried to throw in some striking content (basically, a shiny object meant to reduce critical acumen among those analyzing it).  And the list could go on and on (for more discussion and bibliography, see, for example, Rollston, “Forging History from Antiquity to the Modern Period,” in Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology, Technology, and Ethics, edited by M. Rutz and M. Kersel, Oxbow, 2014, or various other articles on the subject of forgeries on my page on www.academia.edu).  In other words, there’s a very long history in the field of origin stories which have been fabricated to make it seem that some modern forgery is actually ancient.  So here’s the question: has Sotheby’s provided evidence that this Samaritan Ten Commandments is actually ancient? No.  Absolutely not.  All they have done is retold the unverified stories which have been told for about 75 years.

Here’s another problem.  There are no photographs of this inscription from 1913.  None. And so we have no proof of its coming from the ground during some railroad construction.  Not a shred of contemporary photographic evidence from 1913.  In this regard, compare the Samaria Ostraca.  The Samaria Ostraca were excavated at around the same time as this Samaritan Ten Commandments tablet was allegedly found, and we have scores of photographs of the Samaria Ostraca (the original glass negatives of the Samaria Ostraca are still archived at Harvard).  But of this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription, we don’t have a single photograph dating to 1913, or even to the 1920s, or to the 1930s (beware of the fact that modern forgers are also good at producing photographs which appear much older than they are….so forensic analysis would be required of any photo that may come to light, and modern forgers and antiquities dealers are also great at producing “certificates of authenticity” which dupe people as well).  Furthermore, we have no published statement in 1913 or thereabouts regarding this putative find.  No academic articles.  No newspaper articles, such as we often get (even going back to the days of the Mesha Stele, and since then, because the press is consistently interested in great finds.  But with regard to this find, we have nothing, zero from the press in 1913).  So we basically have a story that has been repeated since around 1943 (and included in the 1947 article), and it is repeated again by Sotheby’s.  But the problem is that we have zero documentation from 1913, and since pillagers and forgers often concoct such stories to give an inscription an aura of authenticity, this story could actually just be a tall tale told by a forger, or some antiquities dealer. Sotheby’s would have us believe that we have nothing from ca. 1913 about Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription because no one recognized its significance.  This is hard to believe.  This age of early archaeological discovery is one in which journals and newspapers have countless stories about the finds that are coming from the ground.  So the utter silence about this find cannot be easily explained by stating that “no one understood it was significant.”  If an inscription was found in 1913, especially one of this size and length (in terms of the number of words), it would most likely have garnered some attention.

So, again, should we just assume that the story which was told to Kaplan and Ben-Zvi was true?  Well, I learned a long time ago that it’s dangerous to assume. In a court of law, this sort of story would be classified as hearsay, and thirty-year old hearsay at that.  Not exactly the sort of evidence that would be considered compelling.  And do we even know the name of the “Arab man” who ostensibly found this Samaritan Ten Commandments, or do we know if he was he around in 1943 to verify the story.  I think not.  Perhaps the story was that he had died.  Very convenient of a seller to say that.  So I am definitely suspicious about this putative “story of origins” for Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments.

And Sotheby’s is stating that this Samaritan Ten Commandments inscription is ca. 1500 years old.  But there is no way that this can be known with any sort of precision.  After all, this Samaritan Ten Commandments stone was not found on an archaeological excavation.  We do not have some stratified archaeological context for them.  We don’t even know who actually found them. We don’t know of any associated artifacts.  We don’t have any carbon 14 tests (i.e., of organic remains which might have been found with this inscribed stone, such as a burnt beam or ancient carbonized seeds).

Of course, sometimes it is possible to date inscriptions based on the morphology and stance of the script.  That’s one of the things that I do a lot of: palaeography.  But the script used by the Samaritans is a fairly static script through the centuries (e.g., for the copying of the Samaritan Pentateuch).  So it’s really not possible to date this script with precision.  And that means that Sotheby’s date of “about 1500 years ago” or “300 to 800 CE” is not anchored in some sort of empirical data.  It’s a date which is mostly speculation.  Rather interesting in this connection, therefore, is the fact that within the New York Times article published on December 12, 2024, (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/arts/ten-commandments-stone-tablet-sothebys-auction.html), “Selby Kiffer, the international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s by Victor Mather, Selby Kiffer is cited as saying: “The script is a key to it. We know when it went out of common usage.” The facts on the ground are far from that simple.

There’s something else which I find interesting in the New York Times story.  Kiffer is reported to have “cited the wear and weathering of the stone as a key to determining its age.”  But Sotheby’s (in their sale catalog) stated that the story told to Kaplan was that “the Arab man from Yavne” who sold him the inscribed stone said that “his father found the Tablet in 1913…and transferred it to his home where he placed it at the threshold of one of the rooms of the inner courtyard.”  And that’s where the stone stayed for thirty years.  So, according to Sotheby’s own retelling of the story, people walked on this inscribed stone for thirty years.  Various factors determine wear: the depth of the chiseling of the letters, the hardness or softness of the stone, and exposure to elements or foot traffic (or other types of traffic, or abrading activities).  In other words, is wear a definitive determinant of antiquity?  Absolutely not. This inscription was allegedly in a high traffic area (a threshold), and that could account for the wear.  And it’s surprising that Kiffer would suggest that wear demonstrates antiquity.  It’s definitely not that easy to determine.

So, let’s at least entertain the fact that the Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments could be a modern forgery.  Were there any other Samaritan texts which could have been used by a modern forger as a model for the script (i.e., the letters of this inscription, and the morphology and stance of those letters) of Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments.  The answer is a resounding yes.  After all, we do have the Samaritan Pentateuch, which has been known to the scholarly world for much longer than a century, and it uses this same basic Samaritan script.  In addition, we have the Leeds Samaritan Decalogue, which was discovered around 1863.  Or again, the Palestine Museum Decalogue was discovered in 1935 in the vicinity of Nablus (for these, see “Samaritan Decalogue Inscriptions by John Bowman and Shmarjahu Talmon, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol 33, March 1951, pp. 211-236).  All a forger actually needs is one inscription upon which to model his script.  And the more exemplars which are available, the more straightforward the production of a modern forgery can be.  And so, at the very least, one must concede the fact that there were some nice models of the Samaritan script which could have been used as a model of sorts for the script of Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments.  And as for the Ten Commandments themselves, well, those are in the Samaritan Pentateuch, so all the forger would have needed to do is to copy the words of the Samaritan Pentateuch and then throw in a couple of surprise twists (basically a shiny object to attract attention and reduce critical thinking).  It’s really not rocket science.

Note also that one of the things which has been mentioned about Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments is the fact that it does not contain the commandment prohibiting the vain usage of the divine name, that is, “You shall not take the LORD’s name in vain.”  Note that in the Samaritan Pentateuch, that commandment is present, in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 (i.e., the Samaritan Ten Commandments in the Samaritan Bible does say: “You shall not take the LORD’s name in vain”).  And notice also that forgers during the past 150 years, when they fabricate their forgeries, often throw in surprising content.  And they do this so as to garner more interest in their forgery, and then people begin to talk about the shiny object (the surprising content) rather than the actual problems.  For 150 years, and indeed much longer than that (since forgeries were produced in antiquity as well), forgers have been producing fake inscriptions with surprising content.  Perhaps that is what is really going on here.

Something else deserves mention, at least in passing.  Laboratory testing of inscriptions which surface on the antiquities market is a desideratum.  I’ve written a fair amount about this, including some of the pitfalls (see Rollston, Maarav 10, 2003, and Maarav 11, 2004).  Thus, it is disappointing that even though Sotheby’s is hoping for a sale price of $1 million to $2 million, that they didn’t at least do some laboratory testing (e.g., looking for the presence of microscopic traces of the metal tool used to chisel or incise the letters, etc.).

Am I certain the Sotheby’s Samaria Ten Commandments were forged some 75 to 100 years ago?  No.  But am I convinced these are genuine ancient Samaritan inscriptions from 1000 or 1500 or 2000 years ago?  Absolutely not.  In short, Sotheby’s seems to be making a number of problematic assumptions, and I do not find that to be useful.  Thus, I would simply conclude with these words: caveat emptor.