According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tablets of the Law as they are widely known in English, or Tablets of Stone, Stone Tablets, or Tablets of Testimony in the Exodus 34:1, were the two pieces of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments when Moses ascended biblical Mount Sinai as written in the Book of Exodus. According to the biblical narrative the first set of tablets, inscribed by the finger of God, were smashed by Moses when he was enraged by the sight of the Children of Israel worshipping a golden calf and the second were later chiseled out by Moses and rewritten by God. says the second set were written by Moses. According to traditional teachings of Judaism in the Talmud, they were made of blue sapphire stone as a symbolic reminder of the sky, the heavens, and ultimately of God's throne. Many Torah scholars, however, have opined that the biblical sapir was, in fact, lapis lazuli. According to the tablets were stored in the Ark of the Covenant.
Appearance of the tablets
In recent centuries the tablets have been popularly described and depicted as round-topped rectangles but this has little basis in religious tradition. According to rabbinic tradition, they were rectangles, with sharp corners, and indeed they are so depicted in the 3rd century paintings at the Dura-Europos Synagogue and in Christian art throughout the 1st millennium, drawing on Jewish traditions of iconography. Leo Bible. The rounded tablets appear in the Middle Ages, following in size and shape contemporary hinged writing tablets for taking notes. For Michelangelo and Andrea Mantegna they still have sharp corners, and are about the size found in rabbinic tradition. Later artists such as Rembrandt tended to combine the rounded shape with the larger size. While, as mentioned above, rabbinic tradition teaches that the tablets were squared, according to some authorities, the Rabbis themselves approved of rounded depictions of the tablets in replicas so that the replicas would not exactly match the historical tablets. According to the Talmud, the length and width of each of the Tablets was six Tefachim, and each was three Tefachim thick - roughly 50 and 25 centimetres respectively, though they tend to be shown larger in art. Also according to tradition, the words were not engraved on the surface, but rather were bored fully through the stone.
Content
In Jewish religious tradition, the arrangement of the commandments on the two tablets is interpreted in different ways. Rabbi Hanina ben Gamaliel said that each tablet contained five commandments, "but the Sages say ten on one tablet and ten on the other". Because the commandments establish a covenant, it is likely that they were duplicated on both tablets. This can be compared to diplomatic treaties of Ancient Egypt, in which a copy was made for each party.
The Quran states that tablets were given to Moses, without quoting their contents explicitly: These tablets are not broken in the Quran, but picked up later:
