Half Sheqel - Need Help With Date

Looks like 1985 to me.

If you want to have a go at converting Hebrew dates yourself, here's a step-by-step guide of what to do.

1. Work out which "word" or set of Hebrew letters is the date. Numbers when written with the Hebrew alphabet are distinguished by the use of a special symbol, the Gershayim, which resembles a " double qoute mark; it always appears in the second-last position (when read right-to-left in the Hebrew fashion). Can you see the "quote mark" on your coin? It's at about the 3 o'clock position, on the right hand side; the slash-mark in ½ is pointing almost directly at it.

2. Translate the letters into numbers. Each letter in the Hebrew alphabet is allocated a number. There's a conversion table in the front of the Krause catalogue, or check out the table on Wikipedia. In your example, the numbers are (from right to left) 5, 400, 300, 40, the Gershayim (which doesn't have a value itself, it's just there to tell you "hello, I'm a number") and finally 5 again.

3. Add up the numbers to generate the year. Now, you have to know that the first "5" actually means "5 thousands" - a bit ambiguous, but you simply have to remember this. Also be aware that prior to 1981 (AD), this initial "5" was omitted altogether. So, 5000+400+300+40+5 = 5745. This is the year in the Jewish calendar, which reckons Year 1 as the creation of the world, calculated by the genealogies going right back to Adam, as recorded in the Jewish scriptures.

4. Convert the Jewish date to an AD date. Jewish scholars reckon that the world was created in 3760 BC, so to convert Jewish dates to AD dates we simply subtract 3760. 5745-3760 = 1985.

It helps to remember that Israel's history has been brief, and this calendar hasn't been appearing on coins for very long. In fact, it's been the 58th century (Jewish calendar) since Israel was founded, and will continue to be so until the year 2040. So the first few letter-numbers of the date will (for the forseeable future) always be "5700".

There. Easy, wasn't it? Of course, it's even easier to simply look up the table of years, given under the "Israel" entry in the Krause catalogues.

And if you thought that was hard, calculating an AD date for an Ottoman Empire coin requires considerably more maths skills than that.

Very useful post, Thanks Sap!

Thanks SAP for that explaination, that is really helpful.

I knew there was a reason why I haven't got around to dating half my Israel coins. LOL.

The answer is the same as what you'd hear if you found a "coin" in English without a date - it's not a real coin.

I'd classify it as an evasion, made to look almost, but not quite, like a real coin, because it appears to be modelled on the 1 new agorah of the early 1980's. The side with the branch says "Israel" in Hebrew and Arabic, but the denomination on the reverse is wrong - it says "1 shalom". "Shalom" can mean peace, hello or goodbye, depending on the context; I'm not sure what the context could be for this piece.