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The Tablets of Stone, Stone Tablets, Tablets of Law, or Tablets of Testimony (in Hebrew: לוחות הברית ''Luchot HaBrit'' - "the tablets () the covenant") in the Bible, were the two pieces of special stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments when Moses ascended Mount Sinai as recorded in the Book of Exodus. refers to the tablets as the "Tablets of (the) Testimony". According to the Bible, there were two sets. The first, inscribed by God,〔Exodus 31:18〕 were smashed by Moses when he was enraged by the sight of the Children of Israel worshipping a Golden Calf;〔Exodus 32:18〕 and the second, later cut by Moses and rewritten by God.〔Exodus 34:1〕 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, the lapis lazuli (see Exodus 24:10, lapis lazuli is a possible alternate rendering of "sapphire" the stone pavement under God's feet when the intention to craft the tablets of the covenant is disclosed (24:12)).〔See: Staples, W. E., "Lapis Lazuli", in ''The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible'', vol.3, p. 72〕 Both the first shattered set and the second unbroken set were stored in the Ark of the Covenant (the ''Aron Habrit'' in Hebrew). ==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,〔Bava Batra 14a.〕 and indeed they are so depicted in the 3rd century paintings at the Dura-Europos Synagogue and in Christian art throughout the 1st millennium,〔Except for a variant tradition where a scroll is shown, only known from Christian examples. ()〕 drawing on Jewish traditions of iconography. The rounded tablets appear in the Middle Ages, following in size and shape contemporary hinged writing tablets for taking notes (with a stylus on a layer of wax on the insides). For Michelangelo and Andrea Mantegna they still have sharp corners (see gallery), 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.〔See (HaQoton, Reb Chaim ) "(Squared vs. Rounded Tablets )" (also available on (academia.edu ))〕 The length and width of each of the Tablets was six Tefachim, and each was three Tefachim thick - respectively roughly 20 and ten inches,〔Bava Batra 14a.〕 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. The clearest depiction of the stones is given in the Talmudic Midrashic sources as "clear", "flexible" and "transparent". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tablets of Stone」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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