Talent

The talent (Hebrew kikkar, 'round loaf', from its ingot shape; Greek talanton) was the heaviest weight unit in the biblical world. A Hebrew talent contained 3,000 shekels — somewhere between 30 and 36 kilograms depending on era and region — and could be denominated in copper, silver, or gold. Solomon's annual tribute from foreign kings was 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14), and the gold of the Temple veil alone weighed over 30 talents. By the first century the Greek-Roman talent was reckoned at about 6,000 denarii — roughly twenty years' wages for a labourer. This scale is essential to reading Jesus' parables. The unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:24 owed his king ten thousand talents — a debt the size of a Roman imperial revenue, deliberately absurd. The master in Matthew 25:14–30 entrusted his servants with one to five talents apiece, and even one talent was a sum that should have been put to work for years. Translators sometimes render 'talent' as a generic 'bag of gold', but the original audience would have heard a specific, staggering weight of precious metal.