Religion: The Oldest Decalogue

A Manhattan church—All Souls Unitarian—announced last week that it had acquired a new and unique section of the Dead Sea Scrolls: the oldest complete Biblical copy of the Ten Commandments, probably dating from the end of the 1st century B.C. The price of the scroll, slightly more than $5,000, was paid by a prominent mining tycoon with a hankering for archaeology and a strong dislike of publicity. In the course of two lectures at All Souls last spring, Dr. Frank M. Cross Jr., Harvard's Hancock professor of Semitic languages and a leading member of the international team of scroll scholars that...