A slave often ran away; if caught, the captor was bound to restore him to his master, and the Code fixes a reward of two shekels which the owner must pay the captor.
It should be borne in mind that in early times the larger values, such as minae, would be transmitted by commerce, while after the introduction of coinage the lesser values of shekels and drachmae would be the units; and this needs notice, because usually a borrowed unit was multiplied or divided according to the ideas of the borrowers, and strange modifications thus arose.
The Ptolemaic copper coinage is on two bases -- the uten, binarily divided, and the Ptolemaic five shekels (1050), also binarily divided.
Probably the 129 and 224 systems coexisted in the country; but on the whole it seems more likely that 129 or rather 258 grains was the Hebrew shekel before the Ptolemaic times -- especially as the 100 shekels to the mina is paralleled by the following Persian system (Hultsch) --
A variation on the main system was made by forming a mina of 50 shekels.