So I bought (acquired) her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley and an half-homer (margin, lethech) of barley. In narrating the prophet's compliance with the Divine command, the word אֶכְּרֶהָ is connected by Aben Ezra with וֶכַר in the sense of making acquaintance with; but it is more correctly referred by Kimchi to כָרָה with daghesh euphonic in the caph as in יִקְּרֵךְ shall meet thee.
"The daghesh of the caph is for euphony as in miqdush, and the root is כרה" (Kimchi). The meaning is then simply and naturally traced as follows: to dig, obtain by digging, acquire. The price paid for the acquisition in this case was either the purchase money paid to the parents of the bride, as to Laban in the case of Rachel and Leah by Jacob, or the marriage present paid (mohar) to the bride herself.
Another view represents the prophet paying the price to the woman's husband to whom she had been unfaithful, and who in consequence resigned her for so small a sum. It remains for us to attend to the amount thus paid.
Fifteen pieces of silver or shekels would be about one pound fifteen shillings, or one pound seventeen and six-pence; while the price of the barley would he somewhere about the same. There were fifty or sixty shekels in a maneh, Greek mina, and Latin ulna; while the maneh was one-sixtieth of a talent (kikteer); and thus three thousand or three thousand six hundred shekels in a talent.
The homer, the largest of the Hebrew dry measures, contained one cor or ten ephahs (= ten baths of liquids = ten Attic μέδιμνοι), and the half-homer or lethec (haemi-coros in LXX) was half a cop or five ephahs.
These fifteen ephahs, at a shekel each—for under extraordinary circumstances (2 Kings 7:1) we read of" two measures of barley for a shekel"—would be equivalent to one pound fifteen or seventeen shillings and sixpence.
Both together—the silver and the barley—would amount to thirty shekels, or three pounds and ten or fifteen shillings. Why this exact amount? and why such particularity in the reckoning? By turning to Exodus 21:32 we learn that thirty shekels were the estimated value of a manservant or maidservant; for it is there stated that "if the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant, he shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver."
The price paid by the prophet partly in money and partly in kind was exactly the price of an ordinary maidservant. The barley ( שְׂעֹרִים, plural, equivalent to "grains of barley") may hint the woman's unchastity, as it was the offering for a woman suspected of adultery (Numbers 5:1-31) The low estate of the person purchased is a legitimate inference kern all this.
The wife, for whom such a paltry sum should be paid, and paid in such a way, or to whom such a petty gift would be offered, must be supposed to be in a condition of deep depression or in circumstances of great distress.
Thus the sum paid by the prophet for his partner symbolizes the servile state of Israel when Jehovah chose them for his peculiar people.