And when he began to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents.
The parable begins with a concrete example. The king begins to settle accounts with his servants, and they bring to him a servant who has an enormous debt—ten thousand talents. A talent in the Ancient East was a large sum of money; one talent corresponded to several dozen kilograms of silver or gold. Thus, ten thousand talents is an extremely great debt, an amount almost impossible to repay. Jesus uses this number to emphasize how great a person’s debt of sin is before God. This also symbolizes the condition of the human creature: without God’s forgiveness, it is impossible to be cleansed of the debt by one’s own strength.