About the surcharge of money changers

[HT]

We know the shekel and half shekel of Tyre were the only acceptable currencies in Temple. So if a Jew buys the half/shekel with the money-changer(s), he may play the surcharge about 5.5 prutot. However, if he pay the half shekel to the Temple directly, he still pays 5.5 prutot. David Hendin says 'in order for the Temple to get full value' in his article (http://www.amphoracoins.com/content.asp?s=articles, <SURCHARGE OF THE MONEY CHANGERS>). But I'm not clear about his answer, so can anybody explain for me again?
The second thing I don't understand is that, if a Jew gives a shekel of Tyre to the Temple, he should pay 11 prutot as the surcharge and get back the half shekel. Again, can anyone tell me the reason to charge double 'kolbon' in this case?
Waiting for answer, thanks very much!

[Robert_Brenchley]

The Temple was the holiest place on earth to a Jew, and therefore any transaction involving it had to be free of any suspicion that the people involved were skimping in any way whatsoever. The Rabbis always erred on the safe side in matters of the Law; for instance, the maximum coroporal punishment allowed by the Torah was forty lashes, so they would give thirty-nine just in case they miscounted and went over the forty by mistake. The same approach is found here; it would be legal to pay a shekel and get half a shekel change, as it was the pure silver required by the Torah. But the giver would be gaining at the expense of the money-changer, and this was considered a bit too dodgy. But remember that this is the Talmud, and thus no earlier than 3rd Century AD. The exact amount of the surcharge was uncertain by this time; can we be sure that the rest is correct?

Jesus' attack on the Temple, which is explicitly said to have involved the money-changers, could be relevant here; the taxpayer was forced to go beyond the necessary in order to be straight with the moneychangers, but was he perhaps being ripped off in return? Torah, after all, requires generosity towards the poor, and most taxpayers were probably poorer than the moneychangers!

[PeterD]

It's a bit like if you buy a theatre ticket at an agency, they charge a booking fee. If you I am a spammer from the theatre they still charge a booking fee! That's business.

[HT]

But I don't understand the reason of the Temple to charge the double or just a kolbon. Half shekel of each man is not enough? The tax itself is the expenditure of Temple, right? Is the  surcharge (kolbon) for the Temple to exchange the local money (currency in Jerusalem) with the money-broker?

I guess, if it is, then the silver shekel and half shekel of Tyre are just the tokens in Temple? When a Jew purchases the half shekel from the the broker(s) in Temple, he would pay 5.5 prutot as a kolbon to the broker, and do not use to pay the kolbon to the Temple, right? But if the half shekel is not bought from the demanded broker(s) in Temple, then the Jew should pay the kolbon to the Temple? Right?Then the question is: how can the priests in Temple to identify which half shekel coins come from the brokers or not? Looks like the priests transfer the benefit to the brokers and the brokers transfer the benefit to the Temple, thus they can make more money, ah??

If I guess it wrong, please tell me the reason for the priests to charge the surcharge.
When a Jew gives a shekel, he should gives 11 prutot to get the change of half shekel. Why the Jew is charged with double kolbon but not the one only? What are those kalbanot stand for?

Some questions about the Temple tax: (1)Before the minting of shekel of Tyre, how do the Jews used to play the Temple tax? (2)How can a Jew to prove his payment to the Temple?

[Robert_Brenchley]

There really aren't definite answers to a lot of this; we can only guess as they never wrote it down, or if they did it didn't survive. Remember that all we have is what someone wrote down two or three centuries after the destruction of the Temple, when the whole system obviously ceased altogether, and there were aspects of the setup the writer admits to being unsure of himself. I've given my best guess, and I really can't do more.

Originally, the shekel of silver was a weight of pure silver; when coinage started, they substituted a tetradrachm as the weight was virtually the same. The tax had to be paid in ure silver so, while there's no evidence surviving, it's likely that they had some similar system with people making a nice living out of selling the punters silver to pay the tax with. I don't know what system, if any, they had for checking that the tax had been paid, but the Jews are known to have been very eager to pay it, so coercion wasn't needed. Legally, by New Testament times it was only binding in Judea, but money flooded in from Jewish communities everywhere.

[HT]

Thanks for answering! My last question is: why did the Jews give up their religious belief by using pagan Tyre shekel as the only currency in Temple, although each shekel of Tyre contains very high percentage of silver? Ancient Jews did not mint their silver coins (before First Jewish Revolt), and all circulating coins at that time in middle east were also containing different pagan pictures, so no choice for the Jews. At last they selected the shekel of Tyre because the silver containment. Is it the only reason?

When the Jews minted 'their' shekel of Tyre since 18 BCE to 66CE, why didn't they mint their own style of shekel but followed the original style of shekel of Tyre? Oh yes, that is the KP or KAP issue about the mint of the shekel coins. Anyway, the first genuinely Jewish silver coin was the shekel of Israel in 66CE. If the Jews really minted their shekel coins since 18 BCE, perhaps it is another numismatic first in the history of Israel...??

[Robert_Brenchley]

That's a very good question! We don't know where they were minted, but my guess is that first Herod, and then the Romans, would have had that mint firmly under their control, away from such a volatile city as Jerusalem, as a bit of extra leverage on the Temple. My guess would be Caesarea Maritima, but it is a guess.

When it came to interpreting the Law, the Rabbis had a principle, prabably inherited from their forebears, that when two commandments conflict, one overrides the other. So bearing burdens on the Sabbath might be forbidden work, but if someone needs rescuing from a fire, the commandments about doing good and saving life take priority, and you bring a ladder anyway to get him out. Interestingly, the author of the 'Damascus Covenant' took the opposite view: 'Should any man fall into water or [fire], let him not be pulled out with the aid of a ladder or rope or other utensil'.

Presumably, since the Jews probably didn't have access to silver to mint their own coins, and certainly had no silver mint, they had to use what was available. They must have taken the commandment to use pure silver as overriding the commandment to abstain from images, which wasn't always strictly observed anyway. As the situation deteriorated in the run-up to the First Revolt, they seem to have become stricter, and to have adopted something which we would probably regard as fundamentalism; it's a common reaction when a religious community feels itself threatened. The images on shekels must have ceased to be seen as acceptable, by some people at least, and as soon as the rebels took control of the Temple, they started producing kosher, image-free shekels. I imagine that they must have used the Temple treasury as the source of the silver, since there wasn't really anywhere else they could have got significant quantities from.