Of the ninety-two elements naturally occurring on Earth, the Hebrew Bible (the “Tanach”) mentions only six. The two most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust, by mass, are oxygen and silicon. Even though together they account for just over three-quarters of the mass of the crust, the Tanach says nothing about them. Aluminum is the next most common element, accounting for about eight percent of the mass of the crust, but it, too, is unknown, or at least unmentioned, by the authors of the Tanach.

The elements that the Hebrew Bible does identify, ordered by the frequency of mention, are gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, and lead. Uniquely, in the Book of Numbers (at 31:22), they are mentioned together and in that order as metals that can be purified by fire. Sometimes they are mentioned elsewhere in different combinations and various orders. Mostly, though, they are mentioned separately , although gold and silver are often cited jointly. 

Gold, zahav in Hebrew,  is the most frequently mentioned metal, being identified almost 400 times, according to one concordance. Silver, or kesef, is mentioned the next most frequently, almost 300 times. Counting copper is a bit problematic as the Hebrew word for copper is nechoshet, but that word is also translated sometimes as bronze and sometimes as brass, both of which are alloys of copper. Despite the frequency of their mention, gold, silver, and copper together account for less than 0.007% of the Earth’s crust. Still, the Torah mentions these three metals as important, for instance in the adornment of the Tabernacle. (See, e.g., Ex. 31:3-5.)

The remaining metals — tin (b’dil) (the element that combines with copper to form bronze), lead (ofaret), and iron (barzel) — are mentioned much less frequently. Zinc, which is used with copper to make brass, is identified separately not at all. 

No doubt because gold, silver, and copper occurred naturally in their metallic state and could be used without extraction metallurgy, they were probably the first metals used by our homo sapien ancestors.  We have evidence of their usage as coins or in other objects as far back as 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. They are all metals which may corrode, but, if at all, in a fashion that does not alter their essence. For instance, copper can turn green over time, but it remains functional copper. By contrast, when iron oxidizes, i.e., rusts, its utility and functionality are compromised. Today, symbols of gold, silver, and copper can be  found clustered together in Group 11 at one column of a modern periodic table, with copper (Cu) on top, silver (Ag) underneath, and then gold (Au).

While the frequency of appearance in the biblical text is important, whenever one of these metals is mentioned, we learn something. Sometimes the lesson is instructive on multiple levels, some of which may have been  intentional and others no doubt not on the minds of the authors of the text. 

Two Initial Lessons from Tubal-Cain, the Putative Shaper of Copper and Iron.

As the Torah begins to set the stage for the saga of the development of what today we call the Jewish People, it imagines an initial setting that was chaotic, with dark ambiguity hovering over a watery mass. (Gen. 1:2.) The biblical story then moves rapidly by way of a series of separations and introductions. Within a period said to take three days, the Creator separated light from darkness, waters above a domed space from waters below it, and water under the domed space from land. (Gen. 1:3-13.) 

In the next three days, these domains were filled with objects and creatures that moved, first the Sun, Moon, and stars in the domed space, then fish in the seas and birds in the air over the land, and, finally, domestic animals, wild animals, and humankind on the land. (Gen. 1:14-31.)  

Based on our present knowledge, the Torah’s accounts of stellar evolution, planetary development, and the emergence of life leading to the arrival of humankind are deeply flawed for various reasons. It is easy for us today, and in hindsight, to identify how incomplete, how erroneous, they are. 

As one of many possible examples, the authors did not recognize that everything around them, including the land on which they were standing, the water in the rivers and lakes they saw, as well as the rain that fell, the air that they breathed, the plants and animals they ate and, of course, they themselves, were made up of atoms of elements forged in the furnaces of long dead stars. (See, e.g., Adams, Origins of Existence, Free Press, 2002), at 159.) They were not alone. Humankind would not discover the secrets of  stellar, planetary, or biological evolution until two more millennia passed. Moreover, they probably did not care about the details anyway. They were focused on the development of a people and a nation, not plants and animals, nor even a planet, much less the whole shebang. 

As they were setting the stage for the main story to begin, however, the authors did give early recognition to certain occupations that they must have believed were of interest to their intended readers. Not surprisingly, then, the first of the first two sons of the first couple in the story, Abel, became a shepherd. The second, Cain, became a farmer and, later, a builder of a city. (Gen. 4:2, 17.) 

Not long afterward, though, in the seventh generation after Adam, the Torah mentions one man who became a herder and another who became a musician and played the lyre and pipe. (Gen. 4:20-21.) Around the same time, their cousin Tubal-Cain was identified as a craftsman of every tool of copper and iron. (Gen. 4:22. Some translations speak of bronze and iron.)

The Torah can be understood as a Book of Instruction, a characterization that Deuteronomy uses self-referentially (e.g., Deut. 28:61, 29:220, 31:26), but one that has been applied also to the text as a whole.  The description of Tubal-Cain as a metal forger or shaper, essentially a smith, is instructive on at least two levels.  First, and taking the text as true,  the claim that Tubal-Cain worked with both copper and iron provides a clue as to when he lived. Second, and whether he was or wasn’t a real person, it helps us understand the earliest date that the passage may have been written.

To refine our inquiry, we must have two other bits of information. Here, the first is when the Torah claims Tubal-Cain lived. Jewish tradition sets the creation of the universe at 3761 BCE. (Yes, we know today that the universe in which we live is almost 14 billion years old, but for the moment we are dealing with the story as we have received it.) 

Now, the Torah does not provide lifespans for descendants of Cain like it does for the descendants of Adam’s third son, Seth. Nevertheless, we can see that Tubal-Cain is a seventh-level descendant of Adam. The seventh-level descendant of Adam via Seth is Methuselah.  (See Gen. 5:6-21.) By reviewing the chronology set forth in Genesis, we can determine Methuselah was born in the year 687 After Creation (“AC”) and died in 1656 AC. Under that calendar, we have recently begun year 5785 AC, which is in late 2024 CE in our current system.  So, converting  the AC dates back under our current calendar system, Methuselah lived between 3074 and 2105 BCE. (See Gen. 5:21-26.) The Torah does not tell us when or how long Tubal-Cain lived, but if he lived around the same time as his long-lived cousin, then he lived mostly in the third millennium BCE.

The other information we need concerns when and where copper (or one of its alloys) and iron were forged. For over a century, archaeologists, anthropologists, and others have identified three periods in human prehistory by a number of factors, including what materials were used for tools, utensils, and weapons. These periods are known as the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. 

We will talk more about the Bronze and Iron Ages in a bit, but let’s now tie together the information we have on Tubal-Cain and clarify the two lessons his brief biblical story tells us. First, and still taking the data as given in Genesis as true, Tubal-Cain probably lived in the first 900 years of the Bronze Age. He would have had to live another 900 years, though, to have reached the beginning of the Iron Age. And even had he done so, he probably would not have been vigorous enough to do much forging of iron. So, the biblical attribution of him as the initial iron smith of humankind seems far-fetched and we should not treat his story as a factual history either of him as a person or the development of metalworking.

Of course, a traditionalist may reasonably object that deriving the time Tubal-Cain lived from the biblical genealogy of Seth’s line may lack desired precision concerning descent from Cain.  While true, that objection will not save Tubal-Cain’s position as an ironworker. This is because a traditionalist reading of biblical genealogy teaches that Methusaleh, the comparative standard we used, died in the same year that Noah’s flood commenced, that is, 1656 AC, or 2105 BCE. If all humankind then living and not on Noah’s Ark died in a world encompassing flood, then Tubal-Cain, if still alive right before the deluge, would have died then as well. Either way, he would have missed the beginnings of the Iron Age in the Ancient Near East by about nine hundred years.  

Needless to say, those of us who adhere to reality-based Judaism do not believe that there was a world-wide flood as reported in the Noah story any more than we believe that creation of our universe began just under six thousand years ago.  There is simply no archaeological, anthropological, geological, or other evidence that ancient animals, plants, peoples, communities, or structures were wiped out or even damaged by a global flood. To the contrary, biological evolution that began billions of years ago on Earth continued to do so. More specifically, human activity continued uninterrupted throughout the Ancient Near East, and elsewhere, during the time biblical Genesis teaches that everyone was underwater everywhere. (See, Price, When Judaism Meets Science (Wipf & Stock (2019), at 78-79.)

The second lesson we learn from this exercise relates to the development of the Torah itself. The author of the verse about Tubal-Cain obviously knew about the development of iron implements and their importance. Therefore, he could not have lived his whole life prior to the advent of the Iron Age. As discussed more fully below, this means, at least, that the passage about Tubal-Cain must have been written sometime after 1200 BCE.  Those who think that the entire Torah, or at least the passage under review, was written earlier must confront this hard as iron fact as well as the clear continuity of civilizations that remained dry and functional during the reported flood. 

The Bronze and Iron Ages

       The Bronze Age

According to Eric Cline, Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at George Washington University, the Bronze Age “in the Aegean, Egypt, and Near East . . . lasted nearly 2000 years . . . .”Scholars tend to divide Bronze Age Near Eastern history into three phases: Early Bronze Age (3000-2100 BCE), Middle Bronze Age (2100-1500 BCE), and Late Bronze Age (1500-1200 BCE). 

The parameters of those ages, and the transitions from one age to another, varied in different locations, but the biblical story is centered in the Ancient Near East, and, more specifically, in the Levant, at the southwestern edge of the Fertile Crescent in what is now western Asia. Today that area is occupied by coastal Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestine Authority, and Jordan. There the Bronze Age ran roughly from 3000 BCE to 1200 BCE and the Iron Age from about 1200 to 600 BCE or so. 

During the Bronze Age, people began using bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, to make tools and weapons because bronze was harder than either copper or tin on their own. It was also a time of great social change, as people started to live in cities, use horses for transportation, and develop writing systems. 

Further, during the Late Bronze Age, various communities in what are now modern Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq were engaged in a substantial international trading system and considerable diplomatic and cultural activities with each other. In addition to raw materials like copper and tin, silver and gold were also exchanged. 

When the Bronze Age ended, which Cline places at 1177 BCE, a “systems collapse” that involved “drought, famine, invaders, and earthquakes all occurring in rapid succession” brought down both “(l)arge empires and small kingdoms.” Among these powers were the Hittites north and west of the land of Canaan, Egyptians to the south and west, and Assyrians to the north and east.

Both the Hittites and the Egyptians had exercised control over Canaan for extended periods, so with their demise a void and an opportunity existed. Into that void stepped the Sea People/Philistines along the southern portion of the Eastern Mediterranean coast and the Phoenicians along the northern portion. While the fate of the Canaanites is disputed, there is little doubt that in the interior hill country arose the Israelites. Across the Jordan River from north to south were Aram, Ammon, Edom, and Moab. 

Like Cline, William Stiebing, Jr., Professor Emeritus of History at the University of New Orleans, has written that the end of the Bronze Age was marked by sudden, swift, and widespread societal collapse throughout the Ancient Near East. He argues persuasively, if not conclusively, that climactic changes between 1300 and 1000 BCE were largely responsible for the catastrophies that engulfed long and seemingly well-established societies from the Mycenaeans in Greece to the Babylonians in Iraq. For support, he refers to a diverse and growing collection of data that evidences a warmer, drier period that led to lower water levels in lakes and rivers, grain shortages, famine, population reductions, migrations, revolts, invasions, loss of commerce, and destruction of cities and states. 

Stiebing also suggests that the “drought and tumult” allowed for “the creation in Canaan of detached groups of seminomads [sic], refugee peasant farmers and occasional bands of brigands who fled into the central hill country.” At some point, he surmises, groups “seem to have joined together into tribes which in turn formed a confederation that called itself Israel.”

There are, of course, competing theories about the historical origins of the people and polity named Israel. A black basalt victory monument erected by the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah around 1207 BCE, and known as the Merneptah stele, is generally, but not entirely, accepted as the first non-biblical mention of Israel with its terse claim that the Egyptians have defeated “Israel.” But, as humorist Mark Twain reportedly said of a notice two millennium later regarding his demise, the Pharaoh’s claim was “greatly exaggerated.”  To the contrary, as Cline summarizesfor us, a “multitude of archaeological surveys” confirm that the initial Israelite settlement of the 12^th Century BCE “quickly exploded in number during the early 11^th Century” BCE. 

       The Iron Age 

The existence of iron artifacts in the Ancient Near East prior to 2000 BCE is quite limited. By the 12^th Century BCE, however, the appearance of such items increases and within two centuries iron production becomes “substantial.” The Iron Age ran from about 1200 BCE until 600 or 550 BCE, depending on the area in question and the evaluation of the evidence.

Fundamentally, the designation relates to the replacement of iron for bronze as the dominant material used for tools and warfare. That change arose not because iron was easier to smelt or was more durable than bronze, but because with commerce disrupted iron ore was relatively more plentiful than the tin needed to produce bronze, so iron filled the needs of the times.  

Moreover, the Iron Age was more than heavy metals and weapons. Indeed, iron swords were so unwieldly that more people may have died in battle due to being trampled by horses’ hooves rather than being slain or beaten by iron swords. The gruesome biblical story of the death of Queen Jezebel illustrates the point. (See 2 Kgs. 9:30-37.)

Eventually, however, with new metallurgical techniques like adding carbon to iron (carburizing) to create steel and plunging heated steel into cold water (quenching), the resulting iron alloy emerged stronger, if more brittle, than bronze.  In any case, aside from better swords, what really marks the Iron Age are advances in architecture from royal palaces to four-room homes, city planning including the installation of water systems, and the use of alphabets and written documentation. All these innovations made possible the emergence the literature of Athens and Jerusalem, two cornerstones for what would become Western Civilization.

Gold and Silver

Although, as we have seen, archeologists and others refer to the time period during which most of the activity in the Hebrew Bible is said to have occurred as the Bronze and Iron Ages, the first and most frequently mentioned metallic elements in the Tanakh are gold and silver. Gold is unique in two ways. It can be found in its elemental stage in nature and it is quite soft. This means it can be collected, washed, and then hammered into sheets or melted and cast. Silver also appears naturally, but (mostly) as silver sulfides which need to be refined before the silver can be fashioned.

     Gold

The value and versatility of gold can be illustrated by two stories in the Hebrew Bible, one from the Torah and the other from the Book of Kings (“BOK”). The former illustrates gold’s role in ritual and worship, while the latter identifies gold’s function as a primary means by which tribute was paid by the loser of a battle to the victor. 

         Worship

The first story, familiar to many as the Golden Calf episode, is actually told twice in the Torah and neither time is the term “Golden Calf” used. According to the Book of Exodus, after Moses had been up on Mt. Sinai for a while receiving the Ten Commandments, the Israelites grew restless, not sure what had become of him or if he would ever return. Men gathered around Aaron and called on him to make a god who could lead them on their journey. (Ex. 32:1.) Aaron then instructed them to gather the gold earrings of their wives, sons, and daughters, and bring them to him which they did. (Ex. 32:2-3.) Having received their golden adornments, with the use of a cheret, or stylus, Aaron formed an image of a calf, which was then proclaimed as the god that brought the people out of Egypt. (Ex. 32:4.) 

When Moses, having heard about the incident, returned down the mountain, and witnessed the people dancing near the calf, he smashed both of the tablets of commandments he was carrying down the mountain and then burned the calf of gold, grinding the remains into a fine powder. (Ex. 32:19-20; Deut. 9:15-21.) Later, when asked by Moses to explain what happened, Aaron claimed that the people insisted that he make a god for them, so he collected some gold, threw it into a fire, and the calf came out. (Ex. 32:21-24.) 

Note that in just two dozen verses in Exodus we have not only a clear conflict in the storyline, we have fundamental implausibility wherever we look. The biblical narrator begins by telling us that Aaron used a stylus to form a calf. Yet, while gold can be hammered into sheets and a stylus could, in theory, be used to impress an outline on those sheets, the text does not say anything about such activity. 

Aaron’s story of melting gold in a fire is more plausible. But gold has a relatively high melting point (1064°C, 1947°F), higher than silver or copper, making it a challenge to process and requiring both a furnace and some fuel to be burned. Moreover, melted gold needs to be cast as was recognized in the Torah story regarding the fashioning of gold rings for the Tabernacle. (Ex. 25:12.)  The Torah does not mention either fuel or furnace in connection with the calf, much less from where they came or when Aaron learned to be a goldsmith.  And all that’s before Aaron’s tall tale about the calf emerging on its own, a tale that may echo Mesopotamian myths of the self-generation of divine idols.   

Learned rabbis have tied themselves into knots trying to explain or rationalize what happened. Dr. Deena Grant, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Hartford University of Religion and Peace, summarizes three traditional approaches to the meaning of the Golden Calf as follows: “an alternative god (Rashi), an alternative Moses (Ramban) or a pedestal upon which God would rest (Ibn Ezra).” 

Taking a different approach, Rami Arav, Professor of Religion at the University of Nebraska, has written about how from ancient Egypt, to Crete, and to Mesopotamia, bulls were considered “as symbols of a powerful god.” Among Canaanite gods, El was “often symbolized by a bull.” And, Rava contends, bull figurines have been found in Israelite sites dated to the 12^th and 11^th Centuries BCE.

Victor Hurowitz, former Professor of Bible, Archaeology, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, carries us one step further along. He reminds us that after the Northern Kingdom of Israel broke away from the United Monarchy, temples in Dan and Bethel were in competition with the temple of the Kingdom of Judah in Jerusalem. According to BOK, the Israelite King Jeroboam I (r. ~ last quarter of 10^th Century BCE)  made two calves of gold for use in temples of the Northern Kingdom and told the people that that those golden calves were the god who brought them out of Egypt. (See 1 Kgs. 12:28-29.) That practice seems to have endured as the Northern prophet Hosea, whose book claims that he served in the mid-8^th Century BCE, railed against the practice of making idols of “calves” (apparently some silver) and kissing them. (See Hos. 1:1, 8:5-6, 13:2.)

The language in Exodus and BOK regarding calves of gold that were the god that brought the people out of Egypt is exceptionally close. It would be strange, indeed, for Jeroboam to mimic Aaron’s conduct knowing Moses’s reported reaction to Aaron’s conduct. What makes more sense is that Jeroboam’s actions were the model for a subsequent Judahite author of the Golden Calf story that we find in the Book of Exodus. That author then inserted the tale into what would become the Torah text in order to mock the Northern practice of not only worshipping a graven image but one that was of a weak calf, an animal hardly like the mighty bull that was indicative of the strength of the God whose house was in Jerusalem. Perhaps some of the mockery was directed at Aaron, as well,  for following old Mesopotamian myths of divine autogenesis.

Those who doubt that the Torah would include a satiric polemic that was retrojected into the ultimate text need only consider the story about Balaam in the Book of Numbers. (Num. 22:2-24:25.) There we read that Balaam, an apparently well-regarded non-Israelite prophet or seer, was summoned by Moabite King Balak to curse the Israelites. As his journey started, however, the donkey Balaam was riding was blocked by a divine messenger, who Balaam did not see, which led Balaam to getting into a verbal dispute with the donkey who, in turn, mocked and insulted him. 

Alexander Rofe, Emeritus Professor of Bible at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, teaches that the “sustained mockery of Balaam . . . is the very point of the story” and designed to show that Balaam was “blind to God’s messenger, and dumber than an ass.” That is, the lesson being taught was not that a donkey could talk, but, rather, about the dangers of false, especially foreign, prophets, a lesson of some importance to the readers of the text. Bible scholar Ethan Schwartz says similarly that that the donkey episode is not a “historical annal . . . (but a satire) where realism is not a controlling factor.” Instead, the story “is an intentionally crafted, agenda-driven story with a theological claim . . . .”     

Aaron’s reported conduct and flimsy excuses are no less bizarre than the presence of a talking donkey who verbally belittled the purported seer Balaam. And the Golden Calf story seems to be no less “intentionally crafted” and “agenda-driven” than the donkey polemic. 

In their dedication to understanding the text as historical truth, though, and their attempts to frame or rationalize it in some acceptable manner, textual literalists and traditionalists fail to appreciate one or more of the absurdities of the story, Ancient Near East legends, and the historic experience of bull worship.  Consequently, their approach also misses the likely intent of its authors. We moderns may not appreciate it on first reading either, but those who heard it in the First Millennium BCE surely would have understood the message.

        Tribute

The background for our second story of the importance of gold arises not from any theological concerns but from more existential ones. 

As we have noted, by the end of  the Bronze Age existing empires, including that of Assyria, had collapsed. In the 8^th Century BCE, however, a Neo-Assyrian Empire was in ascendance. In the second half of that century, King Shalmaneser V forced the Kingdom of Israel to pay tribute. His successor, King Sargon, later destroyed Samaria, Israel’s capital, and the Northern Kingdom fell. 

In the Southern Kingdom of Judah, a new king, Hezekiah, saw both opportunities and challenges for Judah. On the one hand, the population of Judah had increased dramatically with refugees from the Northern Kingdom. On the other hand, Judah’s capital Jerusalem needed to be strengthened by an enlargement of the city wall and the development of a tunnel to bring water into the city. In good late Iron Age fashion, Hezekiah accomplished both feats. 

When, around 705 BCE, King Sargon died, some of his vassal states, including Judah, saw an opportunity to assert their independence. With the emergence of Sennacherib as Sargon’s successor, however, the Neo-Assyrian empire fought back. Long story short, the Neo-Assyrians swept down south and captured and controlled all of Judah’s allies and its own villages, cities, and forts. Sennacherib then laid siege to Jerusalem. 

BOK tells us that Hezekiah sent a message to Sennacherib confessing his wrong-doing and accepting in advance any penalty Sennacherib would impose.  In addition to the doors and door posts of the Temple which were overlaid with gold, Hezekiah, according to BOK, turned over all of the silver in the Temple and his palace plus thirty talents of gold. (2 Kgs. 18:13-16.)

The Neo-Assyrian version of what transpired is recorded in the Annals of Sennacherib, the original of which is impressed on a six-sided clay prism, with one copy housed at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures. That version contains a more elaborate list of items of tribute, including Hezekiah’s daughters and harem, more silver, and gems. But it agrees with BOK in one regard. It, too, states that the amount of gold was thirty talents. 

Moving thirty talents of gold was a considerable transfer of property and wealth. Thirty talents was equivalent to about 900 kilograms, 1,984 pounds, or 28,939 troy ounces, the troy system being the one used for precious metals. The spot price for a troy ounce of gold at one point on the morning of September 30, 2024, an admittedly fluctuating number, was $2,666.03.  Given that, the value of that almost ton of gold Hezekiah transferred would have been valued late in September, 2024 at about $77,152,000.  

It is not at all surprising that the records of the two sides differed on the terms of the deal that spared Jerusalem from invasion. That both records agree on the amount of gold transferred is also not surprising. Instead, that concurrence reflects the primacy which gold had at that time as a measure of wealth and prestige. Both authors had an interest in getting that number right.

   Silver

If gold was an indicator of wealth, silver served a different purpose. As explainedby Dr. Tzilla Eshel, a lecturer at Haifa University’s Zinman Institute of Archeology, silver production was in operation as early as the fourth millennium BCE and served as the main means of currency beginning in the third millennium BCE and continuing for well over a thousand years thereafter until coins were invented in the Seventh Century BCE. While goods and services were also bartered, and other materials from gold to barley were also used as payment, silver was the dominant currency  of the times.

Silver, however, does not occur naturally in the Levant, nor was any silver mined in the biblical promised land, regardless of which territorial description one uses.  In the Bronze Age, silver mines were found in Iberia (Spain), Anatolia (Turkey), and Egypt. Consequently, silver’s dominance as a vehicle for payment occurred despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it was neither found nor mined locally.  So, silver had to be imported and stored for use. 

Archeologists, Eshel tells us, have found over thirty hordes of ancient silver throughout the modern state of Israel, with the silver sometimes contained in ceramic vessels and sometimes in cloth bundles. In the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, because commerce was essentially  a business for the elite class, most of these hoards were in temples or palaces and the purity of the silver was high. 

With the collapse at the end of the Bronze Age of international trade and the maritime networks that serviced it, the silver supply dropped and the purity level of what silver did enter the area was reduced. According to Eshel, one 11^th Century BCE horde found at a Phoenician site near modern Acre was “adulterated with copper.” 

As we enter Iron Age II (~1000 – 600 BCE), Israelite communities can be found along the Mediterranean coast between the Phoenicians to the north and the Philistines to the south, as well as in the central highlands. Here, too, hordes of silver have been found, and they are larger, which to Eshel suggests that silver was again flowing into the area. With the onset of the Persian period at the beginning of the 6^th Century BCE, silver was no longer hoarded in what were the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

        Abraham Pays Dearly

This foregoing brief review regarding the history of silver in the Levant helps us understand the numerous references to silver in the Hebrew Bible. One of the earliest stories in the Torah tells of Abraham’s reported efforts to purchase a burial site, consisting of a cave on a field, for his wife, Sarah. The attempt extended through three rounds of negotiations marked by apparent commercial and cultural conventions and language. Essentially, though, Abraham states a willingness to pay the “full price” for the property and the seller sets that price at 400 shekels of silver, a shekel being a unit of weight. Abraham accepted, and weighed out the required amount of silver. (See Gen. 23:14-17.)

Eshel writes that a shekel was the equivalent of 11.33 grams, according to 8-7^thCentury BCE Judean stone weights. Four hundred shekels, she notes, was equivalent to four and a half kilograms or about ten pounds of silver. The modern equivalent, she calculates, would be about $624,000. That would value a troy ounce of silver at about $4,312, over  138 times its traded value of $31.36 on September 30, 2024. 

Not only does Abraham’s purchase price seem high today, as Diana Edelman, Emerita Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Oslo, points out, it also seems high when compared to King David’s purchase of a site for a sacrificial alter in Jerusalem (with oxen included!), which cost only fifty shekels, or Jeremiah’s purchase of his cousin’s field, an acquisition made for seventeen shekels. (See 2 Sam. 24:18-25, Jer. 32:1-15.) Of course, we have to take all these numbers with some skepticism. As Prof. Edelman reminds us, in 1 Chronicles 21:18-26, the metal of exchange used by David was reported to be gold not silver and the number of shekels rose to 600 from 50.

Aside from the different biblical versions of King David’s exchange, the reported purchases by David and Jeremiah were made for different purposes, at different locations, with possibly different sized lots, and at different times than described in the transaction of Abraham. The negotiating positions of David and Jeremiah were also quite different than that of Abraham. Kings can drive favorable bargains and Jeremiah was confined as a prisoner to King Zedekiah of Judah. With regard to Abraham’s purchase, maybe the Torah was reporting what rare silver was worth back in the day, or maybe the author of this story was exaggerating Abraham’s wealth to make a point. 

Taking the value stated in Genesis as true, why would Abraham pay so much? In his wonderful study of the Book of Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom, Leon Kass, then a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, details the clever and crafty negotiations between the seller, Ephron the Hittite, and Abraham. Recall that Abraham was, by his own admission, an outsider, a sojourning settler. Ephron was willing, as a gift, to allow Abraham to bury his wife on the site requested, but Abraham wanted not just the privilege of use, but ownership and possession. 

Legal title to this burial plot, pursuant to an agreement reached in public, would tie future Israelites, of whom Abraham could only dream, to the land their ancestors were promised, or so they believed. This “foothold,” Kass explains (at 364-67), comes before any claim by birth or conquest. And the land acquired therefore becomes holy in the first instance because of “ancestral piety,” according to Kass, as the three patriarchs and the three of four matriarchs of the Jewish People are buried there. 

Today a key driver of property values is location, location, location. No doubt that was true long ago, as well.  In the minds of the authors of the text, the value of acquiring a physical piece of the land of Canaan known as Machpelah was enormous. 

        Joseph’s Brothers Sell Cheap

Silver again plays the role of method of payment in another familiar story in Genesis. In this tale, Joseph, who has offended his brothers directly and indirectly, seeks out his brothers who had traveled  to Dothan. They see him coming, plot to kill him, and ultimately sell him for twenty pieces of silver to a group of Ishmaelites on their way to Egypt. (See Gen. 37:15-28, 39:1.) Note that the text speaks of pieces, not full shekels, of silver. Obviously, Joseph’s brothers did not think he was worth very much. 

        Haman Values Dead Jews Greatly

Later in the Hebrew Bible, we find reported an even more despicable use of silver attempted. The setting is the palace at Shushan in Persia during the reign of King Ahasuerus. (Esth. 1:1-2.) Haman, the Agagite, is promoted to be, essentially, the Prime Minister. (Esth. 3:1.) Haman later becomes enraged when Mordecai, a Jew, refuses to bow down to him,  and, offering to pay ten thousand talents of silver into the royal treasury, convinces the king to allow him to exterminate all of the Jews in the land. By one account, 10,000 talents of silver equated to about 333 tons of silver – an astonishing amount, approximating the entire annual tribute of the Persian empire. (Berlin and Brettler, J Study Bible (Oxford U. Press (1985), at 1630 n.9.) 

Whether these three stories have any basis in fact is doubtful. There is no current evidence for their historicity, and the payments, saving for Joseph, seem exaggerated.  But by including these stories in the Torah, the authors and editors are portraying situations that are based on a truth backed by considerable evidence: silver was a primary method of exchange for a variety of goods and services, especially, if not exclusively, by royal, wealthy, and merchant classes.

When Science Meets the Metals in the Hebrew Bible

The drama that unfolds throughout Judaism’s foundational texts was not written in a vacuum. Rather, the stories we find in our Book of Instruction, the Torah, and the larger Hebrew Bible, the Tanach, were reflections of and responses to events of the times set in the circumstances of those times. If we do not understand the social, economic, and political order of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages, we will not be able to understand the true story of the emergence and place of the Israelites, the Judahites, and the Jewish People in the Levant and on the world stage. We will not be able to understand either how Judaism differentiated itself from the cultures, the ethics, and the beliefs of its neighbors or how the religious civilization that is Judaism evolved.

The documented record of the uses of gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin (we will cover the latter four elements in a subsequent essay) does not prove the historical accuracy of Bible stories involving those elements. But by reviewing the availability and uses of those metals in the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant through lenses of geology, anthropology, metallurgy, archaeology and related sciences, we can gain an insight that might otherwise elude us. And with that additional realty-based perspective, we can perhaps learn important lessons which our ancient ancestors meant for us to ponder. Another rich reward indeed from six metallic elements.