Thirty Pieces of Silver

DESCRIPTION: "'Tis a sad but true story, from the Bible it came, And it tells how Judas sold the Savior in shame.... Thirty pieces of silver was the price they would pay." "Thirty pieces of silver, thirty shekels of shame." Jesus is crucified. Judas commits suicide
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1959 (Cheney-MormonSongs)
KEYWORDS: religious death bargaining betrayal suicide Jesus
FOUND IN: US(Ro)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Cheney-MormonSongs, pp. 169-170, "Thirty Pieces of Silver" (1 text)
Roud #10873
NOTES [968 words]: The details of this are almost entirely from the Gospel of Matthew; although all four Gospels agree that Judas betrayed Jesus, the story differs (e.g. Mark and John do not say what happened to Judas after the betrayal, and Acts 1:18-19 gives him a painful and ignominious death).
The "thirty pieces of silver" are from Matthew 26:15 (in which the authorities give Judas the money), 27:9 (in which he rejects and returns it after Jesus has been condemned) "but it is unlikely that Matthew had historical information about this point [i.e. the amount of payment].... Matthew has read this detail out of the Old Testament" (Fenton, p. 413, who adds that there are many citations of the last chapters of Zechariah in this part of Matthew). Matthew attributed the prophecy he cites to the prophet Jeremiah; in fact it is Zechariah 11:12-13, which says, "(12) They weighed out as my wages thirty shekels of silver.... (13) So I took the thirty shekels of silver and threw them into the treasury in the Lord's house."
At least, that is how the New Revised Standard Version reads Zechariah 11. In verse 13, the NRSV follows the reading of the Syriac translation, which reads "into the treasury"; the Hebrew has instead "to the potter." (The two differ by just one letter.) The Latin Vulgate interprets "ad statuarium," i.e. "for statues" (which might, by extension, mean "for images"). The Greek sort of splits the difference, having "into the smelter" (but otherwise translating the Hebrew very differently). The Jewish Tanakh version, interestingly, reads "treasury" instead of "potter," justifying it by saying that the meaning of the Hebrew unclear.
Even though the NRSV and Tanakh considers the Hebrew text of Zechariah to be corrupt, as do most other modern translations, the Hebrew reading "potter" used in the King James Bible was clearly known to "Matthew," since Matthew 27:7 refers to buying the potter's field with the money Judas was given for betraying Jesus. Interesting that "Matthew" got that right but couldn't get the book right! (But Matthew's text neither cites the Greek Septuagint translation nor translates the Hebrew precisely; probably it is his own loose translation of a Hebrew text he remembered imperfectly -- Beare, p. 526, calls the citation "so mangled as to be almost impossible for us to disentangle.")
We should further note that the original text of Matthew listed "Jeremiah" as the source, but later scribes, realizing his mistake, tried to cover for him. A variant in the Harkleian Syriac translation, plus the mildly interesting Greek manuscript 22, corrected it to "Zechariah"; the Latin translation l read "Isaiah" (probably on the basis that most prophetic quotations were from Isaiah); the more significant Greek manuscripts Φ 33 157 plus the Latins a b and the Sinai and Peshitta Syriac versions omitted the name (NA28, p. 94). However, "Jeremiah" is included in the most important Greek manuscripts, including those known as ℵ A B C D L W Θ 892 (that's nine of the ten most important manuscripts, 33 being the tenth), and is clearly original. (Albright/Mann, p. 341, suggest that the attribution to Jeremiah might be because Jeremiah bought a field in Jer. 32:6-15 and visited a potter in Jer. 18:2-4).
After all that talk of uncertainty and misattribution, we can say with certainty that the suicide of Judas is told in Matthew 27:5, and that the only significant variant in that verse is whether Judas threw down his blood money IN (εν) the shrine [presumably the inner part of the Temple], FROM (εκ) the shrine, or INTO (εις) the shrine, with the reading "into" being best supported.
As a final note, although Zechariah said that the silver coins were shekels, and the song picks that up, Matthew never calls them shekels -- he doesn't even call them coins! He just calls it "thirty of silver" (except that, in 26:15, D and the best Latins read "thirty staters" and 1 and the Latin h read "thirty staters of silver"; NA28, p. 88). In Matthew 27, every manuscript calls it just "silver." Thus it is possible that the authorities weighed out the money rather than gave Judas coins (indeed, the verb "paid," εστησαν, means primarily "weighed out," according to Beare, p. 507); the translation thirty PIECES is not really justified by context. If they paid him in shekels -- and we don't know what units they paid him in! -- the shekel, unlike the Greek denarius or Roman stater, was formally a weight, not a coin.
The closest Greek equivalent of the shekel was probably the denarius, frequently mentioned elsewhere in the Gospels, but there is no reason to say whether the coin was or was not a denarius, or a shekel, or a stater, or something else. I doubt Judas would actually have betrayed Jesus for a mere thirty denarii; "Matthew" was just indulging his penchant for citing the Hebrew Bible. Albright/Mann, p. 316, do say that thirty shekels was the traditional price of a slave (based presumably on Exodus 21:32, where thirty shekels are owed by the owner of a bull which gores a slave, or some similar verse). However, Leviticus 27:3 gives thirty shekels as the value of an adult female slave, with a male slave being fifty shekels. Moreover, inflation had eaten somewhat into the value of a shekel by New Testament times. A healthy male slave would not have sold for thirty shekels in 30 C.E. in ordinary circumstances. "If the thirty coins were shekels, the total bribe was about a month's wages [for a laborer], small pay for so great an act of treason. This hardly suggests greed for money. To 'Matthew' the fulfilment of prophecy held more interest than the idea of financial profit" (Filson, p. 272).
Of course, someone who knew only the King James Bible would not know most of this. The song is basically correct based on the King James of Matthew 26-27. - RBW
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