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Latest comment: 9 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
"The Philistines approach Delilah and induce her with 1100 silver coins to find the secret..." Coins were invented sometime between 710-650 B.C., about 500 years after Samson's time, so the passage is anachronistic. Similarly, using a substitute phrase such as "pieces of silver" would be anachronistic, since it is synonymous with "silver coins". I suspect the original term was "shekel", which before the invention of coins was a measure of weight of silver. Delilah may have been paid ingots of silver totaling 1100 shekels by weight. I can't read the original Hebrew text, so I don't know what it says, and am therefore unqualified to edit the page. Nevertheless, it needs to be changed, because the passage is misleading. CarltonEtc (talk) 16:23, 11 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I located an online version of the Tanakh found the relevant passage, and the side-by-side translation said, "pieces of silver". I looked up the archaeology of silver in Bronze-age Israel and it turns out that the Levant was using irregular pieces of silver as a form of currency. It was valued according to its weight. There were even photos of hoards. The Tanakh and the archaeology support the use of the phrase, "pieces of silver". CarltonEtc (talk) 07:06, 12 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
level-5 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
