This was originally written in June 2017, and has received some editing since, up to and including in 2022.
I have made one correction to the material about the purchase of a field in Chronicles, below.
I’ve been searching about for information on the value of biblical money. In particular, I’d like to answer the question: what does a “shekel” mean in terms of work? In terms of ounces, we’ve got it pretty well worked out. A shekel is 10 or 11 grams, or about 0.4 ounces. But when you read that Abraham pays 400 shekels for a field, I’m not sure how useful it is for us to say that he paid 10 pounds (regular pounds, not those fancy 12-oz jeweler’s pounds) of silver.
According to the various versions of the MacArthur study Bible circulating out there, a shekel is four days’ wages (you can find this in the appendix on biblical weights and measures if you have one). But this is a low-quality source and can safely be ignored. If you use a MacArthur study Bible, I hate to be the guy to break it to you, but there’s no reason to be confident about anything you read in it.
A variety of sources cite Hammurabi’s code #273, which considers unskilled labor to be worth about ten shekels per year, way off from MacArthur’s estimate. Now, parts of Genesis are theoretically set in the time of the patriarchs, the books appear to be written much later, so a more realistic idea of the value of a shekel in the mind of the author in Genesis would be found by learning about later shekel values, say in 600 or 400 BC.
Babylonian and Persian Prices
For that we can consult Peter Altmann, whose Economics in Persian-Period Biblical Texts includes information on prices in the Persian-Period Babylonian economy, where people used an 8.33-gram shekel (p. 60). Altmann cites an estimate for the bare subsistence income required to keep an urban household alive during the reign of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian kind before Cyrus: 22 shekels or its equivalent, 22 kurrus, where each kurru was 180 liters in barley. In Altmann’s words, “These would not equal the entire means necessary for the maintenance of the household: households would likely have some holdings and gardens of their own.”
This gives us not only a minimum subsistence wage of about 2 shekels a month, but also a grain price: 180 liters per shekel. Reading in various other sources show fluctuations in the barley prices so that numbers around 2 to 2.5 kurrus occurred in the late Persian Period (see here).
Altmann also cites the work of Michael Jursa to support the assertion that wages for the least-compensated labor came to 2 shekels per month, with some instances of laborers receiving as much as 7 to 10 per month. A part of Jursa’s work on these and related topics has been uploaded generously to academia.edu, here.
Jursa, in his Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia, sets the the median monthly wage” at “2.5 shekels, during the reign of Nabonidus” (p. 776). Using Altmann’s shekel per kurru figure, that comes to about 450 liters / month of barley: 15 liters / day.
For broader perspective, we can compare a review of wages in the ancient world which gives a variety of ancient wages in liters of wheat per work day. Something like 8 liters per wheat per work day appear to be average, with figures ranging fairly widely. Learning more on this subject is left as an exercise for the reader.
Biblical Economy
I’ve read every passage in the Bible that includes figures given in shekels. Now, biblical shekels were about 10 or 11 grams according to archaeology, so we’re not exactly dealing with perfect equivalents for the Babylonian system. Add about 30% to these figures to translate biblical into Babylonian shekels.
Of those, I’ve eliminated all the ones that use it in a non-economic context as a measure of weight. Four passages give a price for landed property. Genesis 23:15 gives a field, including a cave and trees, a price of 400 shekels. In 2 Samuel 24:24, a piece of property is assessed at 50 shekels, although the variant of the same story in 1 Chronicles 21:25 gives the same transaction at 600 shekels ”of gold”. (A shekel of gold would be considerably more valuable than the standard silver shekel, at a ratio of something like 10:1). In Jeremiah 32:9 a price of 17 shekels is given for a field. None of these transactions give acreage, so I don’t know how useful they can be, and commentators have suggested that the 50, 400, and 600-shekel transactions are deliberately inflated to make a point. A somewhat more promising passage on land-value gives a formula to be used for priests evaluating the value of fields. They give the value of land not directly by acreage, but use the amount of seed required to sow a field to give a formula of 50 shekels per homer (220 liters). Or at least that’s how I’ve read it; there seems to be some ambiguity in the passage.
Exodus 21:23 implicitly sets the value of a slave at 30 shekels: that’s the compensation owed to a slave-owners whose slave was gored by a bull. Leviticus 23:7-10 gives temple (symbolic?) equivalents for the value of people: 50 shekels for a working age man, 30 for a woman, and other numbers on a sliding scale for children and old people. The ballpark value is similar. Apparently a person could be bought for about a year of regular wages; perhaps this takes into account the fact that biblical law limits slavery to a six-year term. If you use Hammurabi’s formula, a slave is worth about three years of wages.
I won’t comment on Numbers 3:46 and 18:16, which seem not to indicate an exchange value, but a symbolic transaction. Similarly Deuteronomy 22:19 and 29 are criminal penalties; neither reflects buying something per se.
1 Kings 10:29 and the parallel verse 2 Chronicles 1:17 give the price for importing a chariot from Egypt (600 shekels) and a horse (150 shekels). 2 Kings 6:25 gives famine prices during starvation — they are wildly unreasonable as real prices. Likewise, Isaiah 7:23 gives an excellent vineyard a price of 1 shekel per vine — maybe a roughly real price, maybe an idealistic price given its poetic context. In 1 Samuel 9:8, a seer’s divination is rewarded with a quarter-shekel donation.
All these could possibly be used to work out some things about the Israelite economic system, by someone better-informed than myself. But I’m most interested in the one passage I haven’t mentioned yet.
This is 2 Kings 7:1, which gives a direct exchange rate from shekels to grain. Unfortunately, while it does not reflect siege prices, it does reflect prices immediately after the end of a siege, and may give a price higher than normal. This gives 1 seah (22 liters) wheat flour, or 2 seahs for barley, for a shekel. We can compare that to the Babylonian prices.
44 liters for a biblical shekel, due to the weight difference, would be equivalent to something in the ballpark of 57 liters of barley for a Babylonian shekel. The 1 shekel per kurru rate of 180 liters per shekel is considerably cheaper than this, but the 2.5 shekels per kurru figure mentioned above is in the ballpark, at 72 liters per shekel.
And this biblical exchange value of wheat, if we return to the typical wheat wages of ancient laborers, would provide an (extremely rough) estimate of wages at about 10 shekels per month, if we assume 7-odd liters of wheat per day. And if, as is likely, the biblical wheat price reflects unusually high wartime levels, a regular wage of considerably less than 10 shekels per month becomes possible.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, the biblical data isn’t good enough to come to a firm conclusion of what a biblical laborer might have expected to earn. Wages figures are never given in the Hebrew Bible, whether in shekels or in grain. And the single verse which provides a grain price is, unfortunately, not a clear indicator of normal conditions.
As a result, I think we’d be better off using an estimate for the nearest well-documented culture, which as far as I can see is Babylonia in the Babylonian and Persian periods. This data seems to suggest about 2 biblical shekels per month per unskilled worker, and an exchange rate of perhaps 100 to 200 liters of barley to a biblical shekel.
Though I don’t have any real confidence in these numbers, either on the biblical end or on the Persian/Babylonian end, due to the difficulties involved in the data, those are the rough figure I’ll keep in my head when I think about shekels in the future.