Tablets of Stone

According to the Hebrew Bible, the Tablets of the Law (also Tablets of Stone, Stone Tablets, or Tablets of Testimony; Biblical Hebrew: לוּחֹת הַבְּרִית lūḥōt habbǝrīt "tablets of the covenant", לֻחֹת הָאֶבֶן luḥōt hāʾeḇen or לֻחֹת אֶבֶן luḥōt ʾeḇen or לֻחֹת אֲבָנִים luḥōt ʾăbānīm "stone tablets", and לֻחֹת הָעֵדֻת luḥōt hāʿēdut "tablets of testimony"; Arabic: أَلْوَاحُ مُوسَى āl-wāḥ Mūsā "the tablets of Moses") were the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments when Moses ascended Mount Sinai as written in the Book of Exodus.
According to the biblical narrative, the first set of tablets, inscribed by the finger of God, (Exodus 31:18) were smashed by Moses when he was enraged by the sight of the Children of Israel worshiping a golden calf (Exodus 32:19) and the second were later chiseled out by Moses and rewritten by God (Exodus 34:1).
According to traditional teachings of Judaism in the Talmud, the stones were made of blue sapphire as a symbolic reminder of the sky, the heavens, and ultimately of God's throne. Many Torah scholars, however, have opined that the biblical sapir was, in fact, lapis lazuli (see Exodus 24:10: lapis lazuli is a possible alternate rendering of "sapphire," the stone pavement under God's feet when the intention to craft the tablets of the covenant is disclosed Exodus 24:12). According to Exodus 25:10–22, the tablets were stored in the Ark of the Covenant.
There is ongoing academic discussion about the possibility that the Ark of the Covenant originally held a cult image of Yahweh, possibly with Asherah.
In recent centuries, the tablets have been popularly described and depicted as round-topped rectangles, but this has little basis in religious tradition. According to rabbinic tradition, they were rectangles, with sharp corners, and indeed they are so depicted in the 3rd-century paintings at the Dura-Europos Synagogue and in Christian art throughout the 1st millennium CE, drawing on Jewish traditions of iconography.
Depictions of round-topped tablets appear in the Middle Ages, following in size and shape contemporary hinged writing-tablets for taking notes (with a stylus pressing on a layer of wax on the insides). For Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) they still have sharp corners (see gallery), and are about the size found in rabbinic tradition. Later artists, such as Rembrandt (1606–1669), tended to combine the rounded shape with a larger size. While, as mentioned above, rabbinic tradition teaches that the tablets were squared, according to some authorities, the Rabbis themselves approved of rounded depictions of the tablets in replicas – so that the replicas would not exactly match the historical tablets.
According to the Talmud, each tablet was square, six tefachim (approximately 50 centimeters, or 20 inches) wide and high, and more a thicker block than a tablet, at three tefachim (25 centimeters, 10 inches) thick, though they tend to be shown larger in art. (Other Rabbinic sources say they were rectangular rather than square, six tefachim high and three wide and deep.) Also according to tradition, the words were not engraved on the surface, but rather were bored fully through the stone.
Replicas of the tablets, known as tabots or sellats, are a vital part of the practice of Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which claims that the original Ark of the Covenant is kept in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum.
The Quran states that tablets were given to Moses, without quoting their contents explicitly:
These tablets are not broken in the Quran, but picked up later:
In 2015, scholar Thomas Römer argued that “clearly… the tablets of the law are a substitute for something else.” He proposed that “the original Ark contained a statue [i.e. a cult image] of Yhwh”, which he specifically identifies as “two betyles (sacred stones), or two cult image statues symbolizing Yhwh and his female companion Ashera or a statue representing Yhwh alone.”