Jesus and the shekel

Money in the House of the Lord?

Of all the things Jesus did during his final week in Jerusalem, none was more astonishing than the cleansing of the Temple. “And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons” (Mark 11:15). What were moneychangers doing in the House of the Lord?

The real meaning of shekel

Moneychangers served an important function in ancient Jerusalem. They changed the foreign currency brought by thousands of pilgrims into the local currency, the shekel. Shekel comes from the Hebrew word shakal שקל meaning “to weigh” and refers to a standard weight of silver (11 grams or half an ounce). Every visitor to the Temple gave a mandatory donation of a half-shekel coin. Jesus overturned the money-changers’ tables because they had set up their weights within God’s Temple instead of in the marketplace outside.
  

Read the story in Hebrew

Jesus’ cleansing of the temple caused a commotion and one theory is that this is part of the reason that he was arrested. Only by reading the Bible in Hebrew can we understand the reason for Jesus’ actions – the moneychangers were weighing out silver, which was inappropriate in God’s house. Enroll in our live online Biblical Hebrew course today and discover more depth in the original Hebrew!