Talanton means simply weight) by both siklos and didrachmon, not unfrequently renders shekel of gold by chrysûs39, which means of course nothing more than gold stater, that is a didrachm of gold, such as those struck by the Athenians, by Philip of Macedon, Alexander and the successors of the latter, including the Ptolemies of Egypt, under whom was made the Septuagint Version. We have thus found the earliest Hebrew weight unit to be that standard which we have found universally diffused, and which we have called the ox-unit.
Next let us see how from this unit grew their system. In several passages the shekel of the Sanctuary is said to consist of 20 gerahs40, a word rendered simply by obolos in the Septuagint. As before observed, the Hebrew metric system was essentially decimal, like that of Egypt; in fact had Tacitus been a metrologist he might have quoted this as an additional proof that the Jews were Egyptian outcasts, expelled by their countrymen because they were afflicted with a plague, perhaps the scabies41, which so frequently affects swine. The measures of capacity, both dry and liquid, are decimal, and so accordingly we find a decimal division applied to the shekel. The latter is divided into two bekahs (בֶּקַע, “a division,” “a half”), and each bekah is divided into 10 gerahs (גֵּרָה). The latter signifies “a grain” or “bean.” The Hebrew literature does not state what kind of seed or grain it was, although it is defined by Rabbinical writers as equal to 16 barleycorns. But the fact is that, as we see from the Septuagint rendering, the name in the course of time came to be considered simply as that of one-twentieth of the shekel, whether that shekel was the shekel of the Sanctuary, the Phoenician silver shekel of 220 grains, or the kings shekel of 260 grains used for copper and lead. The gerah of the gold shekel or shekel of the Sanctuary was probably the most ancient and came closest to the natural seed from which it derived its name; this gerah would be about 6½ grains (130 ÷ 20 = 6·5). On an earlier page (p. 194) we gave the weights of a number of grains and seeds of plants, and amongst them that of the lupin, called by the Greeks thermos. According to the ancient tables the thermos is equal to two keratia, or siliquae