Matthew 26:15

‘And they weighed to him thirty pieces of silver. ’

The chief priests were so eager to get their victim that they seemingly paid the money out up front, and this to someone who had criticised the woman earlier for not thinking of the poor. (Ironically it would later actually be used for the poor - Matthew 27:7). Note the emphasis on the deliberate ‘weighing of the silver’. It was a deliberate payment of blood money, a price sarcastically described by Zechariah as ‘the goodly price that I was valued at by them’ (Zechariah 11:13). It was the price of a moderately valuable slave. (In LXX the verb used here regularly translates the Hebrew verb for ‘weighed out’. It means literally, ‘placed, stood’). Matthew appears to be suggesting that he was paid it there and then, although he does not actually say so. Certainly Judas received it early enough to be able to fling it back at the chief priests later (Matthew 27:3-5).