Meaning
The price of betrayal - a payment, reward, or advantage accepted in exchange for abandoning a person, principle, or loyalty. The phrase indicts the seller: whatever was gained, it was not worth what was given up. Always an accusation of betrayal, weighted by two millennia of use; deploying it against someone is to cast them as Judas, so expect the comparison to land hard. Regional use: General English; Biblical origin.
Origin
Matthew's Gospel has Judas Iscariot agree to hand Jesus over for thirty silver coins, then repent and return the money, which the priests, treating it as blood money, spend on the potter's field. The sum is scripturally loaded: Zechariah 11 has the prophet paid thirty pieces and flinging them to the potter, and Exodus 21:32 sets thirty shekels as the price of a slave - the equivalent, by one reckoning, of about four months' skilled wages. Matthew's citation of the prophecy names Jeremiah rather than Zechariah, a puzzle theologians have argued over since Calvin. From the fourteenth century the coins appeared among the Instruments of the Passion, and venerated Judas-pennies were credited with easing childbirth. Figuratively the phrase has armed every argument about selling out: Reformation polemicists traded it across denominations, it was flung at Dreyfus's accusers, Australians mailed thirty coins to Governor-General Kerr after the 1975 constitutional crisis, a Tuvalu delegate at the 2009 Copenhagen summit protested being offered thirty pieces of silver to betray his people, and Wiktionary's standing definition is simply a reward for betrayal.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- 30 pieces of silver
- his thirty pieces of silver
- thirty pieces
Usage Examples
- Defecting for a competitor's signing bonus felt, he admitted, like thirty pieces of silver with a car allowance.
- The committee's thirty pieces of silver turned out to be a chaired lectureship and a parking space.
- Historians still argue whether the border MP took thirty pieces of silver or simply misread his constituents.