In the next place, we come across a much more startling revelation of the injustice habitually practised by the Hebrew monarchs. Just as later sovereigns were wont to meet their deficits by debasing the currency, so the kings of Judah had learned to augment their revenue by a systematic falsification of weights and measures. We know from the prophet Amos(249) that this was a common trick of the wealthy landowners who sold grain at exorbitant prices to the poor whom they had driven from their possessions. They “made the ephah small and the shekel great, and dealt falsely with balances of deceit.” But it was left for Ezekiel to tell us that the same fraud was a regular part of the fiscal system of the Judæan kingdom. There is no mistaking the meaning of his accusation: “Have done, O princes of Israel, with your violent and oppressive rule; execute judgment and justice, and take away your exactions from My people, saith Jehovah God. _Ye shall have just balances, and a just ephah, and a just bath._”(250) That is to say, the taxes were surreptitiously increased by the use of a large shekel (for weighing out money payments) and a large bath and ephah (for measuring tribute paid in kind). And if it was impossible for the poor to protect themselves against the rapacity of private dealers, poor and rich alike were helpless when the fraud was openly practised in the king’s name. This Ezekiel had seen with his own eyes, and the shameful injustice of it was so branded on his spirit that even in a vision of the last days it comes back to him as an evil to be sedulously guarded against. It was eminently a case for legislation. If there was to be such a thing as fair dealing and commercial probity in the community, the system of weights and measurement must be fixed beyond the power of the royal caprice to alter it. It was as sacred as any principle of the constitution. Accordingly he finds a place in his legislation for a corrected scale of weights and measures, restored no doubt to their original values. The ephah for dry measure and the bath for liquid measure are each fixed at the tenth part of a homer. “The shekel shall be twenty geras:(251) five shekels shall be five, and ten shekels shall be ten, and fifty shekels shall be your maneh.”(252)
These regulations extend far beyond the immediate object for which they are introduced, and have both a moral and a religious bearing. They express a truth often insisted on in the Old Testament, that commercial morality is a matter in which the holiness of Jehovah is involved: “A false balance is an abomination to Jehovah, but a just weight is His delight.”(253) In the Law of Holiness an ordinance very similar to Ezekiel’s occurs amongst the conditions by which the precept is to be fulfilled: “Be ye holy, for I am holy.”(254) It is evident that the Israelites had learned to regard with a religious abhorrence all tampering with the fixed standards of value on which the purity of commercial life depended. To overreach by lying words was a sin; but to cheat by the use of a false balance was a species of profanity comparable to a false oath in the name of Jehovah.
These rules about weights and measures required, however, to be supplemented by a fixed tariff, regulating the taxes which the prince might impose on the people.(255) It is not quite clear whether any part of the prince’s own income was to be derived from taxation. The tribute is called an “oblation,” and there is no doubt that it was intended principally for the support of the Temple ritual, which in any case must have been the heaviest charge on the royal exchequer. But the oblation was rendered to the prince in the first instance; and the prophet’s anxiety to prevent unjust exactions springs from a fear that the king might make the Temple tax a pretext for increasing his own revenue. At all events the people’s duty to contribute to the support of public ordinances according to their ability is here explicitly recognised. Compared with the provision of the Levitical law the scale of charges here proposed must be pronounced extremely moderate. The contribution of each householder varies from one‐sixtieth to one‐twohundredth of his income and is wholly paid in kind.(256) The proper equivalent under the second Temple of Ezekiel’s “oblation” was a poll‐tax of one‐third of a shekel, voluntarily undertaken at the time of Nehemiah’s covenant “for the service of the house of our God; for the shewbread and for the continual meal‐offering, and for the continual burnt‐offering, of the Sabbaths, of the new moons, for the set feasts, and for the holy things, and for the sin‐offerings to make atonement for Israel, and for all the work of the house of our God.”(257) In the Priestly Code this tax is fixed at half a shekel for each man.(258) But in addition to this money payment the law required a tenth of all produce of the soil and the flock to be given to the priests and Levites. In Ezekiel’s legislation the tithes and firstfruits are still left for the use of the owner, who is expected to consume them in sacrificial feasts at the sanctuary. The only charge, therefore, of the nature of a fixed tribute for religious purposes is the oblation here required for the regular sacrifices which represent the stated worship rendered on behalf of the community as a whole.