kesaph

Biblical Aramaic כְּסַף occurs 13 times, all within the Aramaic sections of Ezra (5:14; 6:5; 7:15, 16, 17, 18, 22) and Daniel (2:32, 35, 45; 5:2, 4, 23). It is the regular Aramaic reflex of the common Semitic noun for silver, cognate with Hebrew כֶּסֶף, Ugaritic ksp, Akkadian kaspu, and Phoenician and Old Aramaic ksp, and it is the standard term in the Achaemenid-era Aramaic documentary material (the Elephantine legal papyri and the chancellery correspondence), where silver reckoned by weight is the ordinary medium of payment. The lexicographers do not divide the word: HALOT's Aramaic section, Vogt's Lexicon of Biblical Aramaic in Fitzmyer's English revision, and the Aramaic appendix to BDB all give a single entry glossed "silver," treating the monetary use as a contextual extension rather than a distinct lexeme. The Ezra occurrences sit inside quoted Aramaic documents whose formulas mirror Persian administrative practice: the memorandum of Cyrus's decree concerning the temple vessels of gold and silver (5:14; 6:5), and the rescript of Artaxerxes with its conveyance of donated silver and gold (7:15, 16), its purchasing authorization (7:17, "with this silver you shall buy"), its discretionary clause for the remainder (7:18), and its drawing limit expressed in talents (7:22). Coinage circulated widely in the Persian empire, but temple and treasury accounting continued to be kept in weighed silver, which is why one noun does duty for the metal and for the funds; Williamson and Blenkinsopp discuss the plausibility of the amounts in Ezra 7:22 without questioning the sense of the noun. In Daniel the word is exclusively material: the second band of the composite statue (2:32, with the pulverized metals recapitulated at 2:35 and 2:45), and the plundered temple vessels and manufactured deities of Belshazzar's banquet (5:2, 4, 23), where the catalogue of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone is the conventional polemic against images. Collins and Goldingay read the metal sequence of the statue as a descending scale of value serving the four-kingdom scheme. Greek renderings of these passages use the ἀργυρ- word group, whose noun ἀργύριον carries the same double duty as metal and money.