A cubit is approximately 18 inches of modern measure..................
“A cubit is approximately 18 inches of modern measure..................”
Right. “What’s a cubit?” is from an old Bill Cosby routine. Nobody who’s heard it ever forgets it.
An Assyrian cubit or a Babylonian cubit?
This is the cubit that Israel apparently left Egypt with, but it is a measurement both shorter than the Egyptian cubit and the cubit that was used for the Tabernacle etc.
It should not be hard to understand why: in ancient Egypt the amount of produce from you land you owed ... and the labor ... was related to how much land you occupied. Now, if you want to put someone to hard labor what you could do is reduce the size of their linear measurement BUT keep their measurements for volume and weight the same.
Voila! Everyone in that group has, on papyrus, more land and owes more labor and produce to the king.
FDR did something spiritually similar when he lawlessly siezed gold for greenbacks and then devalued the greenbacks soon thereafter.