What was Rebekah's earring worth?

Genesis 24:22: “the man took a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold.”

Someone in my mother’s study group asked the obvious questions. How heavy is a shekel? What would that be worth now? The app couldn’t say. Now it can, in the Margin beside the verse, in a reference page of its own, and in Ask.

Ounces first

The group is American. Most of them don’t think in grams, so every size gives US measures first and metric in brackets: about ⅕ ounce (5.7 grams). A half shekel was a bekah, and the card says so.

Something to hold

A number alone doesn’t mean much. Each unit comes with something familiar of about the same size or weight. The earring weighs about as much as a US quarter, and a cubit is the length from your elbow to your fingertips.

What it meant then

Today’s gold price says nothing about what a thing meant in its own day, so the card first sets the amount beside the Bible’s own prices: gold beside gold, silver beside silver, the nearest one below and the nearest one above. Rebekah’s ten-shekel bracelets sit next to Achan’s wedge of gold, which weighed fifty (Joshua 7:21).

Today’s money, dated

Only after that comes the metal’s value, with a date on it: In gold, as of October 2026: about $770 for the earring and about $15,500 for the bracelets. The price is fixed when the app is built and says so, rather than pretending to be live.

Ask never makes up a number

When you ask Ask what something was worth, the app works out every figure itself and hands them to the on-device model as one of the passages it cites. The model writes the sentences. If its answer includes a number that isn’t in those facts, the line is dropped. A friendly sentence with a made-up price is worse than no sentence.