The Ten Commandments are, according to Christian question-and-answer site Got Questions, a sort of summary of the hundreds of other laws, regulations, and mandates given by God to the Israelites. The “Decalogue,” as it’s known, contains the foundational legal and moral principles that govern the spiritual lives of Christians and Jews around the world. In Exodus 20 (and again in Deuteronomy 5), God delivers the commandments to Moses, who then gives them to his people. A later narrative, in Exodus 32, tells of the commandments having been inscribed on tablets of stone directly by God’s finger. Moses, enraged at seeing the Israelites worshipping a golden calf, smashes the tablets into pieces, as Oxford Reference reports. A couple of chapters later, in Exodus 34, the commandments are manifested on stone again, this time by Moses chiseling them out per God’s orders.

According to Exodus 25, the original, broken tablets were enshrined into the Ark of the Covenant, a relic consisting of pieces of the Israelites’ history that accompanied them on their journey through the desert. Today, the ark — and, presumably, the contents within it — are claimed by one Christian group to be in a church in Ethiopia.

Are the Ten Commandments tablets in Ethiopia?

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