At the end of Genesis 23:16, it is written that the silver that Abraham pays to Ephron for the purchase of a plot of land »passes to the merchant.« Virtually all previous translations, however, render this note in an emphatically free way, for example as »silver, according to the weights current among the merchants« (NRSV). In our analysis and reinterpretation of the verse, this is wrong. An examination of ancient Near Eastern legal documents shows that when large sums of silver were to be paid, a merchant or someone with similar professional training was often present as a silver weigher

This article is a product of the research project »Bureaucracy and Palace Administration in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean: Ugarit and Idalion« (PID2019-106923GB-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation within the National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (I+D+I).

Peer reviewed