Kleptomaniac

When God says, bring all the tithes into the storehouse, it should be understood that He is talking crops, herds and flocks. If the priests brought the whole tithe into the storehouse as God requested, there would have been enough food in his house. The food was for the Levites who were on temple duty. The key part of Malachi 3:10 is where it truly becomes interesting; according to the common spiritualized interpretation of Malachi, if you test God by paying 10 percent of your income, God will open up the windows of heaven and shower you with financial blessings. Malachi 3:10 says:

Like a meticulous surgeon, you must find out what God meant in Malachi through word study. But before going further, I want to first head off a pro-tithe argument at the biblical pass. While tithe-collecting churches argue that tithing in Israel was upon produce and animals; today’s believers must tithe from a paycheck because all human productivity owes its origins to the earth directly and indirectly because God owns the whole earth. On the surface that seems true, but when you connect money to the earth, the tithe in Hebrew remains eatable items (produce and livestock), which makes the argument for money tithing baseless because it ignores the original Hebrew definition of the word.

Let’s examine what Malachi meant when he referred to the storehouse. To deconstruct the cemented idea that the storehouse in Malachi is the modern church building, you have to define the word from its original language to understand the context and the events that took place. Since it is established that God instructed priests to bring all the tithes into the storehouse, there is no need to belabor the point. However, did you notice the word tithes is plural in Malachi? Based on the context from Malachi Chapters 1, 2, and 3, Numbers 18:9-32, Nehemiah 10:34-39; 12:44 47, and 2 Chronicles 31:15-19, tithes in Malachi refer to the items brought to the storehouses in the cities and towns where the priests and Levites lived. The storehouse in Jerusalem contained food tithes also, however, the priests and Levites brought those tithes to the main temple storehouse when it was their turn to perform their rotational duty. In Malachi, God instructed that the food in the storehouse be replaced every week as the priests and Levites rotated. The tithes in Malachi are not addressing the poor tithe every third year or the sixth year tithe or the tithe the Levites gave to the priests. Of course, the question becomes, did the Israelites themselves ever bring tithes to Jerusalem? Perhaps they did during all the three yearly festivals as stated earlier in this book, but I will admit that anyone writing about Israel’s tithing system, writes from a counter-intuitive perspective because many of us were not raised in a theocratic society and we may not know all the nuances regarding the Hebrew people’s cultural norms.

The storehouse imprint on the psyche of people as the church building with a steeple is the image many money-tithing believers cling to. The storehouse in the Bible does not refer to a church building. What is the storehouse in the Bible? The meaning depends on the context of Scripture. The Hebrew word for storehouse is “owstar” or “o-tsawr.” It means a depository, a treasure from Strong’s #214. It is also from Strong’s #686, which is “osar,” a root that implies to store up, to lay up in store. Storehouse has several meanings in the Hebrew language; the word appears 79 times in 70 verses in the KJV of the Bible. However, this book will not explore each verse, but that is something worth perusing in personal study. Based on the Hebrew language, the only meaning for storehouse referenced in Malachi refers to a place which stores food and drink rather than money. The storehouse in Jerusalem adjoined the temple and it is where the Jews and perhaps the Levites brought the tithe of corn, oil, barley, wine, cattle and flock if they lived close. When the temple was destroyed in AD 70, tithing effectively ended. The purpose of the storehouse was for the sustenance of the priests and the Levites not for the upkeep and funding of church ministries. The storehouses were not only in the Jerusalem temple, but the storehouses also resided in the Levitical cities and towns where the people lived.