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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Troodon, post: 1919672, member: 4626&quot;]Without getting into a religious debate here,</p><p><span style="color: #ff0000">Edited : You just did. </span></p><p><br /></p><p>As near as historians and archeologists have been able to ascertain this, coins, by the modern understanding, date back about as far as 500 BC or so, but &quot;money&quot; is definitely older than that by quite a bit (just look at the giant stone discs on the island of Yap; those are a lot older than coins but are definitely money).&nbsp; It depends on how strict a definition you use, but people were using means of exchange other than barter for quite a while before true coins existed, and a given measure of precious metals was almost an immediate precursor to what we&#039;d define as coins.&nbsp; Quite a few coins and even names of currency evolved from a given measure of precious metal (especially gold and silver) so it is quite possible that was what was being referred to in the time of the Samson and Delilah event, and the biblical author in question was just using the modern (to him) equivalent in order for readers to understand what he was referring to (or it was just the best understanding he had of it).</p><p><br /></p><p>&quot;Shekel&quot; is one such term; it originally did mean a certain measure of silver and only later was used to refer to a specific coin.&nbsp; (&quot;Baht&quot; comes to mind to for a more modern example of this.)&nbsp; Whether the biblical author of the story meant shekel in the older sense, or meant it in what was him the modern sense as an equivalent amount of money for the sake of easier understanding, is lost to history, but the former is at least as plausible as the latter explanation, if not more so.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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