This Sunday night, May 16, is the Jewish holiday Shavuot (Pentecost). This biblical thanksgiving day, which celebrates the wheat harvest and first ripening fruit, is also, according to rabbinic teaching, the time the Hebrews received the Ten Commandments. What did the Ten Commandments look like?
The Bible makes it clear that the Commandments were engraved on two tablets of stone and that Moses carried them in his hands. I’m inclined to believe that the stones were not very big and the words had to be written small, or that the tablets may have been big in surface area, but exceedingly thin like school chalkboard slate. Otherwise, it would have been awfully heavy for one man to lug around.
I have seen some religious Jewish publications illustrating tablets that look like two perfect cubes. If the tablets were just to provide a writing surface, why would they be portrayed as so thick? Old man Moses would have to take a wagon or wheelbarrow up the mountain to bring down stones that big.
Measurements are given for nearly everything in the Tabernacle except for tablet measurements. This exclusion makes perfect sense. The Bible gives the measurements of the Holy Ark. Since the Ark housed the Tablets, the tablets would have to have smaller measurements to fit inside.
Since the Ark held the shattered set of tablets and the second set of Ten Commandments, the tablets would have to be less than half the size of the inside of the Ark.
Moses was commanded to make a second set of tablets “like the first ones that you broke.” Most images of the tablets show them rounded on top. I’m inclined to think the actual tablets were indeed curved on top rather than flat.
The Mesha Stele, or Moabite Stone, dated to be from the Davidic Dynasty era, is an ancient stone tablet describing a Moabite victory over Israel. People come from around the world to the Louvre Museum to study this treasured archaeological find.
For me, the greatness of this find is that it may be the soundest physical clue we have to the shape of the Ten Commandments.
Hersh Goldman is a Swampscott resident.
