Matthew26chapter 26

The perfume was a fortune. Nard was imported from far to the east, sealed in alabaster flasks that had to be broken to be used, and the sum named — three hundred denarii — is roughly a year's wages for a labourer. Pouring it out was an irreversible act.

At a meal of any formality, people did not sit. They reclined on their left side on couches around a low table, propped on an elbow, feet away from the food. That is how a person could be described as reclining next to someone's chest, and how someone could reach a guest's feet.

The Passover meal had a fixed shape by this period: cups of wine at set points, unleavened bread, bitter herbs, the retelling of the exodus, and a closing hymn from the psalms sung at the festival. When Matthew says they sang a hymn and went out, he is describing the end of a liturgy every reader had performed.

The thirty pieces of silver had a bitter resonance. In Exodus, thirty shekels is the compensation owed when an ox gores a slave — the legal price of a slave's life. The coins were most likely Tyrian shekels, the high-purity silver the temple required.

Gethsemane means oil press, and the grove sat on the Mount of Olives just across the Kidron valley from the city. The trial that follows, at night, at the high priest's house, with the verdict reached before morning, breaks nearly every rule later Jewish law laid down for capital cases. The high priest was Caiaphas, and an ornate burial box inscribed with that family name was found in Jerusalem in 1990.