David Wenkel's recent work, Coins as Cultural Texts in the World of the New Testament, is a welcome effort to introduce students of the New Testament to the importance of numismatics, a discipline that has long been integrated into study of the classical world, but has hitherto failed to find wide entry into New Testament scholarship.Footnote ¹ Wenkel is certainly correct to urge greater attention to the value of numismatic material for interpreting New Testament texts. Moreover, the possible insight that coins might bring to various interpretative questions is not limited to light gained through the decipherment of symbolic images and inscriptions.Footnote ² Attention to how ancient coins circulated – or fell out of circulation – can also be highly suggestive.

In treating coins specifically as ‘cultural texts’, Wenkel begins by concentrating on the ‘world in front of the coin’, i.e. the public that used the coins for monetary (rather than propaganda) purposes.Footnote ³ As part of this wide reality, he helpfully highlights the relation of coins to social webs of trust and fear. Thus, on the one hand, in a fiduciary system of coinage, such as that prevailing in the first-century Roman world, public trust in the weight of a coin's precious metal (and thus to some degree in the minting authority behind the money) was critical, as was trust in the caste of money changers, whose expertise in currency exchange provided an indispensable economic service. On the other hand, multiple deleterious factors also worked to undermine this essential network of social and economic confidence. Wenkel names fear as high on the list of these disruptive factors: above all fear of robbers and fear of war.Footnote ⁴ When people feared highway bandits, for instance, they might transport their money in pouches worn around the neck or even by sewing coins into the folds of their garments, where they would not clink or bulge out in visible ways. Fear of governmental instability, by contrast, often resulted in a more permanent solution: the burial of significant sums.

This fear-induced behaviour corresponds directly to a fundamental archaeological datum in the study of ancient money: the frequent discovery of a hoard or stash of coins. The happy occasion of such finds generally permits a very precise dating; hence describing the precise political context of a find is often rather easy. In this regard an important correlation has been observed. ‘Concentrations of coin hoards tend to reflect not prosperity or heavily monetized contexts’, says Christopher Howgego, ‘but rather the insecurity (particularly warfare) which resulted in the owners not recovering their treasure.’Footnote ⁵ More specifically, ‘in the Roman context coin hoards often indicate war periods’.Footnote ⁶ In fact, while some ‘saving hoards’ are also attested, of 128 analysable Roman and Byzantine hoards uncovered within the boundaries of present-day Israel, a full 57 are confidently classified as ‘Revolt hoards’, i.e. hoards from the First and Second Jewish Revolts against Rome (two additional hoards date from 117, the year of the Diaspora Revolt, and eighteen more from the much later Persian and Muslim conquests of Palestine).Footnote ⁷

This ancient ‘under the mattress’ phenomenon is not unknown to New Testament scholars, of course. Commenting on Matthew's Parable of the Treasure in the Field (Matt 13.44), Davies and Allison justly remark:

The wider interpretative implications of such fear-driven behaviour have not been thought through, however. The same capable commentators thus fail, for instance, to exploit the same general background in considering the same phenomenon of burying of money in the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25.14–30 // Luke 19.11–27).Footnote ⁹ In citing a series of interesting parallel texts, which do confirm the widespread custom of burying money (b. Bab. Meṣ. 42a; b. Shabb. 102b; 2 En. J 51.1–2), they fail to probe the fundamental link to ‘times of political instability and crisis’ and they never ask about the actual hidden caches that they mention. They are not alone in overlooking the possible connections. In a survey of nearly two dozen commentaries on this interesting parable from the double tradition, I have found no single reference to the potential relevance or interest of the archaeology of ancient coin hoards.Footnote ¹⁰ Several significant features of the two widely divergent forms of the parable might be illuminated, however, by these finds and the cultural context that Wenkel provides.

Above all, the open suggestion of ‘political instability’ immediately conjured up by a coin hoard provides a new logic to help explain the odd fusion of storylines in Luke's version, which recontextualises the action of the third servant. Interpreters have long noted the seemingly clumsy Lukan frame of the nobleman who journeys off to acquire the title of king, though opposed by his fellow-citizens (Luke 19.12, 14–15, 27). However unusual it may appear, in the light of the archaeological evidence it is possible to view this scenario as quite accurately fitting and even explaining the behaviour of the fearful third servant with his mina. Faced with the uncertain political outcome of his master's contested bid to become king, the timorous servant prefers to play it safe and see what comes, hoarding his modest treasure, rather than risking the windfall and investing himself in the uncertain success of his master's venture. A fundamental lack of trust in the certainty of the coming kingdom thus stands at the root of the third servant's action (or inaction) – or, inversely, perhaps a fear of the wrong sort of coming kingdom moves him to run with his coin purse for shelter (cf. Luke 19.11).Footnote ¹¹

A further historical hint at this background of political instability may be added, without insisting upon its strict pertinence. At least one hoard has been unearthed in the Judean desert (Hoard no. 68 in the catalogue of Waner and Safrai), containing Herodian coins from 37 BCE - 4 CE, thus dating from that uneasy moment between Herod the Great's death and the effort of his oldest son, Herod Archelaus, to claim his father's royal title from the Romans and hold on to his power (Josephus, Ant. 17.9.1–3; J.W. 2.2.2).Footnote ¹² The apparent allusion to this rocky Herodian transfer of power, very often accepted as shaping Luke's story of the throne claimant, may thus be coupled with a material sign of the economic uncertainty that the circumstances evidently evoked in Judea: a buried treasure.

If we prefer to think of the situation of the evangelist himself and his audience at the time writing the Gospel, however, we might equally evoke as a vivid contextualisation of the story the huge mass of Revolt hoards mentioned above. Indeed, the awful vengeance of the king at the end of the parable on those enemies who resisted his kingly right activates a whole series of associations with the Jewish War (Luke 19.27; cf. Matt 22.7–10); and it can be no accident that Luke's parable is immediately followed, as the climax to Jesus’ triumphal royal entry – which certain Pharisees openly resist – by his lament over the imminent destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 19.29–44). If further, as John Nolland contends, at the opening of the parable (i.e. διὰ τὸ ἐγγὺς εἶναι Ἰερουσαλὴμ αὐτὸν καὶ δοκεῖν αὐτοὺς ὅτι παραχρῆμα μέλλει ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἀναφαίνεσθαι, Luke 19.11) ‘the prospect of the immediate coming of the kingdom of God in Jerusalem takes on the coloring of a military takeover by Jesus at the head of a fanatical band of followers’, the chastising of the servant who hid away his stash of silver would be another clear way of saying, it is not that kind of kingdom.Footnote ¹³ The events of 66–70, a time when persons all over Galilee and Judea were fearfully scrambling to secure their valuables as the rebels took the city and faced off with Rome, would thus be an admirably fitting historical backdrop for appreciating the action inside Luke's narrative world. The evangelist seems to say that one need no more fear the coming of this kingdom by burrowing a bank in the ground than one needs to be heavily armed with swords, whether for attack or defence (Luke 22.35–8).

Viewed from this broad perspective, Luke's peculiar hybrid story thus enjoys an historical, cultural and psychological plausibility (not to say a narrative theological coherence) altogether absent in Matthew's more focused account – strange as the Lukan plot device appears at first sight. One might even cautiously wonder whether in introducing a story of political turmoil (and integrating the parable of the minas at just this moment in the Gospel), Luke meant at least in part to provide some more satisfying account for the third servant's frightened action. In effect, Luke supplies the well-known conditions for the common act of hoarding – and that on at least three levels: in the parable itself, in the framing story of Jesus and in the extra-textual allusions to a post-70 world. The evangelist sets all this alongside the puzzling, traditional logion that he also dutifully preserves – but which finally fails to fully clarify the servant's motivation: ‘I was afraid of you because you are a stern man; you carry off what you have not deposited and reap what you have not sown’ (Luke 19.22).

In Luke, of course, several other details are also different. Two may be briefly addressed. First, famously, whereas Matthew speaks of talents, Luke speaks rather of minas (μνᾶς). Commentators have correctly noted the much smaller, more realistic (or at least more quotidian) denomination in Luke (60 minas = 1 talent).Footnote ¹⁴ The report in Epiphanius’ On Weights and Measures that among the Hebrews a ‘talent’ is called a ‘mina’ is a transparent act of Gospel harmonisation. It is quite correct to think of weights and measures, however, and it should be stressed that the mina is principally a weight, not an exchange currency – at least not in the first century Roman Empire.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, the mina is the oldest known unit of weight, created by the Babylonians and in use throughout the ancient Near East and in the Hellenistic world, though never adopted officially by the Romans.Footnote ¹⁶ Luke's use of the term, which is a little (only a little) like our measuring money by the suitcase, should probably be explained by this deeply anchored cultural persistence as a metrical unit, an indication perhaps of the Gospel's Syrian provenance.Footnote ¹⁷ We should accordingly imagine this measure cashed out in coin rather than being presented as one single hefty silver ingot (τὸ ἀργύριον, Luke 19.15), which is the impression one gets from reading the commentaries. Indeed, while a number of very beautiful minas have been preserved from antiquity, and they are often something of a prestige item, none is cast in precious metal to my knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ They are instead ornately carved or moulded in baked clay, stone (e.g. basalt or diorite), lead or bronze, often in zoomorphic shapes, and meant to be used with scales, as for example the magnificent Lion Weights and Duck stones of Nimrud, the cube-shaped Dolphin agora mina (ΜΝΑ ΑΓΟΡ) of Athens or the plate-like Seleucid ‘Victory’ mina, bearing the pretentious legend ΜΝΑ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΑΝΤΙΟΧΟΥ ΘΕΟΥ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥΣ.Footnote ¹⁹ Despite the continued metrological misinformation still found in most commentaries (and repeated by Wenkel), moreover, Der neue Pauly is quite authoritatively clear that one mina is not the equivalent of 100 silver drachms or denarii as once was thought, but rather varies at least between 70 and 150 depending on the time and place.Footnote ²⁰ The exact number is less important than the general impression, however; for the point to make here is simply that of the coin hoards listed in the catalogue of Waner and Safrai only a small fraction exceed 1,000 coins, only two of which are on the order of talent-sized treasures (nos. 132 and 42, with exactly 6,000 and 10,321 coins respectively)Footnote ²¹ – the great majority of ‘treasures’ being much more modest, often in the range of 50–250 coins. As the mina's weight worth of silver coinage would not necessarily be uniformly cashed out exclusively in drachms or denarii (or shekels), but in some mix of greater and lesser denominations, including perhaps di- or tetradrachms (if the mixed character of the recovered hoards is to be taken as a guide), something in just this basic range (50–250 coins) should be imagined.Footnote ²² A mina-sized hoard would thus be quite true to life; indeed, many more or less mina-sized hoards have been found.Footnote ²³

Whatever other failures in verisimilitude and logic might still plague the parable, the behaviour of the servant and the sums involved thus make good numismatic sense. The issue of verisimilitude raises one last question, however, touching a final Lukan detail rather central to our subject. Luke's servant is not said to bury his treasure; he instead wraps it in some sort of towel or handkerchief, a σουδάριον (Luke 19.20).Footnote ²⁴ What might stand behind this peculiar feature of Luke's story, which the commentators essentially treat with silence?Footnote ²⁵

Two possibilities might be imagined. The first is that the cloth represents the ‘treasure chest’ itself. Burying hoards must indeed be pictured as an improvised activity, with everything from loose heaps of coins, to ceramic pots (often in shards) and ‘unassuming clay jars’, to small medicinal cups (pyxis), to ‘juglets’ and even a large bronze jar sealed in a jerry-rigged stone pavement ‘strong box’, all mentioned in the reports as being used to hold and secure the money.Footnote ²⁶ It is accordingly not unknown that a cloth might also be used to wrap up the sum and preserve it during its interment – particularly perhaps in circumstances of acute upheaval. In Locus 336 at Masada, for instance, a buried stash of 37 shekels and half-shekels was found with ‘clear traces of the cloth bag in which they were put’.Footnote ²⁷ It may then be that the servant should be presumed to have hidden away and indeed buried his mina, tied up in this napkin, which he now brings out intact to return with its contents to his master. If some above-ground hiding place may obviously also be entertained, it need not be presumed – and the archaeological record invites some harmonising with Matthew's direct mention of burial.

A more distinct additional possibility exists, however. The image of what is literally a ‘sweat-cloth’ perhaps conjures up not the fabric used to cloak or protect a concealed deposit, but rather the tied pouches that were worn around the neck to guard the contents in safety. The perspiration that would certainly be soaked up by such a sack pressed against the skin would accord very well with the item's literal description. As an alternative to an external money belt (ζώνη) or bag (βαλλάντιον), this form of close concealment on the person suggests a means of very careful portage and protection, just one step short of sewing the coins up in one's garments. If the size of the hoard would inevitably vary with the sorts of coins involved, 150 pieces or more is not really a great amount and in any case the weight would not exceed two Roman pounds – about 2 per cent of the weight a Roman legionary might have to carry on his back. One may thus perhaps imagine that the servant wore this modest hoard on his person the whole time of his master's journey, fearful to so much as separate himself from the money, clinging to it fearfully, afraid to lose a penny.

The world in front of Luke's Gospel text is ultimately the same as ‘the world in front of the coin’ that he presumes. With the help of some basic archaeology of ancient hoards, Wenkel's numismatic analysis of ‘Fear, Coins, and War’ thus helps us penetrate the cultural presuppositions that order (at least to some degree) Luke's tangled discourse in the Parable of the Minas. Stories of political unrest and stories of hidden treasure fit naturally together. Yet the arrival of God's Kingdom is not a simple repetition of such familiar tales.Footnote ²⁸