Weights, Measures, and Money in Scripture

The cubit, roughly the length of a forearm from elbow to fingertip, was Israel’s basic unit of length. Genesis 6:15 gives the ark of the flood its whole shape in cubits: “the length of the ark three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.” Smaller units were fractions of the same forearm: a span was the spread hand, about half a cubit; a handbreadth was the four fingers of the closed hand, about a sixth of a cubit; a finger was the smallest named unit, given directly in Jeremiah 52:21, where a Temple pillar’s bronze wall is “four fingers” thick.

Ezekiel’s temple vision uses a longer cubit and says so in the same verse that introduces it: “a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in the man’s hand a measuring reed six cubits long, of a cubit and a handbreadth each...” (Ezekiel 40:5). Each cubit of the reed is a common cubit plus a handbreadth, a “long cubit,” so the reed itself is six of those, not six common cubits. Scholars differ on the exact length of the common cubit by a few centimeters, depending on which ancient standard (Egyptian, Babylonian, or a native Israelite reckoning) is assumed; this page gives the widely used figure and marks it approximate rather than picking a single number as settled.

Before Israel had coins, it had scales. When Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah, nothing was counted out: he “weighed to Ephron the silver which he had named... four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant” (Genesis 23:16). A shekel began as a weight of silver on a balance, not a minted object; the word itself simply means “a weight.” The sanctuary shekel gets its own stated conversion at Exodus 30:13: “half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary; (the shekel is twenty gerahs)...” The gerah, one-twentieth of a shekel, was the smallest named weight in Israel’s system.

By New Testament times, weighed silver had given way to struck coins, Roman and Greek, and the Gospels name them precisely. Matthew 20:2 (KJV) records a laborer “agreed with... for a penny a day...” the Greek word behind “penny” being the denarius, a Roman silver coin and a typical day’s wage; the ASV renders the same Greek word “shilling,” and both are the translators’ own word for one coin. Mark 12:42 states its own small-coin conversion in the same breath: a poor widow “cast in two mites, which make a farthing,” the mite (lepton) being the smallest coin in circulation, two of them equal to one farthing (quadrans). Matthew 17:24-27 names the Temple tax in the didrachma, a Greek double-drachma coin the ASV translates “half-shekel,” and the coin Peter finds in the fish’s mouth, a stater, which the same verse calls “a shekel,” enough by itself to cover the tax for two men.

The mina (maneh) is Scripture’s own hardest weight to pin down. Ezekiel 45:12 names it directly, “the shekel shall be twenty gerahs; twenty shekels, five and twenty shekels, fifteen shekels, shall be your maneh,” but readers and translators have long disagreed on how that verse’s own numbers total the mina, whether at sixty shekels or another figure; the difficulty sits inside the verse itself, not between two separate texts. This page gives the most common modern reckoning and marks it disputed rather than settled.

Matthew 26:15 records the price paid for Judas’s betrayal, “thirty pieces of silver,” without naming the coin. The traditional identification with shekels rests on Scripture’s own cross-references rather than an outside guess: Exodus 21:32 sets “thirty shekels of silver” as the price of a slave gored by an ox, and Zechariah 11:12-13, the passage Matthew’s Gospel later cites at 27:9-10, names “thirty pieces of silver” as a shepherd’s contemptuous wage, cast to the potter in the house of the LORD. Which specific coin (Tyrian shekels are the common scholarly identification, on the grounds that the Temple required them for its own dues) is a matter of reception, not a claim this page asserts as settled.