The Ohio Decalogue Stone, rounded at the top and squarer at the bottom in stereotypical stone tablet fashion. The characters are not standard Hebrew. Telltale substitution blunders reveal what the hoaxer didn’t want you to know: that the source of the inscription is contemporary - from a Hebrew Bible.  

Suppose you want to engrave the Hebrew Ten Commandments in stone. Carving the letters found in printed Bibles could be very difficult! You might think of changing the Hebrew alphabet (aleph-bet) so the characters are easier to carve! Like this:

From An Annotated Transcription of the Ohio Decalogue Stone, J. Huston McCullough (August, 1992)

The Hebrew of Lehi’s and Jeremiah's time was written with Phoenician-like letters - letters like those carved on the rather plain Tennessee Mound Tablet, also known as the Bat Creek Stone. Mormons especially, should pay attention to this fact! The standard Hebrew alphabet used in Bibles today is post Lehi! Standard Hebrew would not have been familiar to the Book of Mormon patriarch, let alone the improvised writing on the Ohio Decalogue Stone.

The 10 Commandments, written in the plain but very ancient Hebrew familiar to Lehi

The Decalogue of Lehi’s day, and earlier, was written in Phoenician like letters - letters which would have been much easier to engrave than post exilic Hebrew letters in use today.

Evidently, the fabricator of the Ohio Decalogue inscription wasn't familiar with the ancient and more original Hebrew aleph-bet. Had he known ancient Hebrew he wouldn't have seen a need to make up a substitute alphabet. Memo to charlatans: If you’re not going to make a stone inscription of the Ten Commandments in ancient Hebrew, your better off copying the text from a source like the Greek Septuagint. Then at least you can make the plausible claim that the stone was carved by Hebrews from a later time period – e.g. Greek speaking Jews from Alexandria or maybe even Christians.

But the hoaxer decided to invent a substitute aleph-bet. He proceeded to edit the biblical text of the Ten Commandments, keeping the main parts, and counting the number of letters in the string to be carved. Since the made-up letters conveniently occupied square spaces of about the same size, the hoaxer did a little figuring to determine the size of stone needed to accommodate the whole text. He took into consideration the length of the string of letters, and the standard sized space that he wanted for each letter. He also added in the space needed for a graven image. He wanted to use up all the available surface of the stone; front, back, and sides, so folks would be really impressed with the craftsmanship and the text’s exact fit!

This brings up an important point: If you’re going to plan things so that you use up all the available writing space on the stone, you’d better not leave out important Hebrew characters like “et” (את) which indicates a verb’s direct object, but which has no meaning or translation in English! Sure you can read the Bible in English, but if you leave out something seemingly “meaningless” like את it would be a noticeable mistake in Hebrew! If you plan all the letters to fit perfectly on the stone and you stupidly leave out את or other letters, someone who truly knows Hebrew will probably get suspicious of the inscription! Actually the Ohio Moses Stone does ignore an “et” as well as other letters, and yes the text all too cleverly fits the stone’s writing surface. Oops!

Let's say you correctly transfer the Hebrew from the Bible to your improvised alphabet, how will you clue in the curious to the fact that the stone is really inscribed with Hebrew verse - they may not recognize your substitute alphabet? Hey, I have an idea: There could be a big cameo (graven image) of Moses centered on the stone’s face, with his recognizable Hebrew name inscribed like rays above his head! You could even replace the hard to carve standard Hebrew “mem” (מ), beginning the Law givers name, with a character that looks just like a common Latin “m”. See table above. Someone learned is sure to catch on that the stone is inscribed with holy verse when they plainly discern the name of the Law giver!

  מֹשֶׁה                ;מֹשֶׁה Moses                                           

2

                        אֲשֶׁר  which

                  הוֹצֵאתִיךָ  have brought thee

                   אָנֹכִי אָנֹכִי I

                                am

                       יְהוָה  the LORD

                      אֱלֹהֶיךָ thy God,

OOPS! Commentary on the Ohio Decalogue transcription of verse 2:

When it came to converting the Hebrew expression הוֹצֵאתִיך, which means “have brought thee”, the Moses Stone scribe foolishly mistook the letter ו for a ד. These Hebrew letters may look similar to some folk, but someone who actually reads and writes Hebrew would know the difference instantly. The real problem here is that the invented Moses Stone symbol that the scribe substituted for ד does not look at all like the substitute symbol for ו. Do you see the problem? See for yourself. Check out the table above and make the comparison.

So if the substitute alphabet was really used as an archaic writing system, how could the writer possibly have confused the two letters, which were made to look so very different in the Ohio alphabet? Understand that these letters sound very different when spoken. The mess-up here leads to non-sense? This mistake isn’t just a spelling error mind you! It is plain to see how the blunder took place: The scribe was actually trying to convert letters, albeit naively, from a standard Hebrew text (where they look similar) into a made-up alphabet where the corresponding letters were made to look different! Keep your eye out for this type of blunder – it happens again and again in the Moses Stone transcription. See source [2] for the transcription.                  

3

                         לֹא  no

OOPS! Commentary on the Ohio Decalogue transcription of verse 3:

The Hebrew word “elohim” (אֱלֹהִים) in verse 3 (KJV) is badly mutated on the Moses Stone. UNFORGIVABLE! The scribe was apparently insensitive to this very important Hebrew word for “GOD” or “gods”. It is as if he saw in the Hebrew letters הִי in אֱלֹהִים a single Hebrew letter מִ. Not only that, the scribe confused the Hebrew letter ם in אֱלֹהִים with the Hebrew letter ח. Oblivious to the actual Hebrew word he was attempting to transcribe, the scribe made out “elmh” (אֱלמח) – which is nonsense! See source [2] for the transcription.

                        לֹא  not

                 תַעֲשֶׂה־  Thou shalt make

                        לְךָ  unto thee

                      פֶסֶל  any graven image,

                     וְכָל־  or any

                             …      

OOPS! Commentary on the Ohio Decalogue transcription of verse 4:

Bad edit job here! The Moses Stone leaves the sentence incomplete, leaving off at וְכָל־. If the intent of the scribe was to abbreviate this commandment, he should have left off at פֶסֶל. The scribe did not understand everything he was copying. He may have gotten confused because the sequence of Hebrew words in the verse does not correspond one to one with the accompanying English translation. He may not have known for sure where to truncate the verse. See source [2] for the transcription.

5

6

[3]      Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-Aramaic Lexicon, אֵת, 853-854, pp. 84-86.

Back to Home Page