A silver tetradrachm minted at Tyre on the Phoenician coast from 126 BC down through the first decades of the Roman occupation, the Tyrian shekel weighs roughly fourteen grams and runs about 26mm across. The obverse carries the laureate head of Melqart — the Phoenician Heracles, patron deity of Tyre — in stark Hellenistic relief. The reverse shows an eagle standing on a ship's prow, a club at its left shoulder, and a Greek legend running around the rim: ΤΥΡΟΥ ΙΕΡΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΥΛΟΥ — "of Tyre the holy and inviolable." The iconography is unambiguously pagan. And yet the Mishnah at Bekhorot 8:7 specifies kesef tzori — Tyrian money — as the required coinage for the half-shekel Temple tax that every Israelite male owed annually under Exodus 30:13–16. The reason is metallurgical: the Tyrian mint kept its silver purity at roughly 94% across two centuries, where rival provincial issues were debased. The Temple, needing weighed-silver fidelity for the half-shekel obligation (Matthew 17:24–27), accepted the pagan image as the price of the pure metal. When Tyre lost its independent mint privileges around 65 BC, the coinage continued to be struck — apparently by arrangement with the Jerusalem authorities — into the AD 50s, with the late issues sometimes called "Jerusalem shekels" by numismatists tracking the stylistic shift. This is almost certainly the coinage of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot (Matthew 26:15), the sum echoing Zechariah 11:12–13, where the prophet's wage is weighed out and thrown to the potter. The thirty would have been Tyrian shekels because no other silver was accepted at the Temple treasury where the priests transacted. Yaakov Meshorer's Treasury of Jewish Coins and the Meshorer/Lorber catalogue remain the standard references for the series; specimens are held in the Israel Museum, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the American Numismatic Society. Sources: Yaakov Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba (Yad Ben-Zvi / Amphora, 2001); Yaakov Meshorer and Catharine Lorber, Coins of the Holy Land: The Abraham and Marian Sofaer Collection (American Numismatic Society, 2013); David Hendin, Guide to Biblical Coins (5th ed., Amphora, 2010); Mishnah, Bekhorot 8:7; Matthew 26:14–16; Zechariah 11:12–13.
The Tyrian shekel resolves a long-standing tension in Second Temple Judaism: why pagan-iconography coinage bearing Melqart's image served as the mandated currency for the half-shekel Temple tax. Its near-pure silver content, Mishnaic attestation, and probable role as the thirty pieces of silver give it singular weight in New Testament monetary studies.