On Wednesday, Sotheby’s auctioned an item it advertised as the “oldest inscribed stone tablet of the Ten Commandments”—dating to sometime between 300 and 800 CE—for $5.03 million. The artifact was, according to Sotheby’s, discovered in 1913, and has the hallmarks of having been created by the Samaritan sect. But Christopher Rollston, perhaps the leading expert on ancient Hebrew inscriptions, is skeptical about these claims, and lays out a forensic case for doubting the tablet’s authenticity:

The fact of the matter is that this inscription was not found on a scientific archaeological excavation. Rather, it was sold on the antiquities market. Period. That’s all we really know. The seller had a putative “story of origins.” . . . But with inscriptions from the antiquities market, the seller always has a story. And the story the sellers (or forgers) tell is almost always a tall tale, which has been spun so as to convince the buyer that some inscription is ancient and that it was pulled from the soil of some archaeological site. Sometimes such stories are not entirely false, but sometimes they are. And it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

Here’s another problem. There are no photographs of this inscription from 1913. None. And so we have no proof of its coming from the ground during some railroad construction. Not a shred of contemporary photographic evidence from 1913. . . . This is hard to believe. This age of early archaeological discovery is one in which journals and newspapers have countless stories about the finds that are coming from the ground.

Am I certain the Sotheby’s Samaritan Ten Commandments were forged some 75 to 100 years ago? No. But am I convinced these are genuine ancient Samaritan inscriptions from 1000 or 1500 or 2000 years ago? Absolutely not.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.