'Since you have not received the last edition of "The Education of Children," I shall instruct Mr. Halma to send it to me with a certain new book by Otho Sperlingius entitled Dissertation on Unstruck Coins, or Unstamped Money (Sperling 1700), in which he denies that the Samaritans and the Jews ever used stamped money [and asserts that] all coins of either people are fake. These are the expressions used by Mr. Graevius in one of his letters, of the tenth inst., that he honored me by writing me, where it can be seen that this Sperlingius does not understand the nature of the question, or else he is very ignorant in understanding antiquity as regards medals.
With respect to the question, the query whether Samaritans had stamped money or not had never been raised because they were a wretched people who had never had the right to strike coins, let alone to put a legend on them. As for the Jews, however, I have sen and carefully inspected more than a hundred of their medals - both in silver and in bronze, of various sizes, types, and legends. No antiquarian would fail to recognise them as ancient, at least without losing his reputation and showing his ignorance. This makes me say with confidence that either the author has never seen any [Jewish medals] or he has not the least discernment of antiquities.
But to come to the point and to answer accurately [the question] that you honored me in asking me, what is my opinion regarding Hebrew shekels, and whether ancient Hebrew characters can be determined, I can tell you that I think that all silver shekels and half-shekels with Aaron's rod as a symbol and the legend Jerusalem the Holy in Hebrew, in so-called Samaritan characters, on one side and with the Shekel of Israel or Half a Shekel of Israel with an urn as a symbol on the reverse were struck in the time of Judas Maccabeus, and that the letters that are above the urn indicate the years from the cleansing of the Temple by Judas. Four of these [dates] appear on the shekels and half-shekels, the first of which is simply indicated by aleph, which means "I", that is, the first, and corresponds to year 165 of the Common Era of J. Ch.; and the second has above the urn an additional letter bet (that is, shin and bet): this signifies year II, since shin is the initial letter of shenat, which means "year". The last is AW, namely, shin dalet, year IV, because dalet being the fourth [letter] of the alphabet denotes IV, and consequently the year of this medal corresponds to 162 before the Era of J. Ch.
With respect to all other Jewish medalss, whether large, medium or small bronzes, as well as the silver ones that weigh only one drachma, which is a quarter of the weight of a shekel, they all belong to the period of Simon, the brother and successor of Judas Maccabeus. Most of them bear his name very distinctly, and the rest must also be his because they are all of similar types and they date back to the same period. I have also four [medals] on which there appears Simon Prince of Israel, and these are the rarest.
The latest of these medals was struck 139 years before the Era of J.Ch. and in the fifth [year] of Simon's Pontificate. Someday they may find such medals bearing a larger number, because Simon did not die until the year 135 before the Era of J.Ch.
Apart from that I have recently received three medals of Antigonus, the last king of the Jews of the Hasmonean dynasty, on which there are characters similar to those on [medals] of Judas and Simon. They could not have been struck earlier than in the year 40 before our Common Era, at which time, after the Pentecost, Antigonus seized Judea, having dismissed his paternal uncle Hyrcan. It is an astonishing thing that Antigonus would use characters of this type, which were quite surprising on medals of Simon, the great-great-grandfather of this Antigonus. I have indicated to you on a previous occasion that this must have been done in order to preserve [an appearance of] antiquity, in the same way that coin legends in Europe are written in Latin, although the Latin language is no longer in use in countries where coins are struck with such legends.
After that you will understand that in my opinion the so-called Samaritan characters that appear on Jewish medals are the genuine ancient [characters] with which the Law of Moses was written, and which were changed by Esdras so that the Jews would have nothing in common with the Samaritans, who were using these ancient characters that had been given to this people when they were sent to inhabit Palestine and there to serve God of the country through a cult that suited them.
I believe that I have discovered through a certain passage in a strange place what the characters are that Esdras introduced and with which Hebrew Bibles of today are written. Herewith you have two prints of medals hitherto unpublished - the same as several others in my collection which contains thirty-four .... I have marked for you with two small dashes the places from which one should start reading the circular legends on the reverse .... The dotted letters were inserted by me and they are no longer visible on these two medals, although they appear distinctly on others.
On the medal on the left [sic; actually referring to the coin on the right], below which there is an abbreviated explanatory line, the field is inscribed in three lines SiMOUN. NaSIA. ISRAeL. These three words mean Simon Prince of Israel;... the i in SiMOUN, the a in NaSIA, and the e in ISRAeL are added to supplement the pronunciation. On the reverse side, where the vase appears, there is: SeNAT. ECHaT. LeGALaT ISRAeL. YEAR. ONE. OF THE FREEDOM. OF ISRAEL. The rest for another occasion.
I have to tell you also that the word ECHaT in Hebrew has only three letters although in Latin you would count four capital [letters] in it. This is because the "CH" corresponds to a single Hebrew letter.'
(translation from Minc 1985, pp. 115-16)
