“Be Ye Expert Money Changers”

by Albert L. Zobell, Jr.

It was Passover time. Masses of devout Jews pressed their way along the narrow street, eager to reach the temple. There they would make their sacrifices and pay the half-shekel temple tax that had been exacted of all men over twenty since the time of the exodus. As they drew closer to the sacred building, they could hear the bleating of sacrificial victims, the blasts of trumpets, and the cries of vendors. A breeze brought them the heavy smell of blood, split entrails, burnt fat, and incense.

Once inside the outer court they could see the cages of animals and birds on sale for the benefit of those who had not brought a sacrificial animal. The owners of the poor captives loudly proclaimed their animals’ superiority, all in the name of piety.

Quieter, though even more scheming, were the occupants of small tables arranged around the court. Here sat the money changers—offering to exchange, for a neat profit, foreign coins for the special “shekels of the sanctuary,” or weight of the sanctuary, required to make the tax payment.

Upon such a scene of blatant desecration of his house, Jesus came and twice drove the salesmen and animals from the temple: “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Mark 11:17.)

Ironically Jesus himself was at one time asked to pay the temple tax or tribute. The didrachm of one-half shekel in value, or about thirty-three cents in American money, had been instituted as a special sacrifice to pay the effects of original sin. After Jesus explained to Peter (who had mistakenly told the collector that the Savior would pay) that it was ludicrous to ask the children of the king to pay tax, he kindly instructed Peter to go fishing and to open the mouth of the first fish he caught. There he would find a coin large enough to pay the tribute for both of them. The coin he found was a shekel, also called a stater or tetradrachm. Frequently, since the didrachm was rare, two men would join in paying one tetradrachm for them both.

The value of the shekel varied somewhat during the period of the Old Testament. Originally the word simply signified a certain weight of silver or gold. Finally it came to denote one-half ounce of either of these metals. Before coins were struck, unstamped ingots of gold or silver were balanced against a fixed weight at the time of purchase or exchange. Lesser values were made up in the form of bars. Copper was also used as a means of exchange but was not as common as the other two metals. When currency was struck, it was also in these three metals: “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass [copper] in your purses,” attests Matthew 10:9 [Matt. 10:9]. Gold ingots were valued at 13 1/2 times more than the silver ingots. Possibly this ratio was derived from the fact that the Babylonian culture equated gold with the sun and silver with the moon and thus valued each metal according to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies: thus 360 days to 27 days or 40 to 3. Silver was more common than gold as a means of exchange in Palestine.

About five hundred years before the Christian era, Phoenicia was given the right to issue coins in the native standard of Palestine. The tetradrachm Peter found in the fish was a Phoenician coin. Since the Holy Land was a crossroads for ancient trade routes, the coins of a number of nations were in common use there. In the New Testament, Greek, Roman, and Phoenician coins are mentioned as well as gold and silver, which were often weighed for the exchange at the time of the transaction. The gold the wise men brought from the East, along with the frankincense and myrrh, is thought not to be coinage.

Since the Talmud specified that the Temple tribute be paid only in coins on the Phoenician standard, some argument can be made in support of the money changers. These men knew the relative value of each coin in comparison with coins on another standard and in addition were constantly on guard against false money. A frequently quoted agraphon credited to the Savior would have been immediately understood by his disciples: “Be ye expert money changers”—be skillful in distinguishing true doctrine from false. Necessary though the money changers might have been, and still are in Israel today, they had no place in the temple—especially the untrustworthy ones the Savior found there taking full advantage of the confusing state of the money in the Holy City.

At the time of the Savior, Roman coins were in general use. Most common of these coins was the denarius or penny, worth one-fourth shekel or about sixteen and one-half cents. It should be remembered in assigning equivalents in American money that the purchasing power, the only valid test of the value of money, was many times greater then than now. The denarius, for example, was a day’s pay in Palestine for a laborer, and according to the story in Matthew 20 [Matt. 20], the day was twelve hours long.

When the Lord was asked: “Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?” he asked to see a penny. Once having the superscription identified, he answered: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.” (Luke 20:22–25.) That superscription would have been the head of the Emperor Tiberius, with the Latin phrase: “Tiberius Caesar, the son of the deified Augustus.”

The parable of the Woman Who Loses One of Ten Pieces of Silver (Luke 15:8ff) was concerned with her drachm. Greek coins found their way into Palestine, but more frequently the drachms were imperial coins struck at Antioch. They passed for denarii in trade, but were at a discount in paying the imperial tribute. The “fifty thousand pieces of silver” counted as the worth of the “curious arts” books burned in Ephesus were also denarius drachms. (See Acts 19:19.)

The Widow’s Mite? Who does not know that she possessed, and willingly gave, the smallest coin known to the Hebrews. Her contribution consisted of two tiny coins worth less than half a penny in American money. Had she held one of them back, she would have been that much richer in worldly possessions, but the world’s heritage because of her would have been poorer indeed. The little coins were probably Maccabean copper coins. Though the right to strike coins was always jealously guarded by the sovereigns, in 39–38 B.C. the Romans granted Simon Maccabeus the right to produce coins exclusively for the Jews. Though it is not certain whether or not any silver coins were struck, many copper coins were. Simon’s successors continued to produce copper currency. Unlike money from other countries, these coins bore no image of any man nor foreign inscription but were adorned with fruit or plants or some other design and, in the Roman period, the name but not the image of the emperor.

The farthing, worth two mites, was another copper coin that could have been of Roman or local origin. The Savior advised his disciples to agree with their enemies at the time of the conflict lest they be delivered to judgment and cast into prison to there pay the “uttermost farthing.” (Matt. 5:26.)

A third copper coin mentioned in the New Testament is the Greek penny, also called a farthing to avoid confusion with the denarius. Worth about two-thirds of an American penny, the coin could be used to purchase sparrows. (See Matt. 10:29 and Luke 12:6.)

The talent of the Gospels was one of the larger denominations of coins and was of silver, though gold talents were also in circulation. It might conceivably have been the Phoenician talent, but it is believed to be identified with the reduced Attic scale that had been formally recognized by the Romans. The talent was worth 6000 denarius drachms or about $1000.00. Clearly when the overly cautious servant buried his talent, he lost a great deal of interest.

In the parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Matt. 18:23ff) “talents” and “pence” (denarii) are used. The contrast becomes all the more vivid when it is realized that the unforgiven debt was small enough to be carried in a pocket—about seventeen dollars—but for the payment of the other an army of nearly eighty-six hundred carriers, each carrying a sack of money weighing sixty pounds would be required. If these money carriers, on debt retirement day, walked in a single file, each a yard behind the one in front, the line of marchers would be nearly five miles long. The 10,000 talent debt amounted to almost $10 million.

The second most valuable coin was the mina or pound. The mina, like the talent and the shekel, had at one time been a specific weight of metal but was now a definite sum of money. The sixtieth part of a talent, the mina was worth about seventeen dollars. In Luke 19 [Luke 19] is a story similar to the one about a nobleman who gave talents to three servants. Here the departing lord gave one pound to each of ten servants. One of the servants hid his pound up in a napkin and received the same judgment as did the servant who buried his talent in the ground.

Judas betrayed the Master for thirty pieces of silver, most probably Tyrian tetradrachms. The tetradrachm was worth four denarii or sixty-six cents, making the value of the transaction less than twenty dollars or the price of a slave. Still that sum seems to have been sufficient to purchase a field. (Matt. 27:7.)

Money, its earning and spending, was one of the biggest challenges of people in the past as it is now. The Apostle Paul took a philosophical look at money when he wrote to his young missionary companion Timothy: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Tim. 6:10.) The thirsting for money is often stronger than the ability to make money can satisfy. When that happens, it strikes as a plague, twisting and torturing the soul, as happened to Judas. In a sobering moment the writer of the Old Testament Proverbs said: “… give me neither poverty nor riches. …” (Prov. 30:8.) “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal,” the Savior said. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matt. 6:20–21.)

shekel; tetradrachm; mite; denarius; mite

tetradrachm; shekel; denarius; drachm; denarius; denarius; shekel