286 PROF. ARCHIBALD R. S. KENNEDY, M.A., D.D., ON 



7 grs. more than our sovereign of 22 carats fine, and was a 

 light Babylonian shekel of the so-called "royal" standard. At the 

 then current price of gold in terms of silver (13^: 1), it was worth 

 ten light silver shekels or staters of 173-3 grs. (130 x 13^ = 

 173-3 x 10), or twenty half-shekels of 86'6 grs. The latter 

 weight was selected by Darius for his silver coinage. The siglos, 

 the Grsecized form of the Babylonian nhiklu, was thus not what 

 its name suggests, a true shekel or stater, but a half-shekel. 



Now among the weights published by Professor Macalister in 

 his Exploration of Gezer (ii. 285, fig. 433) is a small weight of 

 343*8 grs., described as " the frustum of a pyramid/' and bearing in 

 old Hebrew characters the interesting legend " ii of the King's 

 (shekels)." (Fig. 1.) Its weight identifies it as a double-shekel 

 on the Babylono-Persian silver standard as just explained. A 

 close parallel to the above inscription is furnished by a reference 

 to a loan in one of the recently discovered Jewish papyri from 

 Elephantine (Sachau, No. 28, 1. 4), which amounted to " 4 shekels 

 by the weights (literally, stones) of the King." The latter 

 expression, in its turn, recalls the weight of Absalom's hair, 

 II Sam. xiv, 26 — probably a reader's gloss from the Persian 

 period — viz., " 200 shekels after the King's weight (lit., stone)." 

 The shekel of this passage, however, is the ordinary trade shekel 

 of 126-130 grs., not the exclusively silver shekel of the Gezer 

 weight. The latter, further, enables ns to fix with precision the 

 amount of silver entered in the lists of gifts in the books of Ezra 

 and Nehemiah. The mina, or " pound," of our Version is, of 

 course, 50 of " the king's shekels," or rather less than 1 \ lbs. 

 avoir. The gold is entered as so many darkemonim, or drachms 

 (A.V. drams, K.V. darics) of 126-130 grs., so named as being 

 part of the heavy Babylonian gold mina. 



Eeturnincp from the literarv to the monumental evidence of 

 the presence in Palestine of the Persian silver standard, I make 

 out that it is entitled to claim at least a fifth of the weights in 

 the Gezer collection, ranging from the quarter and half-shekel, 

 or siglos-weight, up to 15 shekels. Similarly, at least a fourth 

 of the weights found in the fifth stratum at Megiddo appear to 

 belong to this standard. 



Now if we accept the view of modern criticism that the 

 Priest's Code assumed its final shape in the early Persian 

 period, we can understand the emphasis with which it is laid 

 down that all reckonings are to be made by " the shekel of the 

 sanctuary " ; in other words, in terms of the national Hebrew- 

 Phoenician shekel as opposed to the popular Persian shekel of 

 the government currency. 



