Since weights varied from locale to locale, and since balances showed an inaccuracy up to 6 percent, prophets throughout the Bible advocated using just weights and balances and warned against using deceitful ones. If they paid the tax faithfully, the Lord promised that there would be no plague among them. When the Israelites were numbered, everyone who was twenty years or older had to give a half-shekel of silver as a ransom for one’s soul. The bekah was important because it was the atonement money for the service of the tabernacle. 1:17.) King Omri paid 2 talents (about $12,000) for the entire hill of Samaria, on which he built the capital of northern Israel.
Solomon could import a horse from the Hittites for 150 shekels (about $298) and a chariot from Egypt for 600 shekels (about $1,192). Jeremiah bought a field from Hanameel for 17 shekels of silver ( Jer. 6 The Old Testament gives us a clear idea of the purchasing power of ancient money. In the Israelite society, however, precious metal was worth more than it is now. 5 In the same market citation mentioned above, silver was valued at $5.42 a troy ounce, so a bekah of silver would currently be worth almost $1.05, a shekel $1.99, and a talent close to $6,000. In fact, where no metal is mentioned, silver is usually intended. Silver, however, was much more common than gold, and most of the biblical passages about money refer to silver. 3 (See first chart, “Old Testament Weights of Exchange.”) In one recent market citation, an ounce of gold (troy weight) was valued at $393, so 666 talents of gold would be worth almost $287,800,000, a very great sum even by our standards. The talent, then, if we take the average weight of a shekel at 11.4 grams, amounts to about 75.5 pounds. 2 Excavators have uncovered numerous ancient stone weights, but none of the shekel or half-shekel stones weigh precisely the same, probably due to the difficulty of carving stones into exactly the same weight. The Hebrew bekah weighs approximately 6.02 grams, and the shekel 11.4 grams. It is rarely mentioned in the Bible.) From Exodus 38:25–26, we can figure the relationship of a shekel to a talent: 3000 shekels to one talent. (The smallest was the gerah, identified in Exodus 30:13 as 1/20 of a shekel. Three of the most common weights were the half-shekel (or bekah), shekel, and talent-the largest standard. Since the Jews did not begin using coinage until the Exile (the time of Daniel and Ezekiel), business transactions before then were done by bartering or by paying a predetermined weight of a precious metal, usually silver. The answer comes from what we learn about the shekel and the talent. That may not mean much to us, though, since most of us don’t know how much a talent would be in today’s monetary systems.
For instance, we know that his annual revenue included 666 talents of gold. Actually, we don’t need to imagine how rich he was-the Bible tells us specifically. We’ve probably imagined an opulent palace with golden goblets.