Cor

The cor is one of the largest dry and liquid measures in the Hebrew system. Ezekiel's reform vision fixes its size against the smaller units of the household: a bath is a tenth of a cor, an ephah is a tenth of a cor, and the cor itself stands equal to a homer. The unit appears almost entirely in royal contexts — palace provisions, foreign tribute, and temple supply — where bulk grain and oil were measured by the wagonload rather than by the basket.

Defining the Cor

The clearest definition comes from Ezekiel's allotment of oil for the prince: "the set portion of oil, of the bath of oil, the tenth part of a bath out of the cor, [which is] ten baths, even a homer (for ten baths are a homer)" (Eze 45:14). The cor is therefore identical with the homer in volume; it is also identical with ten baths or ten ephahs. The same passage standardizes the dry and liquid units against this benchmark: "The ephah and the bath will be of one measure, that the bath may contain the tenth part of a homer, and the ephah the tenth part of a homer: its measure will be after the homer" (Eze 45:11).

Smaller Units in the Same System

The cor is meaningful only as the head of a graded scale, and the lower rungs of that scale appear throughout the Law and the early narratives. The omer sits at the bottom: "Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah" (Ex 16:36). The ephah names a household quantity of grain — the meal Hannah brought to Shiloh with her son (1Sa 1:24), the meal Gideon kneaded for the angel under the oak (Jg 6:19), and the barley Ruth beat out at the end of a day's gleaning (Ru 2:17). The Holiness Code anchors the whole system in covenant ethics: "Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, you⁺ will have: I am Yahweh your⁺ God, who brought you⁺ out of the land of Egypt" (Le 19:36).

The bath is the matching liquid unit. Solomon's bronze sea "held two thousand baths" (1Ki 7:26). Isaiah's oracle of agricultural collapse uses both ends of the scale at once: "For ten acres of vineyard will yield one bath, and a homer of seed will yield [but] an ephah" (Is 5:10) — a tenth of expected wine, a tenth of expected grain.

The Homer

Because the cor and the homer are the same volume, every homer reference doubles as a witness to the cor. The homer measures field-sowing rates in the redemption laws: "the sowing of a homer of barley [will be valued] at fifty shekels of silver" (Le 27:16). It measures the staggering quantity of quails in the wilderness: "he who gathered least gathered ten homers" (Nu 11:32). And as already noted, it is the unit Ezekiel uses to fix all the others (Eze 45:11).

Royal Provision and Tribute

Cors appear in the Bible primarily where kings move grain and oil at scale. Solomon's daily palace ration is reckoned in them: "Solomon's provision for one day was thirty cors of fine flour, and threescore cors of meal" (1Ki 4:22). His standing arrangement with Hiram of Tyre uses the same unit: "Solomon gave Hiram twenty cors of wheat for food to his household, and twenty cors of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year" (1Ki 5:11). The corresponding wage for the Tyrian timber crews is stated in cors and baths together: "twenty thousand cors of beaten wheat, and twenty thousand cors of barley, and twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty thousand baths of oil" (2Ch 2:10).

The same unit measures tribute paid to later Judean kings. After Jotham defeated the Ammonites, "the sons of Ammon gave him the same year a hundred talents of silver, and ten thousand cors of wheat, and ten thousand of barley" (2Ch 27:5). Artaxerxes' decree to the temple treasurers in Trans-Euphrates is framed in cors as well: "to a hundred talents of silver, and to a hundred cors of wheat, and to a hundred baths of wine, and to a hundred baths of oil, and salt without prescribing how much" (Ezr 7:22).

In the Parables

The unit reappears in the New Testament once, in the parable of the unrighteous steward, where the second debtor owes "a hundred measures of wheat" and is told to write eighty (Lu 16:7). The Greek term behind "measures" here corresponds to the cor of the older economy — the same large dry-grain unit that paid Solomon's hewers and Artaxerxes' temple commission, now reused to size a debt large enough to ruin a household and large enough to make the steward's discount a striking gesture.