The Teacher was sold for thirty pieces of silver.

Matthew 26:15 and said, “What will you give me if I deliver him over to you?” And they paid him thirty pieces of silver.

Thirty pieces of silver. That is so strange when you think of it. Did not the Old Testament give the valuation of a man to be fifty shekels?

Leviticus 27:3 … the valuation of a male from twenty years old up to sixty years old shall be fifty shekels of silver, according to the shekel of the sanctuary.

But Judas accepted 30 shekels. Did Judas miss an opportunity? (I speak as a fool!) The priests offered 30 shekels and Judas took it.

As an aside, in the Old Testament, thirty pieces of silver was the same as thirty shekels of silver. Now back in the day, a shekel was approximately 2/5 of an ounce. For us moderns, we know an ounce of silver is worth approximately $28. So, given that the thirty shekels would equate to 12 ounces of silver, and at the going rate of $28 per ounce, Judas was paid just under $340 for this deception.

But the question remains – why thirty shekels? Why was this the agreed upon exchange of funds?

There is a short passage in Exodus that speaks of the cost of a slave as being equivalent to thirty shekels.

Exodus 21:32 ESV – If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

Might this have been a verse that the priests considered when offering Judas the funds? Did the priests, in their arrogance, consider the Teacher to be worth nothing more than a slave? They definitely wanted to rid themselves of Him, and in all their discussions with Him, they approached Him with an air of superiority, looking down their nose at him, haughty and proud. Only after continually being frustrated by the wisdom of the Teacher did they change their approach from challenging Him openly to secretly plotting against Him.

So I would suggest that they considered Him worth the same as a slave.

Yet if we read that short passage in Exodus again, we need to consider that the slave was gored. This surely would result in a terminal condition, with the slave dying from the wound.

So if I understand this passage a bit deeper, the thirty pieces of silver were payment for a dead slave. Even in the fee to be paid for the deliverance of Jesus to the priests, death was intimated. The priests had plans to kill Him, and the price of the Teacher reflected this attitude.

One more item that just occurred to me. These funds that priests used were from the temple funds. Holy money as it were, money that was to be used for the purchase of sacrificial animals, even lambs that were to be slaughtered during the Passover feast. How appropriate for the priests to use God’s money to pay for God’s Lamb as God’s Sacrifice for all mankind!

Surely the Word is rich and He is good. Yes – He is good all the time.

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