The great martyr Rabbi Akiva, who lived roughly from 50 to 135 CE and was flayed alive by the Romans for teaching Torah in public, was once asked a dangerous question.
"How great is the value of the Torah?"
His answer was a single sentence, and he backed it with a verse. "Each word," he said, "is worth thousands of pieces of gold and silver."
The verse he cited was (Psalm 119:72): "The Torah of Your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver." The psalmist had written it about himself; Akiva applied it to every syllable.
This was not rhetoric from a rabbi who had never been tested. Akiva had watched Rome burn Jerusalem once; he would soon watch it burn the Bar Kokhba revolt. He had memorized the weight of a gold coin in bribery, in ransom, in the daily economics of an occupied province. And he had weighed a single word of Torah against all of it, and chosen Torah.
The valuation the sages preserved here, in Gaster's exemplum No. 90, is not an exaggeration. It is a receipt. Rabbi Akiva was eventually paid in his own life for every letter he had taught; he knew exactly what one word cost.