A stone tablet that was described by Sotheby’s as the oldest in the world inscribed with the Ten Commandments sold on Wednesday for just over $5 million to an anonymous buyer who plans to donate it to an Israeli institution, the auction house said.

       The sale came after experts had raised questions about the item’s provenance and authenticity.

       Sotheby’s said the tablet was about 1,500 years old, from the late Roman-Byzantine era. It weighs 115 pounds, is two feet long and is carved in an early version of Hebrew, now called Paleo-Hebrew, the auction house said.

       Sotheby’s had estimated that the tablet would sell for between $1 million and $2 million. But it sold for $5.04 million after more than 10 minutes of intense bidding, Sotheby’s said.

       “The result reflects the unparalleled importance of this artifact,” Richard Austin, Sotheby’s global head of books and manuscripts, said in a statement. “To stand before this tablet is an experience unlike any other — it offers a direct connection to the shared roots of faith and culture that continue to shape our world today.”

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       According to the man who discovered the tablet in 1943, Jacob Kaplan, the stone was found in 1913 while a railway was being built near the coast of what is today southern Israel. It was used as a paving stone at a home, and was sunk into the earth with its inscription facing up, Mr. Kaplan said at the time.

       Mr. Kaplan, who died in 1989, published his findings in a scholarly journal, The Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society, in 1947. The tablet made its way to an Israeli antiquities dealer in 1995 and then to the Living Torah Museum in Brooklyn. It was bought in 2016 by a collector, Mitchell S. Cappell, for $850,000; he sold it at Sotheby’s New York on Wednesday.

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