10 minas, 100 talents, 1000 shekels. When these quantities show up in our Bible reading, we typically don’t pay a second thought and simply glance over onto the “juicy bits”. Okay, maybe you have more curiosity than me, but it took me 20 years to start caring about what these numbers actually meant in terms I understood. That was when things became very very interesting.
In 1 Chronicles 22:14, we read that King David went to great lengths to finance the construction of a temple for God, precisely, “a hundred thousand talents of gold, a million talents of silver” and much more. Have you ever wondered how much that is in our days?
Conveniently, gold and silver are precious metals that stand against time and inflation. Their values are largely comparable even till today. With the help of Bible footnotes and gold price tracker, I can tell you that those gold and silver are worth about $200 Billion USD. $200B! The Empire State Building cost less than $1B to build (adjusted for inflation to 2022). The 7-star hotel in Dubai, Burj al Arab, cost $15.6B in today’s USD. That’s not all, David paid even more out of his own pocket and so did the Israelite leaders. Now, go ahead and update your imagination for God’s temple. I’ll wait.
We can keep going, the amount of money that Elisha turned down as a reward for healing Naaman? $4.2M. The amount of gift Queen of Sheba brought to Solomon? $211M. And btw, Solomon gave her more gifts than she brought. In the Parable of Talents, the owner gave his three servants 5 talents, 2 talents, and 1 talent, respectively, with each talent worth about 15 years’ of wage. At a current estimate of the $31K USD median income, the 5-talent person got over $2.3M worth of assets to manage, and the 1-talent one $467K. Phew, no wonder he was fearful. He wasn’t just holding one coin, he had a pot of gold.
In the Old Testament, people didn’t use currencies like dollars or yuans. Instead, they used standardized weights to indicate the amount of precious metals being exchanged. That’s why we see shekels 舍客勒 {she3-ke4-le4} of gold, darics 達利克 {da2-li4-ke4} of silver, and talents 他連得 {ta1-lian2-de2} of iron. That changed in the New Testament with the advent of (relatively) advanced civilizations like the Roman Empire. That’s why we start to see denarius 一錢 (a day’s wage), penny/assarion 一分銀子 or 一文錢 (1/16 of denarius), quadrants 大錢 or 銅錢 or 銅幣 (1/64 of denarius), and drachma 塊錢 (around a denarius).
No, you are not required to remember them all. But as you can see, digging a little deeper into their modern equivalence paints quite a new color to the Biblical stories we read, so again, it pays to be curious.
Speaking of which, the word “talent” that we use so often these days actually comes from the Greek word “tálanton” which is the same word used in the Parable of Talents. The moral is, use your talents for God.
Photo from Thanasis Papazacharias on Pixabay