Lesson 2: The Los Lunas Stone
Yes, it is Los Lunas, not Las Lunas. It is located on New Mexico State Trust land.
The stone weighs 80 tons. On it is an inscription in proto-Hebrew script. According to a 1949 translation by Robert Pfeiffer, a Professor of Old Testament and Assyriology at Harvard University, the inscription reads:
I [am] Yahve your God who brought you out of the land of the two Egypts out of the house of bondages. You shall not have other [foreign] gods in place of [me]. You shall not make for yourself molded or carved idols. You shall not lift up your voice to connect the name of Yahve in hate. Remember you [the] day Sabbath to make it holy. Honor your father and your mother to make long your existence upon the land which Yahve your God gave to you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery or idolatry. You shall not steal or deceive. You shall not bear witness against your neighbor testimony for a bribe. You shall not covet [the] wife of your neighbor and all which belongs to your neighbor.
Note: the phrase “two Egypts” refers to upper Egypt (closer to the headwaters of the Nile) and lower Egypt (closer to the Mediterranean). The Hebrew word is plural, as marked by the suffix, im: mizraim. On the two Egypts, see Wikipedia’s entry.
Here is a later translation:
I am Jehovah your God who has taken you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves. There must be no other gods before my face. You must not make any idol. You must not take the name of Jehovah in vain. Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Honour your father and your mother so that your days may be long in the land that Jehovah your God has given to you. You must not murder. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not give a false witness against your neighbour. You must not desire the wife of your neighbour nor anything that is his.
The Hebrew word for God (Yahweh) is found in this inscription.
The so-called Tetragrammaton is composed of the 4 Hebrew consonant letters YOD HE WAW HE and refers to the divine name. It is commonly rendered as Jehovah in the English language, by inserting the 3 vowels “e”, “o” and “a” between the consonants. In fact, the Hebrew part of the Bible (also known as the Old Testament) contains the Tetragrammaton more than 6800 times, including some instances inside the Ten Commandments.The following table compares the Los Lunas Tetragrammaton with those from other ancient Middle Eastern inscriptions:
http://www.loslunasdecalogue.org/decalogue-tetragrammaton.html
Reading assignment:
“Is this the world’s oldest surviving inscription of the Ten Commandments…in New Mexico?” Download here.
Here, we read:
Further speculation involved the authorship of that rock inscription. Some even considered it to be an inscription from a member of one of the lost tribes of Israel. Others have expressed the thought that perhaps some Mormons may have carved this message in an attempt to support their views of an ancient pre-Columbian semitic history in North America. However, a simple research on Mormon Web sites reveals absolutely nothing about this rock inscription. It is not used by their church as a proof for the existence of ancient Nephites in America. For a certainty it is not written in so-called “reformed Egyptian” language.
There is confirming evidence here.
Indeed, Mormons would seem to benefit the most, ideologically speaking, from authenticated Hebraic inscriptions. But in 1953, I found out, a group of five archeologists from Brigham Young University in Utah made the trip to Mystery Stone and found themselves unconvinced. Among them was John Sorenson, who wrote a letter to the editor of the Mormon Sunstone Review in the 1980s stating that though the scientists were “quite thrilled at first sight,” he notes that “the surrounding petroglyphs … were heavily patinated, whereas none of the carvings on the Phoenician stone were thus darkened.” Welby Ricks, another of the Mormon archeologists, concluded finally in the 15th Annual Symposium on the Archaeology of the Scriptures at BYU that “the Ten Commandment stone found near Los Lunas, New Mexico, is a fraud,” and probably the work of Eva and Hobe, as late as 1930.
“Indian Petroglyphs at the Los Lunas site.” Download here..
J. Huston McCulloch, “The Los Lunas Decalogue Stone” (1997). Download here.
Professor McCulloch and I were roommates at the 1974 Austrian Economics Conference, which was held at South Royalton, Vermont. We did not have any contact with each other until I found his article on the Bat Creek stone, which I came across in 2014. I discuss that artifact in lesson 3.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, “The Mystery Stone” (2013). Download here.
“Los Lunas Decalogue Stone.” Wikipedia. Download here.