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One of my favorite sta­tis­tics that I often tell peo­ple relates to the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion liv­ing in the United States.It illus­trates that this nation of peo­ple clearly have some type of secret under­stand­ing that is result­ing in a sta­tis­tic as follows.

 

“The Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion accounts for 4% of the pop­u­la­tion of the USA yet con­trols 40% of the wealth of the United States.”

 

Now that my friends is a mind bog­gling sta­tis­tic if you think about it!

 

What are these peo­ple doing to get such results? The answer can actu­ally be found in the Bible (a great book if you have never read it!) There are cer­tain laws and prin­ci­ples that the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion have grown up with that is 2nd nature to them but unfor­tu­nately not to us Westerners.

 

This prin­ci­ple is called the Tithe

 

Chris­tians under­stand this term to be the giv­ing of 1/10th of their income to the Church to sup­port the min­istry etc. How­ever even ded­i­cated Chris­tians are often unaware of the fur­ther aspects of the tithe that all Jew­ish peo­ple would have known from childhood. 

 

Our mod­ern Bible which trans­lated the Old Tes­ta­ment from the orig­i­nal Hebrew into our Eng­lish only gives the one term for what we call the tithe. How­ever the orig­i­nal Hebrews had three dif­fer­ent tithes, plus ad-hoc offer­ings and some­thing called the first fruits. It was these finan­cial stew­ard­ship prin­ci­ples that in my opin­ion accounts for why the Jews con­trol 40% of the wealth of the USA and many other coun­tries I’m sure.

 

Let’s have a look at these Stew­ard­ship Principles: 

 

First fruits: In the orig­i­nal Hebrew you will see this referred to as the Teruma or in our Eng­lish trans­la­tion a Heave Offer­ing. Now remem­ber we are deal­ing with an agri­cul­tural farm­ing com­mu­nity so the first fruits were the cream of the crop that came first before the rest of the Har­vest. This first fruit amounted to a total roughly 1/40th of the entire har­vest which the Jews offered to the priest as a heave offer­ing. The priest then prayed over the first fruits and prayed a bless­ing over the rest of the har­vest. It was very sym­bolic and it was actu­ally believed that if the first fruit was eaten by the sower it would actu­ally curse the rest of the offer­ing. It was a mat­ter of respect and giv­ing hon­our where hon­our was due. 

 

Now let us look at the three tithes

 

Tithe 1: This is the tithe that most Chris­tians are aware of, which was the 1/10th that was paid to the Levites (priests) which they used to sup­port them­selves. Levites were not allowed to own prop­erty in Jew­ish cul­ture and they were there­fore com­pletely depen­dant on the peo­ple for their livelihood. 

 

Tithe 2: Is a very large rea­son for the wealth of the Jews. The Jews paid a 2nd tithe, which was again 1/10th of the income that was left (from the har­vest), which was paid as an invest­ment to them­selves. (This was used for travel, loss of wages etc.) This tithe was used for the pur­poses of stor­ing up wealth for their future years and to even­tu­ally give as an inher­i­tance to their children’s chil­dren. This was an absolute essen­tial aspect of their cul­ture and was an issue of pride for the father of the house.

 

Tithe 3: Exactly the same as the 2nd tithe except that it was given to the poor. The exact sys­tem that was fol­lowed looked as follows:

 

• Years 1 & 2 & Years 4–6: The 2nd Tithe paid to them­selves as an investment
• Year 3 and 7: The 2nd tithe was actu­ally paid to the poor.  

 

One last point: Over and above this was sim­ply offer­ings that were col­lected purely on a basis of freewill and were used for spe­cial occa­sions like the build­ing of a new tem­ple etc. 

 

And there my friends is the ear­li­est rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their sys­tem of wealth stewardship.

 

Now it is very unlikely that the Jew­ish com­mu­nity fol­lows this sys­tem to the absolute let­ter of what it used to be with the ancient law. How­ever the prin­ci­ples of giv­ing to God, them­selves and the poor are still in my opin­ion some­thing you will find them prac­tic­ing today. The num­bers may dif­fer but the prin­ci­ples remain.

 

What I would also like to say is that this prin­ci­ple of pay­ing your­self is noth­ing new as we have all heard it before, but it is the dis­ci­pline of just doing it that we often fall prey to. Let us all com­mit to a pro­gram of giv­ing to God, to our­selves and our children’s chil­dren and to the poor and let us see the results we get. The past his­tory of this sys­tem seems to sug­gest an excel­lent return on invest­ment.

 

How­ever more impor­tantly is the sense of con­tri­bu­tion and ful­fill­ment you get as you apply a sys­tem like this that pro­vides for some­one more than just numero uno.

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