17 February 2018 Navigate up to the English index: index-topical-hb.
Chronicles greatly expands the material concerning David and the Temple. It’s expansions tend to portray David as even more splendid than the source material in Samuel. For example, in Samuel David’s census counts 1.3 million soldiers — a total about three times the size of the Roman Empire at its peak — while in Chronicles the number is inflated to 1.47, as the 800,000 Israelites is inflated to one million. Where Samuel has David buying some real estate from Ornan for 50 shekels of silver, Chronicles has the purchase involve 600 shekels of silver.
In Chronicles, unlike Samuel, David goes to extravagant lengths to prepare materials for the future temple in Jerusalem. 1 Chronicles 22:14 reads:
”I have taken great pains to prepare for the house of Yahweh one hundred thousand kikkarim of gold, and one million kikkarim of silver, and immeasurable brass and iron, a great deal. And I have prepared timber and stone, to which you will add.”
Let’s start with weights, the most securely doable calculation. It is known from archaeological finds that a shekel was about 11 grams. The Bible places a ”kikkar” at 3000 shekels in weight, or about 33 kilograms. For the 3000 to 1 ratio, see Exodus 38:26-28, where the calculations presuppose a kikkar of 3000 shekels.
So in sheer weight, David is claiming to have prepared about 3.3 million kilograms of gold, and 33 million kilograms of silver, for the work of the temple. At today’s prices, silver is worth $537 per kilogram, and gold $43,352. A little simple math, then, gives $17,721 per talent of silver, and $1,430,616 per talent of gold. So, then, David is claiming to have prepared 17.7 billion dollars worth of silver, and 1.4 trillion in gold.
But that is just if you sold the gold and silver at auction today. What was the value in ancient terms of these metals? Well, I’ve discussed this at greater length elsewhere, but for now let’s just take two reference points discussed at greater length there. In terms of wages for unskilled labor, 2.5 shekels of silver per month might be a decent ballpark figure. In terms of the value of a slave, there are suggestions that the market value of a slave was about 30 shekels.
So the million talents of silver come to three billion shekels, or on the rates above, an amount of money that could buy one hundred million slaves, or to buy one billion man-months, or eighty million man-years, of labor.
Now, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that David’s kingdom really did contain the 1.5 million males that Chronicles claims — an absurdly large sum according to archeology. Each year, these 1.5 million men produced 1.5 million man-years of labor. Over the forty years of David’s reign, 60 million man-hours of labor would be produced.
David’s government would amass its funds by taxation. Most likely, the Roman Empire only managed to siphon off about 5% of total production in the form of taxes (see here), but let us take Samuel’s figure of ten percent (1 Samuel 8). On this reading, total tax receipts for Israel could total ten percent of GDP, or 6 million man-hours of labor. This amounts to less than one tenth the total value of the silver that David is said to have donated to the temple effort, and we have not yet begun trying to account for the gold, which is approximately equal in value to the silver (there being a tenth as much gold as silver, but gold being about ten times as valuable.
Another angle to get at the general value of the silver David held is to compare it to the total tax receipts of the Roman Empire. Page three of this paper shows total tax receipts of the entire Roman Empire coming to about 1 billion sesterces per year. Now, as a sesterces was worth a quarter of a shekel or less, this means we can put an upper bound on the total “shekel” income of the Roman State — about 250 million shekels. But David is claimed to have donated 3 billion shekels to the temple effort.
So suppose that a Roman Emperor, ruling forty years, wanted to raise 3 billion shekels for a temple. The math is simple: he would have to divert 30% of the Empires revenues for forty years. But gold was worth 12 times what silver was in the Roman Empire, so to raise the 300 million shekels of gold would require the equivalent of 3.6 billion shekels of silver. So that’s 36% of the entire tax income of the Roman Empire for forty years. Add it up, and our hypothetical Emperor would have to divert two-thirds of the total tax receipts of the Roman Empire to his Temple project. This might be conceivable if the tax receipts of the Roman Empire simply piled up, and running the Empire was inexpensive. But Rome had to staff massive armies, pay administrators, build roads, and so on. The Empire simply couldn’t divert two-thirds of its income to accumulate gold and silver for a religious project.
If the Roman Empire couldn’t do it, David couldn’t do it. The Roman Empire ruled over at least 45 million people. If we take the inflated biblical figures, David ruled about 4.5 million people. If we take more realistic figures from archaeology, we’re looking at a million or less. The Chronicler’s account of David’s preparations for the temple is historically impossible.