I find economics fascinating.  Probably because I know very little about it.  I took one economics course in university and remember something about supply and demand.  I also remember phrases such as “inelastic demand”, “negative supply shock”, “guns and butter”, “velocity of money” among others.  Don’t ask me to say anything sensible about them, but I’ve been thinking about economics with our current fiscal meltdown.  So as I was reading in Genesis I came across what may be the first instance of monetary policy in history.

Gen 23:16 “Abraham agreed to Ephron’s terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weight current among the merchants.”

The weight of a shekel was variable.  They had a floating currency!  I doubt there was some central banker that set the weight… but I would guess that it would go up and down based on certain economic conditions.  Don’t ask me what those conditions would be.  Also… don’t ask me what the spiritual significance of this is either.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.