Ancient Israelite Coins and Scales

Coins and Coinage

Coinage was invented in Lydia, in western Asia Minor, in the seventh century BCE. Coins consisted of a premeasured quantity of precious metal, mainly silver, struck with an image or legend naming the issuing authority and attesting to its value. Value was determined primarily by the type and quantity of metal, but quality and purity were also considered. The coins did not bear legends indicating their denominations; the denominations were probably identifiable by the coins’ diameter, thickness, and relative weight.

Minting authorities recognized the iconographic value of coins. Images representing the king or the city-state and their patron deities were used both to identify the authority and to demonstrate its power. Traders began to recognize certain coins for the quality of their silver and the accuracy of their masses. Athenian silver tetradrachm coins, for example, found their way around the Mediterranean and remained in use long after they were minted.

During the period of Persian rule, Persian and Greek coins were used in the province of Yehud (Judea). Later, in the second half of the fourth century BCE, the province minted its own silver coins, adding the legend Yehud, usually in paleo-Hebrew script, even though Aramaic was the official administrative language of the Persian Empire. Some scholars believe that this return to Hebrew script represents an assertion of Jewish national identity. Many of the images imitate those used on Athenian coins, such as the heads of deities and their symbols (e.g., the owl of the Greek goddess Athena). It is not clear whether the Yehud coins use these images with their original religious symbolism or merely demonstrate the province’s authority to issue coins, using standard coin imagery without any religious meaning. Specific innovations in imagery on Jewish coins, such as the shofar, the ear, and the lily, may reflect a developing Jewish iconography and religio-political message. It is also possible, though not certain, that Yehud and nearby provinces eschewed the contemporary Greek coin denominations such as drachma and obol and used a different system, in the case of Yehud one based on the shekel of the Temple. The provenance of most coins is unknown.

Before coinage, purchases could be made with silver or gold. Sometimes the metal took the form of broken jewelry or irregularly shaped pieces of metal, and other times of small ingots that were cut from long strips scored for easy separation. The pieces of metal, like those from the Philistine city of Ekron (seventh century BCE), were carried in pouches and would be weighed out on a balance scale to make a purchase.

Scales and Weights

Balance scales were likely made mostly of wood. No complete example has survived, but they are depicted in ancient Near Eastern art. Bronze pans from several balances have been found. These are flat or mostly flat plates, often with slight rims, and are approximately 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm) across. Three or four small holes, spaced evenly around the pans near their edges, allow them to be suspended from the beam of the balance by a cord. The weights were stone or metal objects and were usually dome-shaped, but some were shaped like animals. They often had their denomination inscribed on them.

Almost all the Judahite weights are made of limestone and are dome-shaped with an inscription indicating their denomination on the top. Their base unit is a shekel of approximately 0.4 ounces (11 g). Inscribed shekel weights have a symbol like an Arabic numeral 8 with an open top, accompanied by a hieratic (Egyptian) numeral to its right or left indicating the number of shekels in denominations of 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, and 40. Other weights are inscribed with the Hebrew words for fractions of a shekel (beka, payim, and netsef, or one-half, two-thirds, and five-sixths of a shekel, respectively). These inscribed weights were found in Jerusalem, Arad, and elsewhere; they date to the late eighth through the seventh centuries BCE.

A few weights were shaped like animals. A well-preserved bronze lion-shaped weight, weighing around 3 ounces (82 g), was discovered near the altar of the Arad sanctuary. It seems to be an imitation of lion-shaped weights from Assyria. Why it was present in the sanctuary is unknown, although the Bible indicates that types of donations brought to the Tabernacle would have been weighed (e.g., Exodus 30:23–25; 38:24–29).

Many of the weights were shaped and polished so that any damage would be visible. Damaged weights might weigh less than intended, and a transaction using them would result in the wrong amount of silver changing hands. The Bible warns against cheating by using weights that were too heavy or too light (e.g., Deuteronomy 25:13; Proverbs 20:23). The words for units of currency are derived from the process of weighing the metal (Hebrew shekel, for example, comes from the verb “to weigh”). Because coinage was not invented until late in the biblical period, most biblical references to payments in shekels of silver refer to weighed-out quantities of metal, not to coins.