The custom of wearing ornaments of an accur- ately determined weight—such were Rebekah’s
old nose-ring of half a shekel weight and her
racelets of ten shekels, Gn 24*°—would naturally tend to facilitate their use on occasion as mone The ‘ wedge (lit. tongue) of gold of fifty sheke weight’ purloined by Achan was paren an orna- ment of some sort (Jos 7“). The ring-money so opular in Egypt, to which allusion has already Tiger made (§ 1), does not appear to have been current among the Hebrews.* ‘The nature of the piece of money—for such it surely must have been —called késitah (np-yp Gn 3319, Jos 24%, and Job 42" only) is quite unknown. From the fact that the oldest versions render it by ‘lamb’ or ‘sheep,’ it is a plausible conjecture, but nothing more, that the késitah may have been a piece of precious metal, the value of which was in some way indicated by its having a lamb stamped upon itt (see art. KESITAH, and add to the reff. there given, Hultsch, Metrol.* pp. 460-63, who attempts to determine its value from utterly insufficient data, and Ridgeway, Metal Currency, pp. 270-72 [with illustrations], who concludes ‘ that the gesitah was an old unit of barter like the Homeric ox, and as the latter was transformed into a gold unit so the former was superseded by an equivalent of silver’).
efore we pass from this section, it may be
added that the predominant use of the shekel as the monetary unit in ordinary transactions has led to its frequent omission in statements of price in the OT. Joseph, for example, was sold for ‘twenty (shekels, AV pieces) of silver,’ Solomon paid for his Egyptian chariots ‘six hundred of silver’ apiece (see complete list of such omissions in Madden, Coins of the Jews, p. 15). It is worthy of note, finally, that the mina (735 in Ezk 45" by AV transliterated ‘maneh,’ elsewhere in OT and NT ‘pound’) does not occur in any pre-exilic writing.t The price of a chariot we have just seen was ‘600 shekels,’ not ‘12 minas’; Achan’s wedge weighed ‘50 shekels,’ not ‘one mina,’— examples might be multiplied indefinitely,—while large sums are quoted by talents and shekels only. From among the latter may be singled out Solomon’s annual revenue of 666 talents of gold (1 Καὶ 1015, 2 Ch 915) = £4,095,900, as also the incredible total of David’s Temple Fund, which, according to the Chronicler, amounted to the colossal sum of one thousand and twenty-five millions sterling (£1,025,000,000) 18
“6. Hoffmann, in Zeit. f. Assyriol. ii. (1887) 48f., has pro- posed to render the obscure word 733 of Job 22%. 35 (ΑΥ̓͂ gold, RY treasure, RVm ‘Heb. ore’) by ‘ ring-gold,’ t.e. gold circulat- ing in the form of rings, but on insufficient grounds.
+ Compare the Assyrian ingots stamped with ‘the head of Istar of Nineveh,’ to which Babelon refers in 1.68 Origines de la Monnaie, p. 58, and those spperenily, stamped with a plant, to which Mr. Pinches has called our attention. These stamped ingots were the precursors of true coins. (Cf. now, Johns, ‘ Did the Assyrians coin Money?’ Expos. Novy. 1899).
1 For this and other reasons the MT of 2 Ch 918 giving ‘ three hundred (md) of gold,’ viz. shekels, is to be preferred to, and to be substituted for, the text of the parallel passage Καὶ 1017 “three minas (m3D) of gold,’ and not vice versa, as most modern critics. This disposes of the hasty inference which several writers have drawn from these passages, that in the time of the Chronicler the mina was computed to contain 100 light shekela or drachms (cf. below, §§ 3, 4).
§ ‘One hundred thousand talents of gold and a thousand thousand talents of silver’ (1 Ch 2214).
MONEY
MONEY 42]
B. COINED MONEY FROM THE PERSIAN PERIOD TO THE REIGN OF NERO.
§ 3. Invention of the art of Coining. y Darius and his successors. The ‘Shekel of the Sanctuary.’—Modern research tends to confirm the statement of Herodotus (i. 94), that coins are an invention of the Lydians. To the reign of Gyges [c. 700 B.c.] may perhaps be ascribed the earliest essays in the art of coining (Head, Hist. Nwmorum, p. xxxiii; to this work, to Babelon, Les Origines de la Monnaie, and the other works mentioned at the head of this article, the student is referred for full discussion of the question as to the invention of coining, the pence employed, ete.). Wherein, it may be asked, does a true coin differ from the ingots of gold and silver of specified weight so long in use in the ancient world? We answer that an ingot becomes a coin when it receives the impression of an official mark—called by numismatists the ‘type’ of the eoin—which serves as _a_ public
uarantee of its weight and fineness, and hence of its value in the currency of the country. When the last band of Jewish exiles left for the land of their captivity (B.C. 586) true coins had cireulated in western Asia Minor and Greece for about a century, but there is no evidence that this economic revolution had affected Palestine. Forty years later (B.C. 546 or 548, acc. ta Winckler. Unter- suchungen zur altorient. Gesch. 131) Cyrus gained his decisive victory over Croesus king of Lydia, who had reorganized the currency of his kingdom (Head, Coinage of Lydia and Persia, 19f., Hist. Num. 546), introducing a gold stater, the famous κροίσειος στατήρ, of the weight of the light Baby- lonian gold shekel (126 grs.), and a corresponding silver stater or shekel* of 168 grs. Lenormant, Head, and others consider that Cyrus continued the issue of these coins from the mint at Sardis; but Babelon has shown that this view is untenable (Les Perses Achéménides, Introd. iif.), and that the royal coinage of Persia was first issued by Darius Hystaspis (B.C. 522-485). Darius’ coins were of two denominations—(1) a stater of pure gold (χρυσίον καθαρώτατον, Herod. iv. 166), weighin 130 grs. and circulating throughout Asia an Enrope under the designation στατὴρ δαρεικός or daric ;+ and (2) a silver coin of almost 87 grs., known as the σίγλος μηδικός or Median shekel.t The former was the light Babylonian shekel on the royal standard (see § 1),—otherwise one half of the corresponding heavy shekel (260 grs ) repre- sented at this period by the popular gold coin known as the stater of Phocca (Babelos, op. cit. ivf.; Head, op. cit. 506; see also footnote),—while the latter, the siglos, was one half of the light Babylonian silver shekel on the same standard. These were in all probability the first coins to cir- culate among the Jews. No 1 of the plate of illns- trations shows a gold darie of the Persian kings, the type of which is fenly constant throughout. The obverse represents the king as an archer, bearded, crowned with the cidaris, and kneeling right ; clad in long robe with left knee bare, he holds a bow in his outstretched left hand, and in his right a spear. The reverse is not occupied by