Tithing: Enjoying one’s firstfruits with God.

TITHE taɪð noun One-tenth.

2. verb. Set aside a tenth of something, either as savings or as a charitable donation.

3. verb. Give [either a tenth, or any variable amount] to our church.

Most Christians define tithe as a donation to one’s church. But what we donate is pretty variable. Might be $20 a week, or $100 a month, or two hours of volunteer work (i.e. cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming the carpets, sterilizing the toys in the nursery… you do sterilize the toys regularly, right? Babies put ’em in their mouths). It’s whatever we regularly donate, although some of us aren’t all that regular about it.

But for small churches, what we collectively donate isn’t always enough to cover our church’s expenses. Nor does it allow us to give pastors a stipend, or do much charity work… or pay the utilities or rent. Which is why Christian preachers so often feel they should remind us the word “tithe” comes from the Saxon teóða, “tenth”: It means a tenth of something. And that something would be your income. Whatever your job pays you, your tithe should equal a tenth of it—and that’s what you oughta be contributing to your church.

And you need to bring your whole tithe to church. ’Cause it says so in the bible.

Malachi 3.8-12 KWL

8 “Does any human cheat God like all of you cheat me? You say, ‘How do we cheat you?’

In tithes. In offerings. 9 You’ve cursed yourselves. The whole nation is cheating me.

10 Bring your whole tithe to my treasury: There’s unclean food in my house!

Please test me in this,” says the LORD of War. “See if I don’t open heaven’s floodgates and pour down blessing till you overflow.

11 I rebuke the blight for you: It won’t ruin your crops. It won’t kill the vines in your field,” says the LORD of War.

12 “Every nation will call you happy, and consider you a land of delight,” says the LORD of War.

Most preachers only quote verses 8-10, and don’t bother with verses 11-12. They should. These verses reveal the context of what the LORD actually means by מַעֲשֵׂר/mahašer, “tithe.” He’s not talking about Christians who are stingy with donations: He’s talking about Hebrews who didn’t contribute their crops to their community food closets. Old Testament tithing was about food.

I know; you might never have heard this idea before. You’d be surprised how many Christian pastors are totally clueless about this fact. I grew up Christian, and hadn’t heard any of this stuff till my thirties. But it’s all in your bible, hiding in plain sight.

The bible’s not a biology textbook!

Leviticus 11.13-19 • Deuteronomy 14.11-18 • Jonah 1.17 • Matthew 12.40

During a talk with a fellow Christian, we went off on a bit of a tangent.

ME. “…Like when Jonah got swallowed by the whale…”

HE. “Sea creature.”

ME. “Whale. How’re you getting ‘sea creature’ from kítus?”

HE. “From what?”

HE. “Kítus. The Greek word for ‘whale.’ The word Jesus used when he talked about Jonah being in the whale’s belly three days and nights. Mt 12.40 It’s the word we get our adjective ‘cetacean’ from, which refers to whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other marine mammals.”

HE. [confused; betcha he didn’t expect me to know what I was talking about] “But Jonah said he was swallowed by a great fish.” Jh 1.17

ME. “Sure.”

HE. “Well a whale’s not a fish.”

ME. “Not anymore. It was a fish in Jesus’s day.”

HE. “Whales used to be fish…?”

HE. “Yep. No, they didn’t once have gills then evolve lungs. They used to be fish because the ancients classified them as fish: If it lives in the sea it’s a fish. Then somebody realized some of these fishes have lungs, and decided if you have lungs you’re not a fish, and humanity redefined ‘fish.’ Well, the bible’s still using the old definition. So whales, in the bible, are still big fish.”

HE. [still confused] “But whales aren’t fish.”

ME. “Aren’t fish now. Were fish back in Jesus and Jonah’s day.”

HE. “So are you saying the bible’s wrong, or we are?”

ME. “Neither. The bible doesn’t define fish; it explains God. We define fish. You remember Adam got to name the animals. Ge 2.19-20 We get to decide what’s called a fish and what’s not. And if we update the words, we gotta update our bible translations. Problem is, sometimes we update ’em wrong and make the bible look inconsistent. It’s not. It’s just a quirk of language.”

Turns out his confusion came from the fact his updated bible translation changed the wrong word. It took Jesus’s kítos—which still means “whale” in modern Greek!—and rendered it thisaway:

Matthew 12.40 NIV

“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

Which isn’t an entirely illegitimate translation. To Jesus’s mind (at the time) a whale was a huge fish. But if we wanna be precise, he said kítus/“whale.” Whenever there appears to be a bible difficulty, the NIV is notorious for changing the text till it’s not so difficult anymore.

Problem is, people aren’t always gonna read an NIV bible. Plenty of people still read the KJV. All those Gideon bibles in the hotel rooms still read “whale’s belly,” and people are still gonna read ’em. And maybe wonder why Jesus thought a marine mammal was a fish. If you don’t know your history, you won’t know why it was totally okay for Jesus to think that.