An archaic unit of MONEY or weight — Jacob buys the field at Shechem 'for a hundred kesitah' (33:19; KJV 'pieces of money'). Its exact value is unknown; the word survives in only three places in the whole Bible (here, Joshua 24:32, and Job 42:11), a sign of its great age — later Hebrew had long since replaced it with the shekel. The Septuagint and rabbis guessed it was worth a lamb (some ancient coins were stamped with a lamb), so it may have meant 'a lamb's-worth' of silver. This translation keeps the old word untranslated rather than smoothing it into 'coins,' which would be an anachronism — coinage proper came a thousand years later. → first discussed at Gen 33:19