How many days wages is a talent

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I am a revert to the Catholic Church. I was baptized at age 9 but then quickly acquired great fear of hell. When I was confirmed at age 15, I really wanted the gifts of the Spirit and did all requirements for the sacrament, but my heroes were hard rock guitar players, not saints.

With social awkwardness of Aspergers, my academic years were difficult, and I even attempted suicide. But Mother Mary spared me, and I found my priceless worth in God. And hence, the Church must know what the Bible means! This knowledge very much relieved me of much spiritual suffering and uncertainty. When I found the stability and love of Catholicism, my life was changed forever. Toggle navigation. How much is a talent? Every seventh day. Holy you know what! I can see where you are going.

This actually gives us a correlation to almost all the other numbers: , years of labor have been drawn by extrapolation from the loaves and fishes, since they are already the fulfillment of days wages a day is as a thousand years and thousand years as a day.

Related Categories:. In modern English, this fact is obscured because the word talent has come to refer mainly to skills or abilities. But this parable concerns money. It depicts investing, not hoarding, as a godly thing to do if it accomplishes godly purposes in a godly manner.

More pointedly for the workplace, it commends putting capital at risk in pursuit of earning a return. Sometimes Christians speak as if growth, productivity, and return on investment were unholy to God. But this parable overturns that notion. This includes the production of needed goods and services. The volunteer who teaches Sunday school is fulfilling this parable.

So are the entrepreneur who starts a new business and gives jobs to others, the health service administrator who initiates an AIDS-awareness campaign, and the machine operator who develops a process innovation. God does not endow people with identical or necessarily equal gifts. At the same time, the parable ends with the talent taken from the third servant being given to the one with ten talents.

Equal worth does not necessarily mean equal compensation. Some positions require more skill or ability and thus are compensated accordingly. The two servants who did well are rewarded in different amounts. Roman coins had heathen figures—graven images and false gods—and propaganda stamped on them that were especially hateful to the Jews. Christ referred to one of these Roman coins, a denarius, with the graven image of Caesar, probably Tiberius, stamped on it, to answer the Pharisees and Herodians who asked him if it were lawful to pay tribute.

He showed them the coin and replied:. By the New Testament period, the temple tax atonement money was paid yearly. Since the Jews did not have enough of their own coins to cover their needs, they accepted coins minted in Tyre. The Jews determined that the Tyrian didrachma was equal to a half-shekel. It was not a common coin, however, so the stater two-didrachma coin was often used to pay the temple tax for two people together.

With the temple tax, free-will offerings, and animal sacrifices to make, yet with coins that could not be brought into the temple proper, righteous Jews faced a problem.

Thus, a lucrative business arose on the temple grounds. Money changers charged a fee of one kollybos, a small Greek coin, for changing money into the acceptable half-shekel of the sanctuary, while cattle, sheep, and bird dealers sold animals for sacrifice. The noise and the greed were incompatible with the temple, and twice the Lord swept over the money tables and drove the dealers and their animals out. The amount had been foretold in Zechariah and was the price for an ordinary slave.

The people who worshipped at the temple, though, should not be equated with the money changers and priests who profited from the temple businesses. Mark —44 records one instance when the Lord was watching those who cast their free-will offerings into the treasury. Two were not even enough to feed oneself a simple meal. Not all money was minted as coins, though. In the New Testament period, the talent was a sum of money, not a coin; whereas in the Old Testament it was strictly a unit of weight.

The New Testament talent was the equivalent of denarii. A denarius was a silver coin weighing 60 grains. Such a figure, however, does not reflect ancient values.

In other words, one denarius would buy enough bread to feed twenty-five people. On that basis, a laborer would have to work for days to earn one talent. The lord, because he was traveling to a far country, divided his property. One servant received five talents; another, two talents; and another, one talent. The servant who received five talents received more than he could possibly earn in a lifetime by himself. Two of the servants put their talents to good use, doubling them in trade.

This action was not unusual, as there were no banks in Palestine, except for the temple, which had a treasury and was used for money-changing.