Exodus 21:32, which Neville places in Leviticus, taken as the legal source of the thirty pieces of silver: if an ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner of the ox must pay the owner of the slave thirty pieces of silver, and then the ox must be stoned. The ox is the symbol of Christ, and Christ gores - the ox goad drives a man off his traditional concepts and on to a higher level of awareness, which is why the one who comes brings not peace but a sword. So the thirty pieces are not a bribe or a betrayal fee but a statutory price, the price of an unfree person, paid because the slave was gored. Neville turns the statute on his own platform: if what I say tonight offends you, then I have gored you, and you are entitled to make me sorry for my thirty pieces of silver, for scripture is all about me. He sets Joseph beside it as the prototype of Jesus, sold for twenty pieces, glossing twenty as disappointed expectancy against thirty as divine perfection, reducible to three and so to resurrection.