A small bronze prutah, 12 to 14mm across and weighing only about half a gram — roughly the mass of a paperclip. The obverse carries an anchor inside a circle with the Greek inscription ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ — "of King Alexander." The reverse shows an eight-rayed star surrounded by a Hebrew paleo-script legend reading Yehonatan ha-Melekh — "Yehonatan the King." The two languages reflect the political bilingualism of the Hasmonean court: Greek for the Hellenistic world, Hebrew for the temple constituency. Alexander Jannaeus reigned 103–76 BC, but his bronze leptons stayed in circulation for nearly two centuries, worn smooth in the hands of generations of laborers and beggars before the Jewish War finally swept them out of use. Two of them are the lepta duo of Mark 12:42 and Luke 21:2 — the offering of the widow that Jesus singles out, sitting opposite the Temple treasury, as larger than every rich gift dropped into the trumpets that day. The Greek text fixes the denomination precisely: a lepton (literally "a thin one") was the smallest copper coin in circulation, valued at one-half of a quadrans, itself one sixty-fourth of a denarius. Two leptons together — the widow's whole offering — were worth roughly five minutes of a day-laborer's wage. The Jannaeus lepton is one of the most common finds in Judean archaeology. Excavations at the Temple Mount, at Qumran, at Masada, and across hundreds of lesser sites have recovered them by the thousands; they appear in nearly every Israeli museum coin tray and circulate widely on the modern collectors' market. Dan Barag's catalogue of the Jannaeus issues and David Hendin's Guide to Biblical Coins remain the standard references. The coin survives in such numbers because it was struck in such numbers: a worn, anonymous, near-worthless thing, which is exactly why the widow's two of them entered the Gospel record and stayed. Sources: Dan Barag, "The Coinage of Alexander Jannaeus" (Israel Numismatic Journal, 1985); David Hendin, Guide to Biblical Coins (5th ed., Amphora, 2010); Yaakov Meshorer, A Treasury of Jewish Coins from the Persian Period to Bar Kokhba (Yad Ben-Zvi / Amphora, 2001); Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4.
The Jannaeus lepton grounds the Gospel widow's-mite narrative in recoverable material culture. Because the coin is archaeologically ubiquitous — recovered by the thousands at the Temple Mount, Masada, and Qumran — scholars can precisely fix the denomination, valuation, and social context that Mark 12:42 and Luke 21:2 presuppose.