Talent

A talent was originally a measure of weight (around 34 kg) and then an enormous unit of money — a talent of silver was worth roughly 6,000 denarii, about twenty years of a labourer's wages. It was the heaviest, highest denomination in use.

This scale is the whole point of Jesus' parables. In the parable of the talents, servants are entrusted with sums representing lifetimes of wages, raising the stakes of faithfulness enormously. In the parable of the unforgiving servant, a man is forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents — an absurd, unpayable fortune — yet refuses to forgive a fellow servant a debt of a hundred denarii.

Read at its true value, that second parable becomes devastating: the debt God forgives us is incalculable, and the debts we cling to against others are, by comparison, trivial. Because the English word “talent” later came to mean ability, the parable also shaped our very language about using our gifts.