In the movie “The Ten Commandments,” Charleton Heston comes down off the mountain with two huge stone tablets. What was the real size of the tablets of the Law? What type of stone were they supposed to be made of? Any traditions on this?
A late Jewish legend has it that the first set of the tablets of the Law were each in the shape of a cube made of
sapir (sapphire/lapis lazuli; the same material the ‘pavement’ before God’s throne is likened to in Exodus 24:10), six
tefachim (handbreadths; 1
tefach = 8-10 centimeters) long and wide and three
tefachim thick. The words - purported to be not just the Ten Words, but “all the precepts of the Torah in all their particulars” all categorized according to their respective commandments - were not just engraved on the surface, but rather were bored fully through the stone (cf. Exodus 32:15, “on the one side and on the other were they written”), yet both sides appeared normally instead of the reverse side being a mirror image as one would expect. Despite being very thick and made of stone, however, the legend says that the tablets could be rolled up like a scroll. Plus, the letters miraculously supported themselves as well as the stone in which they were encased; Moses could never have been able to carry the tablets had this not been the case. In this legend, Moses ‘broke’ the tablets only because he
accidentally (
) dropped them - the divine power which supported these tablets was withdrawn when he saw the people worshipping the Golden Calf, with the letters flying back up to heaven.
http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/2730/75823226.png
All that aside, historically speaking, I don’t think there’s really any warrant for depicting the tablets to be very huge as they are in the movies or in paintings other than they make what is written on them more legible for the viewers. The text doesn’t say their actual sizes. Who knows? Perhaps the actual ones could have been barely larger than the palm of a hand. We have examples of
ostraca (singular
ostracon), pieces of pottery or stone usually containing scratched-in words or other forms of writing from ancient Egypt and the Near East. Many of these ostraca aren’t very big at all: they could easily be held with one hand. (Which is quite natural - you needed the other one for writing.
) If the tablets were anything like these ostraca, at least
that would certainly them more portable and would make Moses’ breaking of them more easier. But it’s just that, simple speculation.
http://historyofscience.com/G2I/timeline/images/gezer_calendar.jpg
The above is a picture of the
Gezer calendar (c. 10th century BC), a tablet of soft limestone inscribed in a “Phoenician” or what has been called paleo-Hebrew script. The calendar describes monthly or bi-monthly periods and attributes to each a duty such as harvest, planting, or tending specific crops. The text could either be a schoolboy’s memory exercise or perhaps the text of a popular folk song or even a mnemonic designed for the collection of taxes from farmers. It’s actually very small - 11.1 cm long and 7.2 cm wide, only slightly larger than the pic above.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/images/ps331488_m.jpg
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/9016/ps354801l.jpg
And here’s a nice Egyptian ostrakon containing the final lines of
The Tale of Sinuhe, dating from around 1250 BC. Again, the size isn’t very big: 29.5 cm by 17 cm. The second pic meanwhile is a register of workmen’s absences written on a limestone slab 33 cm by 38.5 cm.
As for what stone the tablets were made of, again there isn’t really anything much about it. As mentioned above the Jewish legend thinks that it is made of blue
sapir (sapphire/lapis lazuli), but some people simply assume that the tablets were made of granite, since that is the type of stone which is common in the Sinai peninsula (the traditional site) - in fact, that is what the mountains there are made of.
http://www.st-katherine.net/images/pgsMts01.jpg
, then that’s a bit more extra weight there.