Comment by lloydleroimiller on December 6, 2011 at 11:36am

hehe

Comment by Warren E Jappe on January 13, 2013 at 10:32am

How much is a "shekel" of silver, and how much is fifty shekels of silver that is supposed to be given to the father of the damsel.

I find it weird the next verse, "A man shall not take his father's wife (mother maybe?), nor discover his father's skirt. (maybe his father is a closet transvestite?) They must have had some world back then.

Comment by SteveInCO on January 13, 2013 at 11:21am

Warren,

Coinage was not invented until the 6th century BCE in what is now Turkey, and even the "critical scholars" (i.e., the ones we tend to agree with) believe that part of the Bible originates from somewhere around 750 BC (with some further editing being done a bit later).  Thus there really wasn't any "money" back then as we understand it today.  (Early iron age goat herders.)  A shekel was a unit of weight at the time (as was a talent), and I usually see something like 11.5 grams as today's equivalent (though sometimes I see 14 and 17 as well).

(Coinage originated as pieces of metal pre-stamped with their weight, so they wouldn't have to be tiresomely weighed every time one used them.  Thus it was common for a coin or other unit of money to be named after a unit of weight.  In fact, the "pound sterling" was originally a troy pound of sterling (0.925) silver; that works out to 345+ grams of silver if I didn't just bodge my arithmetic (31.1035 g/ozt * 12 ozt/lbt * 0.925), and it appears that ancient Judea did in fact use shekel coins eventually, certainly it did during the revolt in 68 CE since I just now looked at a picture of one.  Of course the modern state of Israel adopted "shekel" as the name of their currency in 1980 (replacing the lira), but it then got inflated to ridiculousness and replaced by the "new shekel." )

Figuring the silver probably wasn't refined all that purely back then, let's figure 11.5 grams of "silver" back then actually had 11 grams of actual silver in it.  (See again, under early iron age goat herders.)  Silver (99.9% pure) today bounces around between 28-32 dollars a troy ounce (right this instant I am seeing $30.47/ozt); a troy ounce is 31.1035 grams.  So for a simple back of the envelope calculation (appropriate because I have already done two approximations), figure silver is a US dollar a gram, and a biblical shekel is therefore 11 dollars.

The hot virgin will therefore cost you 550 dollars.  Of course a lot of numbers that went into this are imprecise and as I said the price of silver bounces around a lot, so it may be appropriate to round it to five benjamins.  If I am pessimistic about the metallurgy back then, and the silver is purer, six benjamins might be a better figure.

Using the 17 grams figure and the other approximations above (including purity of 11/11.5), I get 813 bucks.  So that gives you a price range of one hot virgin between 500-800 dollars.

Comment by SteveInCO on January 13, 2013 at 11:23am

As a complete aside, there's no remedy if the hottie is no longer a virgin; you aren't even allowed to think about her while masturbating because you can't masturbate.

Comment by onyango makagutu on January 13, 2013 at 12:47pm

if christians said the truth about the bible, there would be none left

Comment by Tim on January 13, 2013 at 11:33pm

One of my Mormon facebook friends posted a message that said something similar to, "Make a list of all of your favorites Bible verses and let's compare lists,"

I cut-and-pasted a couple pages of rape stories, infanticide, genocide, slavery, murder, and dismemberment.

One lady was _extremely_ upset and told me that what I posted was "pornographic and of the devil".

LOL

Comment by Kelly Leiter on January 14, 2013 at 2:32am

That's awesome! LOL

Comment by Gregg R Thomas on January 14, 2013 at 9:06am

Everyone should accept a free bible when offered...it's packs well on a camping trip and when I leave a few pages in the forest after the call of nature, I can say I'm spreading doG's word. :D

Comment by archaeopteryx on January 14, 2013 at 11:31am

RE: "Rape any hot virgin and get a wife!" - Unless your name happens to be Schechem --
(Gen 34:26)

Comment by archaeopteryx on January 14, 2013 at 11:37am

Very few Christians even KNOW the truth about the Bible.

Comment

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