THE PURCHASE OF THE POTTER’S FIELD

MATTHEW 27:6–10

After Judas threw the thirty silver coins into the Temple, his life came to a tragic conclusion when he ended it himself. The one unresolved matter that lingered in connection with him was those coins—the money used to purchase the betrayal of Jesus. As we will see, those coins could not be used for improvements in the Temple or Temple service. Consequently, the chief priests used the money to purchase the potter’s field.17

Typically the money placed in the Temple treasury was put to work in a variety of ways,18 but there was a problem with the coins Judas had thrown into the Temple courts. Jewish tradition stated that any money that had been associated with a crime or was at all clouded with suspicion should be removed from the Temple treasury and put to work in some public project to benefit society, such as the development of a water system.19 That is what happened with the thirty silver coins. “The chief priests picked up the coins and said, ‘It is against the law to put this into the treasury, since it is blood money’” (Matt. 27:6). Instead they purchased the potter’s field located outside the city walls.20 This plot of ground was then set aside for the burial of foreigners who died in Jerusalem (Matt. 27:7).

Painting from the Monastery of Onesiphorus, depicting the hanging of Judas.

Aerial view looking southwest toward the Monastery of Onesiphorus, which commemorates the potter’s field, also known as the “Field of Blood.”

First-century tombs in the area of the potter’s field.

As early as the fourth century, Christians pointed to a field at the southeastern end of the Hinnom Valley above the confluence with the Kidron Valley as the location of this potter’s field. The location may well be associated with an earlier record that is supported, at least in part, by a passage in Jeremiah that speaks of the shedding of innocent blood (Jer. 19:1–4). The Lord directed Jeremiah to purchase a clay jar from a potter. To do so, the prophet exited through the Potsherd Gate and entered the Ben Hinnom Valley.21 Perhaps this association with Jeremiah explains the reason for the name “potter’s field.”

When the chief priests took the thirty pieces of silver that Judas returned and purchased the potter’s field, a link connected them to certain corrupt Temple leaders of an earlier time as mentioned by the prophet Zechariah. In Zechariah 11:12–13, the prophet mentions thirty pieces of silver that were thrown to the potter in the Temple in order to identify the religious leaders who had rejected the God of Israel. “I am going to raise up a shepherd over the land who will not care for the lost, or seek the young, or heal the injured” (Zech. 11:16). This is an apt description of those who purchased the potter’s field.

So it was literally within days of Judas’s death and the purchase of this land that people stopped calling it the “potter’s field” and began calling it Akeldama, which is Aramaic for “Field of Blood” (Acts 1:19). This name is a reminder of the true price of this field.

Cliff overlooking the Hinnom Valley (with the potter’s field in the background)—the possible site where Judas hung himself.