09/02/2026
A passage in 1 Samuel 13:19-22 says that since no blacksmiths existed in Israel, people went to the Philistines to sharpen their tools, and in return they paid a pim. This word pim appears only once in the Bible. It’s used casually, on the assumption that everyone knew what it meant. Yet for 2500 years, no one did. The term pim was used from the 10th to the 8th centuries BC to represent a stone weight equivalent to 7.6 grams or two-thirds of a shekel. This was the price in weight of silver to sharpen tools around the time of King David. The weight fell out of use and people soon forgot what the term meant. Scholars in the 18th and 19th century couldn’t figure it out either since no ancient lexicons translated the meaning of the term. Only in the early 1900s, when archaeologists found a stone weight inscribed in ancient Hebrew with the word pim, was the mystery solved. Since then multiple pim weights have been found. So consider: Bible skeptics have insisted the Bible was written much, much later than the events it purports to describe. But how would people writing centuries later, say between the 6th and 3rd centuries BC, know about a weight that had long disappeared? They would not. How would they know how to use a term whose meaning was not rediscovered until the 20th century? They would not.
