Is this a widow's mite?

[crispus]

Can someone tell me something about this coin? I have a bag of them.

[Akropolis]

Yes.
PeteB

[Aarmale]

This coin is a full prutah of Alexander Jannaeus.  Most people consider 1/2 prutot as "widows mites".

-Aarmale

[crispus]

quote author=Aarmale link=topic=68379.msg428710#msg428710 date=1293759691]
This coin is a full prutah of Alexander Jannaeus.  Most people consider 1/2 prutot as "widows mites".

-Aarmale
[/quote]
Ah! I didn't know about that. Thank you.[

[Snegovik]

And the widow must have had something in common with Rip Van Winkle because she was using more than a hundred year old coins. It's like paying at a gas station with a Morgan dollar.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Herod I minted a lot of (real) leptons, so if there's a historical basis to the story and Mark isn't just emphasising the woman's poverty, then most likely she'd have had Herod's coins.

Jannaeus did mint a few (real) lepta, but they're rare and expensive; the most you can say about these is that a few of the crudest issues were down to lepton size. My heaviest example weighs 4.08g, and I absolutely refuse to believe a heffalump like that could be a lepton, when most of them are under 1g!

As for the identification with the 'mite', a lepton was the smallest Judean coin, and Mark gives the woman two, equal to the smallest roman coin, the quadrans. So the early Bible translators, reasonably enough, translated it in terms of the smallest unit of value in use in England; it was a denomination in use in the Low Countries, but the coins were never legal tender here. It was used for accounting purposes only, at different values in different places. It's now a lot more obscure than 'lepton', which is the term originally used in the New Testament, so I wonder why we're still using it?

[Aarmale]

Herod I minted a lot of (real) leptons, so if there's a historical basis to the story and Mark isn't just emphasising the woman's poverty, then most likely she'd have had Herod's coins.

Jannaeus did mint a few (real) lepta, but they're rare and expensive; the most you can say about these is that a few of the crudest issues were down to lepton size. My heaviest example weighs 4.08g, and I absolutely refuse to believe a heffalump like that could be a lepton, when most of them are under 1g!

The weights vary for even regular prutot.  A regular prutah's weight can span about 6 grams, as pointed out in AJC.  Could these coins, in antiquity, be weighed for value, and not just assume it is a prutah value?
This seems logical, because otherwise, someone is always getting less then the value they payed/earned.

You write that you cannot accept the half-prutah value to these coins, because of an oversized coin you own.  I could argue that, because there are regular types of Hasmonean coins more then the prutah weight of 1 gram, these coins are actually 2-prutot, just most are undersized at 1 gram.  Some Hasmonean coins can reach the size of 7 grams, a greater difference in weight then the half prutah you have.
My argument would be probably incorrect. Most of the prutot that we know to be prutot 100% weigh about 1 gram, so we conclude its value is a prutah.
These coins usually weigh under 1 gram, so why can't we assume that these coins are half prutot, using the same logic?

-Aarmale

EDIT: Is the mark on the reverse of the coin from 8:00-9:00 anything?

[Snegovik]

Herod I minted a lot of (real) leptons, so if there's a historical basis to the story and Mark isn't just emphasising the woman's poverty, then most likely she'd have had Herod's coins.

Jannaeus did mint a few (real) lepta, but they're rare and expensive; the most you can say about these is that a few of the crudest issues were down to lepton size. My heaviest example weighs 4.08g, and I absolutely refuse to believe a heffalump like that could be a lepton, when most of them are under 1g!

As for the identification with the 'mite', a lepton was the smallest Judean coin, and Mark gives the woman two, equal to the smallest roman coin, the quadrans. So the early Bible translators, reasonably enough, translated it in terms of the smallest unit of value in use in England; it was a denomination in use in the Low Countries, but the coins were never legal tender here. It was used for accounting purposes only, at different values in different places. It's now a lot more obscure than 'lepton', which is the term originally used in the New Testament, so I wonder why we're still using it?

I guess for commercial purposes. Herod's coins are popular because of other reasons, but how to market common coins of an unknown ruler? Same story with the 'coins of the Magi'.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Of course it's commercial. Most of the 'mites' - and we have to go by the average - are over a gram, and the flans are too big for lepta as well.

[Aarmale]

I would be happy to accept that these coins are full prutot if the average is over a gram.

[Robert_Brenchley]

FORVM currently has sixteen of these on sale, not counting lots or one coin where the decimal point has been omitted from the weight. The weights range from 0.80 to 3.64g (rounding to two decimal places), with the smaller coins being noticeably crude. The mean weight is 1.41g. There's a very wide variation in weight, with the lower end overlapping with that of the lepton. These may be imitations, or coins produced under emergency conditions of some sort. I suggest though, that the average weight is clearly that of a prutah.

[Aarmale]

In the article "The Metrology of Judaean Small Bronze Coins" by D. Hendin (the lepton guy!),
Jannaeus types are given the following information:

Name	Sample Size	Avg. Wt.	Range in g	Avg. Std. Deviation Calc
Jannaeus GBC 471; TJC L1, L2	(200)	1.20 ± 0.02	(0.61–1.79)	.23919 / 14.142136 = .0169
Jannaeus GBC 472; TJC L3–L17	(1251)	0.81 ± 0.01	(0.20–1.70)	.24731 / 35.369478 = .0070

These statistics are less then you thought originally. 1.20 g. & 0.81 g. seems like more like a half prutah weight, especially seeing that the average of these two weights is about 1 gram.
You could compare these weights with a few weights from known prutot.

Name	Sample Size	Avg. Wt.	Range in g	Avg. Std. Deviation Calc
Antiochus VII GBC 451	(162)	2.47 ± 0.03	(1.62–3.41)	.33547 / 12.72792 = 0.0264
Yehohanan GBC 453–455, 459, 460; TJC A, B, D, E, F, G, I	(599)	1.92 ± 0.01	(1.12–3.06)	.33631 / 24.47448 = 0.0137
Jannaeus GBC 467, 478; TJC N, T	(344)	2.15 ± 0.02	(1.04–3.50)	.44343 / 18.547237 = .0239

You could also compare the Jannaeus coin types with half-prutah weights of the Herodians.

Name	Sample Size	Avg. Wt.	Range in g	Avg. Std. Deviation Calc
Herod I GBC 501; TJC 66	(278)	.86 ± 0.01	(0.41–1.42)	0.1924/16.67333 = .0115
Archelaus GBC 506; TJC 72	(391)	1.19 ± 0.01	(0.44–2.1)	.29426 / 19.773719 = .0149

Although, Hendin does write:

The average weight of these poor anchor/star coins (Figure 6) is 0.81 ± 0.01 g,
but it fluctuates dramatically from coins as light as 0.20 g to coins weighing 1.70
g (8.5x). These coins may well be degraded prutot and not half-prutah coins.16
Hyrcanus I (GBC 458, 461) and Jannaeus (GBC 468) issued coins with different
designs or inscriptions that were intended to be smaller denominations, probably
half-prutot. Both types are so scarce we could not include them in this study.

-Aarmale

[Robert_Brenchley]

I'd suggest that the 'poor' coins should be excluded; I'm not sure what's going on there, whether they're imitations or whether they're official coins produced when there was a shortage of metal, but they're not typical. Archelaus retariffed the prutah, so perhaps he shouldn't be included. More to the point would be the weights of Hyrcanus' and Jannaeus' lepta. I'll accept that Jannaeus' are rare, though weights should be available, but Hyrcanus' aren't. Meshorer (TJC p38) considers these to be prutot, though he does suggest that the 'poor' coins might be lepta. Against this is the fact that every other lepton has a distinctive type, and that the sheer crudity of the engraving suggests that there's something else going on.

[Aarmale]

True, I also wondered why Hyrcanus leptons were not included.  MCP lists 105 specimens of the regular type (without rosh), and 27 Jannaeus leptons.
Here are the weights of some Jannaeus leptons from largest to smallest (*=coin or size not in the MCP):

Collection or publication Weight (g) Sasson 1.77 "Hendin Site" 1.65 British Museum* 1.65 Sternberg Sale #23 lot 313 1.55 Spaer 1.53 British Museum* 1.5 Grosswirth 1.44 Fontanille 1.424 IAA 1.3 Leu Sale #91 lot 231 1.26 CNG alectronic auction 212 lot 131* 1.28 INJ #4 plate 1.21 Superior - Abramowitz #11 1.21 Gemini auction VI lot 280* 1.14 Leu sale 91 lot 232 1.1 Hendin, EBay 1.09 Hendin, EBay 1.07 Noble Sale #53 lot 2232 0.98 We can see that most of these weights are slightly above 1 gram.  The average is about 1.36 grams.