In the pavement-arch of the Zytglogge are some metal bars. In pre-metric days, if there was dispute about whether a clothier was giving short measure, you could go and check his ruler against the standard Bernese ell. The English word yardstick referred to a similar thing.
It is hard enough for us to know whether petrol at £3.70 per gallon is cheaper or more expensive than 160 rappen per litre. Most of us couldn't begin to estimate the price of cloth two centuries ago in batzen per ell! (And especially when, just as American and British gallons are not the same, each city had its own ell, when an English ell (at 45 inches) was twice the length of a Flemish ell, and longer, too, than a Scottish ell (of 37 inches -Scottish inches, of course, which were slightly longer than English inches!))
I was reminded of this when Sam preached on Abraham's three visitors a few weeks back. You'll find the story in Genesis 18. Abraham is sitting at the entrance to his tent at Mamre at midday when he looks up and sees three men standing near him. Reading between the lines, it is clear that this is God in person. "Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves," says Abraham, and then goes inside to tell Sarah to bake "three se'ahs of fine flour," as well as getting his servant to kill and prepare a choice calf for the visitors.
Now a se'ah was at least seven and a half litres - possibly twice as much, for jars found in excavations in different places have very different capacities. Three se'ahs of flour would weigh at least 15 kilos: more than enough for a "little bread" for the three travellers to refresh themselves! Knowing this gives us some insight into Abraham's hospitality. Or was this not so much a meal as a sacrificial offering, and did the fact that it was three se'ahs have something to do with the number of visitors?
Intriguingly, this large amount of flour crops up again in Matthew's Gospel - Mt. 13:33 - where Jesus tells the disciples that the Kingdom of Heaven is "like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened." Was it perhaps just the standard recipe? We may never know.
We will understand our Bibles better if we know the names of some of the measures. The bath, or homer, or cor was the largest of the measures of volume - but it is enough to know that it was a donkey-load - ten ephahs, or thirty se'ahs.
With distance, we are on more familiar ground. A span was as far as one could reach from thumb to little finger - three handbreadths, or half a cubit - the length of one's forearm. Again, some cubits were longer than others, and some reports suggest there was a "human cubit" of six handbreadths and a "sacred cubit" of seven.
Even so, we need to hold a balance in our mind between the measurements reported in the Bible and their modern metric equivalents. It is not very helpful to know that Noah's ark was 137 metres long, 22.8 metres broad and 13.7 metres high, or that the ark of the Covenant was 115 by 70 by 70 centimetres, even if this does give some idea of the general size.
The same applies to money. We may know that in New Testament times, a Roman denarius represented a day's pay for a labourer. If we rephrase the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard to say that the workers, whether they had worked through the heat of the day or had come an hour before dusk, all received two hundred francs, perhaps we gain in knowledge, but perhaps we lose in simplicity. In the same way, the parable of the two debtors whose debts were cancelled is both nearer and further away from the original story if we substitute a hundred thousand francs for "five hundred denarii", and ten thousand francs for fifty.
Money was also counted as a given weight of silver. Here again, weights and the proportions between them varied from place to place, and the proportions also changed when the currency was devalued. The largest weight, the talent, was over 30 kilograms, divided into fifty, or sometimes sixty, minas. A mina was divided into a similar number of shekels. Easy enough, but when coins were invented (after the Exile), they were based on the Greek drachma, which was one hundredth of a Babylonian mina. (Luckily there was a two drachma coin and a four drachma coin, but to confuse things further, both might be referred to as a shekel!)
Here it helps us to know that a talent was a lot, a shekel was a little. And again, it helps a little to know that Judas' reward, if it was in four drachma coins, represented some twenty-five thousand francs in modern purchasing power, though they would only have weighed half a kilogram. But we lose something if we do not keep to the literal translation, "thirty pieces of silver."
And we lose a lot if we use the translation at the head of this article. For at Balshazzar's feast, the fingers of a hand appeared from nowhere and wrote in the plaster of the wall: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. Two minas, a shekel and two half-shekels. Balshazzar was being called to account, but the total was irrelevant. The meaning lay in the derivation of the words - mene, your days are numbered; tekel, you have been weighed and found wanting; upharsin, your kingdom will be divided. Even weights and measures can carry messages from God.
HD