of the Sanctuary[1]." If we had any doubt as to whether it was not possible that there were two separate shekels of the Sanctuary, one for gold, and one of different standard for silver, our misgivings are at once dispelled by finding spices weighed after the holy shekel. It is certainly incredible that there could have been a separate standard of the Sanctuary for the weighing of spices. There seems then no reasonable doubt that there was only one shekel of the Sanctuary, and that the unit of 130 grains. In support of this we may adduce Josephus[2], who made the Jewish gold shekel a Daric (which as we have already seen is our unit of 130 grains). This in turn derives support from the fact that the Septuagint, which regularly renders the Hebrew sheqel (which like the Greek Talanton means simply weight) by both siklos and didrachmon, not unfrequently renders shekel of gold by chrysûs[3], 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 gerahs[4], 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 scabies[5], 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
