Why the Ten Commandments Occupy a Lofty Place in America

The commandments have a way of popping up in peculiar places. Joselit writes about a retired surveyor who claimed to discover an ancient stone copy in Ohio, electrifying the whole country in the 1860s. The artifact seemed to confirm a popular theory that Native American burial mounds in the Midwest were remnants of an ancient Hebrew civilization—proof, one Ohio pastor wrote, that the “sons of Jacob were walking on the soil of Ohio many centuries before the birth of Columbus.” The “Newark Holy Stones” were almost certainly a hoax, though scholars still debate whether the surveyor was the scammer or the scammed.