The phrase “30 pieces of silver” is a proverb in many modern languages. It refers to someone who has sold out and taken money, high office or personal gain in exchange for betraying a person or an important cause.
The phrase comes, of course, from the Bible, because it was for 30 pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot betrayed Christ. But what was 30 silver pieces actually worth in its day?
The story is a familiar one. In the Gospels, when Christ enters Jerusalem and disturbs the civil and religious leaders of the day, Judas goes to the chief priests and asks what they will give him to hand Jesus over to them, and he was given the famous sum on money. (Matthew 26:14-16)
Later, Judas repents what he did and throws the money back at the priests, who decline to return it to the treasury because it has now become blood money. Instead they buy a potter’s field to bury dead foreigners. (Matthew 27:3-10)
Perhaps religious leaders of the day saw the money as now ritually unclean and so it went to purchase a lot for dead gentiles, people who were outside the covenant and therefore religiously unclean.
Burial of the dead, Jewish or gentile, was considered a righteous act of mercy in the day. Christians would see in that purchase a deeper symbol, in Christ’s blood purchasing a place for them in death and life.
And so to answer the question above, 30 silver pieces was enough to purchase a cheap vacant lot outside town.
The problem with the 30 pieces of silver is that we do not know which coins the text refers to. The ancient world had a lot of silver coins, some worth a lot more than others.
To rephrase this in modern terms, if we were to say, “I paid 30 greenbacks for thus and such,” it means something rather different if one means a $1 bill or a $100 bill.
The idea that there is one type of currency in a given country is a very modern concept. In antiquity it was the weight of the silver that mattered in exchange and people did not care a great deal about which king or empire issued the coin. They did care a great deal about the purity or debasem*nt of the silver.
Leading candidates for Judas’ finder’s fee are the stater issued by Antioch, the shekel of Tyre or the tetradrachem of Ptolemaic Egypt. Depending on which of the coins was used, in modern values of silver, these known coins would bring the sum to be between $250 and $300.
Some scholars have observed that one silver coin was a working man’s wage. So in modern terms, a worker getting $15 an hour in an eight-hour day would take would take home $120. Thirty days’ wages would be $3,600.
It gets more complicated still when we recall that not all coins of the same weight were of equal value. The coin issued in Antioch was Roman and bore the dead of Caesar, but it was only about 80 percent pure. The Tyrian coin was more than 90 percent pure, and so it mattered a great deal whose currency was employed.
Small wonder that the money changers of the Bible were held in such contempt by Jesus and others, because to trade coins of a similar weight made it very easy for a savvy banker to sell less silver for more.
The Hebrew Scripture give us a few more clues. The Torah tells us that if an ox gored a slave, the owner of the dead slave had to be compensated the sum of 30 shekels of silver, and the ox got executed. (Exodus 21:32)
As a slave was an expensive commodity, this would indicate that Judas’ wages were more significant than a mere $300. It is not hard to see how the Christian writers of the New Testament would see this sum as foreshadowing the redemption of the faithful by the price of an innocent man’s life.
In a more cryptic passage, the prophet Zechariah seems to have gotten fired from his job for preaching the word of the Lord and gets paid off for the sum of 30 silver pieces, a term he calls “lordly.” (Zechariah 11:13)
The Zechariah passage seems to indicate that he was paid off because he was betrayed, and this passage probably inspired the better-known one from Matthew’s gospel.
Of course, no one knows whatever happened to the original 30 pieces of silver, although various ancient coins purporting to be the originals were preserved in shrines of the middle ages as relics.
When this author asked his New Testament tutor in seminary what the actual value of the coins was, the reply came back, “the price of a bus ticket to hell.”
The universality of the cynical phrase “They got 30 pieces of silver for that” by people of any faith suggests the fact that most of us have felt betrayed and sold by people in public authority.
This past month’s recent national political conventions and both political parties have provided more than one example of that.
Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.
