"Dishonest scales are an abomination to the LORD, But a just weight is His delight." (Prov. 11:1)
A crooked merchant can use dishonest scales as a way to steal from the customer. If the sign
says that a pound of Cajun pastrami sells for $9.99 per pound, you expect to get 16 avoirdupois ounces for ten bucks. But what if the merchant is clever and rigs the scale to read a full pound at only 15.5 ounces? That's not a lot to shave off, but like the urban legend of the computer programmer that rolls additional fractions of cents into his own bank account, when multiplied over thousands of transactions, that's a lot of money stolen. And what's to stop the merchant from lulling people into slowly changing the scales a little at a time, year after year, so that, say in 50 years, your "pound" of meat is really only 8 ounces? If it's done slowly enough, you won't even notice.
It seems that such schemes were around in the days of King Solomon, as Proverbs 11:1 demonstrates. In fact, there are at least two other mentions of "dishonest scales" in the Book of Proverbs. READ THE REST
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