The Eleventh Commandment

Nearly 150 years have passed since Moses Shapira, an antiquarian book dealer in Jerusalem, up-ended the Victorian world of biblical scholars and archaeologists by declaring he had discovered the earliest Bible text in the world—an original Book of Deuteronomy, which included the Commandments—eleven of them.

He offered fifteen leather-like fragments to the British Museum for one million pounds—the London papers could talk of nothing else for weeks in the summer of 1883, and Shapira was a celebrity. Experts at the museum pored over the manuscripts and came to a decision: they were forgeries, not the 3000-year-old scrolls that Moses insisted they were. He left London in disgrace.

Six months later, he was found in a shabby hotel in Rotterdam, a bullet through his head.

But was it suicide, as the police thought, or was it murder?

Historical fiction author Mary F. Burns has incorporated Shapira's story into the fourth book of her series, The...