Thou shalt not... damn, out of room!

[lethargic_man]

The BBC website reports today on auctions of a number of famous film props. Amongst their number are the Ten Commandments from... well, it says Ben Hur, but surely it means The Ten Commandments:

Anyhow, knowing the palaeo-Hebrew script just about well enough to follow a given text, I was intrigued to see whether it divided up the commandments according to the scheme followed by most Jewish commentators^*, or that by most Christian commentators^†.

* With the first two commandments being "I am the Lord your G-d" and "You shall not have any other gods before Me"; and the last one being the ban on all forms of covetousness.

† In which the commandment to worship G-d and the ban on worshipping anyone else are lumped together, but the bans on covetousness split apart.

And the result? Well, first the tablets are presented in the wrong order, with the first one on the left; but that's probably just the person who arranged them for photographing. Furthermore, the commandments are divided up most oddly, with four commandments on one tablet, and six on the other, thus losing not only the mathematical symmetry, but also the division between the five commandments between G-d and man, and the five between man and his fellow. But beyond that, the commandments are indeed presented according to the consensus-Jewish order.