Shekel & the Thirty Pieces of Silver

The shekel began as a unit of weight in silver and became the basic measure of Hebrew money; major payments were reckoned in shekels long before coins were minted. Every Israelite paid a half-shekel as atonement money for the upkeep of the sanctuary.

By the Gospel era the temple tax was still half a shekel, and Jesus had Peter pay it with a stater (a four-drachma coin, a full shekel) found miraculously in a fish’s mouth — exactly enough for two. The shekel’s most infamous appearance, though, is the thirty pieces of silver Judas took to betray Jesus — pointedly the price of a slave in the law of Moses.

Even that detail fulfilled prophecy: Zechariah had foretold a shepherd valued at “thirty pieces of silver,” money then thrown “to the potter in the house of the LORD.” Judas, in remorse, flung the silver into the temple, and it bought a potter’s field — Scripture’s grim accounting of the price put on the Son of God.