Talk:Thirty pieces of silver
 | Thirty pieces of silver has been listed as one of the Philosophy and religion good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
 | A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on March 21, 2010. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the thirty pieces of silver which Judas Iscariot received for betraying Jesus are echoed in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by the thirty roubles which Sonia earns for selling herself? | ||||||||||||
| Current status: Good article | |||||||||||||
| This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Value
[edit]How much value had in that time 30 silver coins? I know that deppends on the kind of coin used, but there must be a range. How much money made a worker for a day? Comu_nacho (spanish speaker) (talk) 18:31, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
- The two coins mentioned as candidates are the Tyrian tetradrachm and the Antiochan stater. Currency debasement and imprecise terms ("stater" could have a few meanings) make it difficult to be precise, but my understanding is that in this period both are roughly equivalent to a Roman denarius. According to Biblical references, a denarius was about one day's wage for a manual laborer. This may or may not be intended to be taken literally. At this time, a Roman soldier made about 5/8 of a denarius per day, but they were also living rent-free.
- It's nearly impossible to assign exchange rates to ancient currency due to extreme market differences, but to give a general sense, the most common Roman coin in actual commerce was the copper as, which was 1/16 of a denarius. In the rural provinces in the first century, an as could probably buy a loaf of bread or a cup of decent wine (about a British pint). So you can think of thirty pieces of silver as enough money to buy 480 loaves of bread, or 260 liters of wine. :) Elmo iscariot (talk) 19:36, 6 October 2011 (UTC)
Other references
[edit]In season 3 of House M.D., Dr. Wilson tells the Detective "I'm going to need 30 pieces of silver." before talking to him about Dr. House's illegal prescriptions. 76.100.161.245 (talk) 03:11, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
A usage
[edit]- In a fiction story that I saw once, a man was offered money to do something, and he answered angrily "Try thirty pieces of silver!".
Symbolism of #30
[edit]I added... The #30 was recognized by the Hebrews (and others) as being sacred because of the lunar cycle of 29.53 days and the Hebrew calender using alternate 29-day and 30-day months. The Torah/Bible lists Noah's Ark as "30 cubits high"<ref]Genesis 6:15</ref] and Solomon's Temple as "30 cubits high".<ref]1 Kings 6:2</ref] - 2601:586:C701:4135:587C:F645:E3A3:DF15 (talk) 14:04, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
- Thanks for starting this discussion. We need citations to reliable secondary sources. It's not enough to have a couple of Bible verses, and neither of them say the number 30 was sacred anyway. Do any scholars connect these measurements with the 30 pieces of silver? StAnselm (talk) 18:08, 19 July 2018 (UTC)
This article has been plagiarised
[edit]Just in case anyone thinks the content here was copied from this book, it was actually the other way round: the author has copied substantially from this article. StAnselm (talk) 16:44, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
in Croatia, and has been revered as a relic for centuries.
[edit]Reference to a purported relic of one of the pieces of silver is kept in Nin, in Croatia. Consider adding that? I don’t know how to contribute. 2601:14B:C301:2C60:E4A5:B4A1:72D0:4BFF (talk) 19:30, 4 September 2022 (UTC)