שמות 25:3
וְזֹאת֙ הַתְּרוּמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר תִּקְח֖וּ מֵאִתָּ֑ם זָהָ֥ב וָכֶ֖סֶף וּנְחֹֽשֶׁת
And this is the offering which you shall take of them; gold, and silver, and brass,
There is a great deal of gold mentioned in this week’s parsha. First, gold is donated (Ex. 25:3). Then the Ark is covered in gold (ibid, 11), as are four special rings on each of its corners (ibid, 13). The poles that carried the Ark were plated in gold (ibid, 13), as were the two childlike forms known as the keruvim that were fashioned to face one another and placed on top of the Ark. The Table was top be overlaid with gold (ibid, 24) ditto the poles to carry it (ibid, 28) and the various dishes and spoons that sat on it were to be made of “pure gold” (ibid 29). The Menorah was to be made of gold, of course (ibid 31, and more on that in two weeks), as were the clasps that held the curtains (ibid 26:6) in the Mishkan. That’s a lot of gold for a lot of stuff.
The Talmud discusses different kinds of gold, and so for those not familiar with the chemical and medicinal properties of element 79, today on Talmudology we explore different kinds of gold.
יומא מד, ב
אָמַר רַב חִסְדָּא: שִׁבְעָה זְהָבִים הֵן: זָהָב, וְזָהָב טוֹב, וּזְהַב אוֹפִיר, וְזָהָב מוּפָז, וְזָהָב שָׁחוּט, וְזָהָב סָגוּר, וּזְהַב פַּרְוַיִם. שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְפָז. זָהָב שָׁחוּט — שֶׁנִּטְוֶה כְּחוּט. זָהָב סָגוּר — בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁנִּפְתָּח כָּל הַחֲנוּיוֹת נִסְגָּרוֹת. זְהַב פַּרְוַיִם — שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים. זָהָב וְזָהָב טוֹב, דִּכְתִיב: ״וּזְהַב הָאָרֶץ הַהִוא טוֹב״. זְהַב אוֹפִיר — דְּאָתֵי מֵאוֹפִיר. זָהָב מוּפָז —
Rav Chisda said: There are seven types of gold mentioned in the Bible: Gold, and good gold, and gold of Ophir (I Kings 10:11), and glistering gold (I Kings 10:18), and shaḥut gold (I Kings 10:17), and closed gold (I Kings 10:21), and parvayim gold (II Chronicles 3:6). The Gemara explains the reason for these names: There is a distinction between gold and good gold, as it is written in the verse: “And the gold of that land is good” (Genesis 2:12), which indicates the existence of gold of a higher quality. Gold of Ophir is gold that comes from Ophir. Glistering [mufaz] gold is so named because it resembles the luster of pearls [paz] in the way it glistens. Shaḥut gold is named as such because it is very malleable and is spun like thread [shenitve keḥut]. Shaḥut is a contraction of the words shenitve keḥut. Closed gold is so called because when a shop opens to sell it, all the other shops close, as no one is interested in purchasing any other type of gold. Parvayim gold is so called because its redness resembles the blood of bulls [parim].
רַב אָשֵׁי אָמַר: חֲמִשָּׁה הֵן, וְכל חַד וְחַד אִית בֵּיהּ זָהָב וְזָהָב טוֹב. תַּנְיָא נָמֵי הָכִי: בְּכל יוֹם הָיָה זְהָבָהּ יָרוֹק, וְהַיּוֹם אָדוֹם — וְהַיְינוּ זְהַב פַּרְוַיִם שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים
Rav Ashi said: There are in fact only five types of gold, the last five in Rav Chisda’s list. Gold and good gold are not independent categories; rather, each and every one of the types of gold has two varieties: Regular gold and a superior variety called good gold. That was also taught in a baraita with regard to parvayim gold: On every other day the coal pan was made of greenish gold, but on this day it was made of a red gold, and this is the parvayim gold which resembles the blood of bulls.
Illustration drawn for Talmudology by Yosef Itzkowitz (www.yosefpaper.com)
Not all Gold is “gold”
We usually think of gold as being the color of, well, gold. But that’s not its only color. While pure gold is a sort of reddish yellow, gold alloys vary in color depending on the proportion of the other metals that are found in it. (An alloy is a mixture of two or more different metal elements.) So an alloy of gold and copper will be more red, while an alloy of gold and silver (or gold and other metals like nickel or palladium) will give a white looking gold. You can see how this works in the figure below:
In addition, the purity of gold is measured in karats (also spelled carats, but certainly not carrots), where each karat is 1/24 (or 4.1667%) part of pure gold. Sixteen karat gold means that it is an alloy in which 16 parts are gold and 8 parts are another. Pure gold is, by definition, free of other metals and is therefore 24-karat (ie 24 parts out of 24) gold.
Where does “Parvayim Gold” come from?
Recent evidence suggests that gold is formed by the massive collision of neutron stars. “Every element on the periodic table heavier than bismuth…is forged by the rapid-process in these most extreme stellar surfaces” wrote the cosmochemist Tim Gregory in his 2020 book Meteorite (p.168). “This includes some of your most highly prized substances like …silver, platinum and gold.” This gold was incorporated into the earth’s mantle when the planet was being formed, and was incorporated with other metals, which is why different kinds of gold alloys may be extracted from different mines.
It is this feature that Rav Chisda and Rav Ashi were highlighting in today’s page of Talmud. Shauhut gold (זָהָב שָׁחוּט) which Rav Chisda noted to be so malleable that it could be “spun like a thread” (נִּטְוֶה כְּחוּט) was likely almost pure gold (i.e. 24 carat). Today, gold can be made into a thin sheet known as gold leaf that is an astonishing four to five millionths of an inch in thickness (0.1 to 0.125 millionths of a meter or micrometers, µm). And the “spinning into a thread” that Rav Chisda mentioned? Today it is possible to spin gold into a thread that is just one atom thick. One atom. Think about that.
Another kind of gold mentioned by Rav Chisda is Parvayim gold which was a red color that “resembled the blood of bulls” (שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים). This gold was likely an alloy with a high content of copper, (found towards the bottom right of the triangle above).
The Medicinal Qualities of Gold
The Jewish physician Abraham Portaleone was born in Mantua in 1541, and is best known for his work Shilte Hagibborim [Shields of the Mighty], in which he sought to identify the precise ingredients of the Temple incense mentioned in the famous talmudic passage called Pittum Haketoret (Grinding of the Spices). Portaleone was also very interested in pharmacology, and authored a Latin text De Auro Dialogi Tres (Three Dialogues on the Application of Gold in Medicine) about the possibilities of a medical use of gold “a topic halfway between alchemy and medical studies that still created heated scientific debate.” Here is the assessment of historian Alessandro Guetta in his 2014 work on the history of Italian Jewry:
Contemporary medical authorities were divided into two camps on this: those who denied gold’s powers and those convinced of them. Portaleone’s position lay midway between the two. In his view, the hypothesis that gold had powerful medicinal properties was true; nevertheless, it remained a mere hypothesis, since such properties do not reside within gold as we know it …but in its quintessence, a substance perfectly pure and balanced in composition. In truth, nobody had yet succeeded in extracting this essence…consequently, the long list of healings that ancient and modern doctors had attributed to attributed to the ingestion of “common gold” mixed with water or wine was the fruit of ignorance and charlatanism. As for gold’s capacity to cauterize wounds, it has this in common with many other metals with the same characteristics.
We are now some four centuries after Abraham Portaleone wrote his book about gold. And it is indeed now true that gold can be used as a medicine. Aurotherapy is used to treat some kinds of inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, and may have a role to play in the treatment of some cancers and as an agent to improve wound healing. So to add to the Talmudic categorization of gold based on its color and malleability, we can now thankfully add another: how useful it is in treating disease.
