Kleptomaniac

The message coming from pulpits every time the church doors open is that the first tenth of your check belongs God, but when you examine the tithe verses in Leviticus and the entire Bible, God never says that. Since farmers and cattle herders tithed in Israel, make sure you understand that Yahweh meant what he said about the tenth animal. If a cattle herder had less than nine cattle in a birth cycle, whether sheep, bulls, or goats, they did not tithe because God wanted the tenth animal from the increase not the ninth. Herders tithed only the tenth animal whether its condition was good or bad. The Bible says God would accept the eleventh animal if the herder thought the tenth did not meet the standard. Despite the condition of the tenth animal, it became the tithe; it could not be exchanged for another animal because the tenth animal was holy unto the Lord. Israel paid a tithe on an increase and never on a decrease. For example, if you have nine sheep and during the birth cycle, those sheep would need to give birth to ten or more calves to tithe on the increase. If you had less than ten, you did not tithe. When you examine the Jewish Mishnah, which is a compilation of Jewish oral traditions called the Oral Law, the text reveals that whatsoever is kept watch over, cultivated, and grows from the soil; whatever is used for food (excluding unclean) is what is tithed. The tenth sheep, the tenth goat, the tenth bull was the tithe, not 10 percent. Remember if a herdsman had nine cattle, he didn’t tithe because the tenth animal that passed under the rod belonged to God as the tithe despite its condition.

No one can assume from silence in the Scripture that a man in Israel tithed a tenth of his income from making a living, harvesting clams. If he raised walnuts and sold some to the marketplace, the money was not titheable based on the empirical and historical definition of the word tithe as eatable items. Leviticus Chapter 27 focuses on vows. The chapter ends with a critical introduction to tithing meaning it was not the writer’s intention to lay out a full description of the tithe laws. A more comprehensive description of the tithe laws appears in Numbers and Deuteronomy. Today’s tithing doctrines come from twisted hermeneutics and exegesis. Many tithe teachers take Old Testament tithe verses and write a new giving prescription that commutes the agricultural, herd and flock tithe to money. They interpret tithe verses using eisegesis in which one reads into the text their personal meaning based on the circumstantial impact of a different economy without scriptural support to change eatable tithes to money. The food and crop tithe described in the Old Testament is not a prescription for money tithing in the New Testament.