Anyone can become the owner of a piece of ancient history.
A sidewalk slab that later turned out to be the oldest stone tablet with the 10 commandments is now available at auction – it can be purchased for only 2 million dollars.
LADbible writes about this.
A paving stone used in front of a house in Israel turned out to be a 1,500-year-old tablet with biblical commandments. Perhaps the strangest part of this story is the fact that the tablet was found near a railroad track in 1913, but its significance was not realized at the time. Instead, the 60cm tall, 52kg slab was recycled and used as paving stones outside someone's home.
Laid face up and exposed to the elements, the slab was walked on by countless people for 30 years until someone noticed the meaning of the ancient inscription.
The slab is written in a long-abandoned Paleo-Hebrew language, which explains why people did not know they were walking on a piece of history. However, constant wear means that in some places the inscription is no longer entirely clear.
The tablet has since been declared “the oldest known carving” of the biblical Ten Commandments, a portion of Holy Scripture used in both Christianity and Judaism, and dates to the late Roman-Byzantine era.
However, historians have noted that this text has one significant difference from the commandments that most of us know, which gives us an idea of who this text may have belonged to.
Usually, the third line of the 10 commandments reads, “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain.” This tablet calls the reader to pray at Mount Gerizim, which is a place of religious significance to the Samaritans. The Samaritans are not just characters from biblical history, but an ethno-religious group that separated from the mainstream of Judaism about 3,000 years ago.
The tablet will be put up for auction on December 18 Sotheby's at a price of about 2 million dollars.
Recall that recently a 77-year-old piece of Queen Elizabeth II's wedding cake was sold at auction. A letter from the bride was sold along with it.
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