Lepton (Widow's mite)

The lepton (Greek 'thin one') was the smallest denomination in use in first-century Judea — a tiny bronze coin only about 15 mm across and weighing under two grams, often crude and irregularly struck. Most surviving leptons are prutah bronzes minted under the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus (104–76 BC), still circulating widely a century later because no smaller official Roman coin had displaced them. Two leptons equalled one quadrans, the Roman copper, and 128 leptons made one denarius — so a single lepton was less than half an hour's wage at the bottom of the labour market. When Jesus watched a poor widow drop 'two leptons, which make a quadrans' into the Temple treasury (Mark 12:42; Luke 21:2), the crowd would have heard the smallness of the sum and missed the point: she had given everything she had to live on, while the wealthy donors had given out of their abundance. The English 'mite' comes from Wycliffe's translation borrowing the name of a small Flemish coin.