History and Provenance

The account is given in Exodus and retold in Deuteronomy. Moses ascends Sinai and receives two tablets of stone inscribed with the commandments, described as the work of God. Finding the people worshipping the golden calf on his descent, he shatters them; he is then commanded to cut a second pair, on which the words are written again, and these are deposited in the Ark of the Covenant. From that point the tablets travel with the Ark, through the wilderness, to Shiloh, to Jerusalem, and into the Holy of Holies of the First Temple, and, like the Ark, they leave no further trace after the period before the Babylonian conquest.

Later tradition dwelt on them. A rabbinic teaching held that the fragments of the first, broken tablets were kept in the Ark beside the intact second pair, a striking image of brokenness preserved alongside wholeness. Jewish and Christian art fixed their now-familiar shape, and the tablets became a standard emblem above the Torah ark in synagogues and in church iconography. The Quran too speaks of the tablets (alwah) granted to Moses. Across all these traditions the tablets are objects of memory and symbol; none preserves or claims to preserve the tablets themselves.