Weights and Measures of the Hebrews

Weights

The earliest Biblical reference to a unit of weight is in Genesis 23:16: “Abraham came to an agreement with him and weighed out… four hundred shekels (of silver) of the standard recognized by merchants.” Abraham was a new immigrant in Canaan. The shekel units which he used to weigh out the silver for Ephron the Hittite may have been those of his native Mesopotamia, with which he would have been most familiar.

The Mesopotamian shekel weighed about 8.3–8.5 g. Sixty shekels = 1 maneh (Greek: Mna, mana. English translations of the Bible often render maneh as “pound”) of 497–508 g. Sixty maneh = 1 kikar(Greek: Talanton; English: talent) of 29.8–30.5 kg. This system, which was originally Sumerian, in the fourth or third millennium BCE, was used with little change for thousands of years by the peoples of Mesopotamia; the terms SH‐Q‐L, M‐N‐H, and K‐K‐R are Semitic in origin and were first used by the Akkadians. Systems similar in structure, though varying in detail and in the...