A WEIGHT — not yet, at this point in the story, a coin: Israel would strike no currency of its own for well over a thousand years yet, so every 'shekel' named across the Torah is a unit of WEIGHED silver or gold, never a stamped piece of metal. The root is shaqal, 'to weigh' — the word names the ACT before it ever names the object. Abraham 'weighed out' four hundred shekels of silver for the cave of Machpelah (23:16) — a transaction reported as an act of weighing, not paying. The priestly law later fixes one controlled standard against every local custom, the 'shekel of the sanctuary' at twenty gerahs (Exodus 30:13, already on these pages) — and Numbers 7 (already on these pages) is where that standard gets its longest workout: twelve identical gifts, weighed and summed twelve times over, converging on an exact total — two thousand four hundred shekels of silver, a hundred twenty of gold — down to the last unit of weight. → first discussed at Gen 23:16