I need not repeat the more banal
influences from Egypt on the Bible such as loan words or idiomatic or
metaphorical expressions (they may be found in Williams 1971:262-67). This kind
of influence is only to be expected in view of the close and intense relations
between Egypt and Palestine through the millennia. One interesting feature may,
however, be mentioned to show the degree of penetration of Egyptian culture
into Israelite (or Judaean) society. In the course of Kathleen Kenyon’s
excavations in Jerusalem 1961-67 (where Donald Redford and I were site
supervisors) a number of weights from the late 7th century or early 6th
century were found in a house belonging to a merchant and destroyed in the
Babylonian invasion of 587 B.C. They were of course in the
Babylonian-Levantine weight system in sheqels in a sexagesimal system (1, 6,
12, 24 and fractions of sheqel), but added to this there was a curious
feature, many of them had a Hieratic sign in the Egyptian number system to base
ten. This may implicate that ordinary people used at least a number of standard
Hieratic signs, even if they did not read Egyptian. And perhaps it shows a kind
of reform of measures, where the Egyptian way of reckoning was amalgamated with
the local system of weights. An influence on Israelite administration may
also be seen in the list of state officials of Solomon (Mettinger 1971),
regardless of the historicity of King Solomon and the united kingdom. (John
Strange, “Some Notes on Biblical and Egyptian Theology,” Egypt, Israel, and
the Ancient Mediterranean World: Studies in Honor of Donald B. Redford, ed.
Gary N. Knoppers and Antoine Hirsch [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 347, emphasis in
bold added)
Here is a relevant quotation from the work of R. B. Y. Scott
that Strange references concerning the pre-exilic weights:
The unexpectedness of a 24-shekel
denomination in either a decimal or a sexagesimal system raises a difficulty
and points to an interesting conclusion. Of sixty-two known scale-weights
bearing the shekel symbol, no less than twenty-four are 8-shekel weights. The
average mass of these, as reported, is 91.246 gm., approximately the mass of
the Egyptian deben. The problems of foreign exchange must have been as
vexatious for traders, travellers and governments then as now, and the equation
8 shekels = I deben would have been a useful one in dealing with
Egyptians. The 24-shekel weight not only provided multiples of the commoner 1-,
2-, 4- and 8-shekel series but also represented three deben. Support for
this suggestion comes from three large stone weights now in the Palestine
Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem, Jordan: one of 454.4 g01. from a previous
excavation at Ophel, one of 4527 gm. from Tell Beit Mirsim, and one of 4541 gm.
from Samaria. These are correctly described as representing 40, 400 and 400
shekels respectively, and therefore as equivalent to 5, 50 and 50 deben. Apart
from this correlation it is hard to see why these particular denominations
should have been selected in the Israelite system where 50 shekels = 1 mina, 60
minas = 1 talent. (Scott, p. 135) (R. B. Y. Scott, “The Scale-Weights from
Ophel, 1963-64.” Palestine Exploration Quarterly 97, no. 2 [1965]:135
