Re: I was left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was the parable was about

From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 03/20/05 

Date: 20 Mar 2005 10:38:29 -0800

Ken Johnson wrote:

> The Biblical "Parable of the Talents" always
> puzzled me.

> Then there's this strange currency, the talent.
> One talent was enough to start you up in business,
> which makes it a very large currency unit, and I
> couldn't trace a society that uses, or used, a
> currency called the Talent. At least, I couldn't
> find one in about half a minute of mucking about
> with Google.

Sheesh, it took me 45 seconds using Google Scholar,
and 40 of that was waiting for my ISP's pig slow
domain name server to cough up the IP address of
Google Scholar.

"The Birth of Coinage":

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/economics/discpapr/DP0102-08.pdf

tells us that a "talent" is a _Greek_ coin, worth 5
staters (or chrysos), or 100 drachmas, or 500 oboli,
weighing, in gold, 650 grains, or about 4/3rds of an
ounce, and at a then ten-to-one exchange rate, about
6500 grains of silver, or a bit less than a pound.

For comparison, it takes seven US 25 cent pieces
("quarters") to register as 1.3 ounces on the
household postal scale.

So, it was a chunk of gold maybe a third the size of
a golf ball or a bit less, gold being denser than
the misch-metal used these days for US coinage.

So the first thing we know about the boss in this
story is that he outsourced the task of producing
trustworthy coinage to some boy-buttering
foreigners, a pretty sad situation for a resident of
a place that by law stoned to death "men found lying
with men".

How much credence are we going to give to "moral
lessons" from a man who wouldn't even deal in honest
heterosexual sheckels?

IMWTK

xanthian, who might have buried tens of thousands of
dollars of US currency, on the odd occasion, in a jar
in the garden, for reasons that seemed good at the
time. "Bring back the 'third servant'!"