The shekel shall be twenty garahs. This ordained that the standard for money weights should remain as it had been fixed by the Law (Exodus 30:13; Le 27:25; Numbers 3:47). The "shekel" (or "weight," from שָׁקַל, "to weigh;" compare the Italian lira, the French livre out of the Latin libra, and the English Found sterling) was a piece of silver whose value, originally determined by weight, became gradually fixed at the definite sum of twenty "gerahs," beans, or grains (from גָּרַר, "to roll").
The "gerah," value two pence, was the smallest silver coin; the "shekel," therefore, was forty pence, or 3s. 4d. Commentators are divided as to how the second half of this verse should be understood: twenty shekel, five and twenty shekels, fifteen shekels shall be your maneh.
The "maneh" (or "portion," from מָנָה, "to be divided"), which occurs only here and in 1 Kings 10:17; Ezra 2:69; and Nehemiah 7:71, Nehemiah 7:72—"that is to say, only in books written during the Captivity or subsequent to it" (Keil)—was probably the same coin as the Greek rains ( μνᾶ), though its weight may have somewhat differed.
A comparison of 1 Kings 10:17 with 2 Chronicles 9:16 shows that a maneh was equal to a hundred shekels, which cannot be made to harmonize with the statement in this verse without supposing either that an error has crept in through transcription, or that the chronicler has employed the late Greek style of reckoning, in which one mina is equivalent to a hundred drachmas.
Again, the Hebrew and Attic talents, when ex-stained, fail to solve the problem as to how the text should be rendered. The Hebrew talent, כִּכָּר, contained 3000 sacred or Mosaic shekels according to Exodus 38:25, Exodus 38:26; and the Attic talon 60 minas, each of 100 drachmas, i.
e. 6000 drachmas, or 3000 drachmas, each of which again was equal to a Hebrew shekel. Hence the Attic mina must have been one-sixtieth part of 3000, i.e. 50 shekels, which once more fails to correspond with Ezekiel's notation.
What this notation is depends on how the clauses should be connected. If with "and," as Ewald, following the Targumists, thinks, Ezekiel is supposed to have ordained that in the future the maneh should be, not 50, but 60 shekels—the weight of the 'Babylonian mana ('Records of the Past,' 4.
97, second series); only, if he so intended, one sees not why he should have adopted this roundabout method of expression instead of simply stating that henceforth the maneh should be sixty shekels If with "or," as Michaelis, Gesenius, Hitzig, and Hengstenberg prefer, then the prophet is regarded as asserting that in the future three manehs of varying values should be current—one of gold, another of silver, and a third of copper (Hitzig), or all of the same metal, but of different magnitudes (Michaelis); and this arrangement might well have been appointed for the future, although no historical trace can be found of any such manehs of twenty, twenty-five, and fifteen shekels respectively having been in circulation either among the Hebrews or among foreign peoples.
Kliefoth pronounces both solutions unsatisfactory, but has nothing better to offer. Keil supposes a corruption of the text of old standing, for the correction of which we are as yet without materials.
Bertheau and Havernick follow the LXX. (Cod. Alex.), οἱ πέντε σίκλοι πέντε καὶ δέκα σίκλοι δέκα καὶ πεντήκοντα σίκλοι ἡ μνᾶ ἐσται ὑμῖν, "The five shekel (piece) shall be five shekels, and the ten shekel (piece) shall be tea shekels, end fifty shekels shall your maneh be;" but Hitzig's judgment on this proposal, with which Kliefoth and Keil agree, will most likely be deemed correct, that "it carries on the face of it the probability of its resting upon nothing more than an attempt to bring the text into harmony with the ordinary value of the maneh."