CHAPTER X. The Systems of Egypt, Babylon, and Palestine.

Now it will be observed that in the passage from Exodus quoted above, whilst the shekel of the Sanctuary is carefully mentioned when amounts of gold and silver are enumerated, no such addition is made in reference to the “seventy talents and two thousand and four hundred shekels of brass.” If then the heavy or double shekel and its corresponding mina and talent, known to us hitherto as the royal Assyrio-Babylonian heavy standard, had already been introduced among the Hebrews (and we have just seen that according to the First Book of Kings it was in use, at least a mina of 50 double shekels (100 light) was employed for gold), nothing is more likely than that this standard would bear a title similar to that which it enjoyed in Babylonia and Syria, and be known as the king’s weight or stone. As I have observed in the case of the royal Assyrian standards that they were employed for copper, lead, and commodities sufficiently costly to be sold by weight, so we may with considerable probability conjecture that this king’s weight was employed regularly among the Semites for the weighing of the less precious metals, and other merchandise. Hence it is that there was no need to add any explanation of the nature of the standard by which the 70 talents of brass were weighed, and it was only because in the case of Absalom’s hair we have an article not commonly weighed, that it was thought necessary by the writer to make clear to us by which of the two standards usually employed the estimate of the weight of the year’s growth of hair was made. We may therefore conclude with probability that “the king’s shekel”