When he had begun to settle, one was brought to him who owed him ten thousand talents.
ExplanationCommentary
Verse 24. Ten thousand talents. It is put as an example for an immense sum. It is not certainly agreed what was the value of a talent. A talent of gold is said to be 4900 lb.; of silver 375 lb. See Walton’s Prologomena, Dr. Harris’s Lexicon, and so forth Witham.—The 10,000 talents, according to some authors, amount to £1,875,000 sterling, that is 740,000 times as much as his fellow-servant owed him; the hundred pence amounting to not more than £3 2s. 6d.
Ten thousand talents (about 300 metric tons of silver) represents an extremely large sum of money, equivalent to about 60,000,000 denarii, where one denarius was typical of one day’s wages for agricultural labor.