THE SANCTUARY VILLAGE PROJECT
Just Weights and Measures
“You shall have just balances.”
— Ezekiel 45:10
Every market in history has been broken the same way: by moving the weights. A merchant shaves the stone, a bank thins the coin, a government prints the paper — and the family that worked hardest is paid in something smaller than what they earned.
The Sanctuary Village keeps a standard against that. It is written in stone, calibrated to scripture, and it does not move.
Nothing on this page is money. The village buys and sells in Jordanian Dinars, the same as every shop in Amman. Visitors pay the posted price. Residents pay the posted price. No one at any counter will ever hand you a strange coin or a second price list.
This page describes a standard and a preparation — kept the way we keep grain in the storehouse. We hope never to need either. We keep both anyway.
The village’s unit of weight is the Sela — 14.250 grams of pure silver — set by the ancient standard of Ezekiel chapter 45 as preserved in the Aramaic Targum. Every larger weight locks into it by law, so no measure can be quietly changed:
| Weight | The law | Silver weight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Meah | one twentieth of a Sela | 0.7125 g |
| 1 Sela | the anchor | 14.250 g |
| Quarter-Mina calibrator | fifteen Sela | 213.750 g |
| Third-Mina calibrator | twenty Sela | 285.000 g |
| 1 Silver Mina — the third calibrator | twenty-five Sela | 356.250 g |
| 1 Master Mina | sixty Sela — the three calibrators together, exact in counts and in grams | 855.000 g |
The three calibrators sum to the Master Mina exactly — fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five make sixty — so any scale in any market can be tested against any other, and a shaved weight has nowhere to hide. That is the whole design: fraud dies where measures agree.
Two Minas appear on this scale on purpose: the Silver Mina (twenty-five Sela) for everyday commerce, and the Master Mina (sixty) that oversees it — the smaller weight trades, the larger weight judges.
What silver is worth in Dinars or Dollars changes every day with the world’s markets. The weights never change. The weight is the law; the price is the weather.
The village measures land in the dunam — one thousand square meters, the measure Jordan already uses. One family homestead of ten dunams is the master production unit, and its harvest is divided by fixed law: a tenth to those who serve, a tenth to the safety net that catches any family that falls, a tenth to the festivals that bind us (the community calendar, opens in a new tab), a tenth to the governance that protects us, a portion to the storehouse against famine — one sixth of what remains after the tithes, which works out to exactly one more tenth of the whole — and half, always, kept by the family that grew it.
Add it yourself: four tenths, the storehouse tenth, and the family’s half make the whole harvest exactly. The law sums to one hundred on any scale, which is the point of a law.
The same law for the largest family and the smallest. The same tenth for everyone. No one is taxed by mood.
The village storehouse keeps grain against a year the harvest fails. In the same spirit, the village trust keeps this standard — the weights, the balances, and a sealed written protocol — against a day the world’s money fails.
We are not predicting that day. We are simply a people who do not wait for the storm to learn how to build a roof. If the world ever reverts, by conflict or collapse, to trading by weight and measure, this village will already know its weights, already trust its measures, and already have them cut in stone.
Until such a day — and we pray it never comes — the standard sleeps, the Dinar serves, and the only thing this page asks of you is what the prophet asked: deal justly, weigh honestly, and keep the balance true.