An Ancient Practice, and Why It's Still Relevant Today
What Tithing Actually Means 📖
At its simplest, tithing means giving a tenth of what you earn, grow, or receive: a portion set aside before the rest gets spent, saved, or invested. The word comes from an old term for “tenth,” and the practice shows up early in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), well before it became law.
The first tithe on record happens after a battle. Abraham has just rescued his nephew Lot, and on the way back he meets a man named Melchizedek, the king of Salem (an early name for Jerusalem) and, unusually for the time, also a priest of God Most High. Abraham doesn’t answer to him or owe him anything, but he gives Melchizedek a tenth of everything he’d recovered anyway. It’s a voluntary act of honour toward someone he saw as representing God, centuries before any law required it.
Jacob has his own version of the same moment. Running from his brother and alone at a place called Bethel, he makes a promise: if God protects him on the road and brings him home safely, he’ll give back a tenth of everything he receives.
Centuries later, under the Law of Moses, the tenth became formal. Israelites returned a tithe of their harvest and livestock to the Levites, the tribe set apart to serve at the temple and without land of their own to farm.
Why Ten Percent 🔢
Why ten percent today? Mostly because it’s a clear, useful benchmark, so you’re not left guessing what “enough” looks like. We don’t live under that law today. But we can still learn from it: giving to a charity, a church, or a cause you care about. And ten percent turns out to be just the start.
Even under Mosaic law, real generosity went far past ten percent. There were really four layers to it. First came first fruits: the first and best part of the harvest, given to the priest before anything else was even counted. Then came the first tithe: the classic 10%, which supported the Levites and the priesthood, similar to funding a church and its staff today. On top of that was a second tithe, also called the festival tithe: another 10%, brought to Jerusalem and eaten there by the family in celebration (Deuteronomy 14:22–27). Every third year, that second tithe changed purpose. Instead of a trip to Jerusalem, it was stored locally for the Levites, foreigners, orphans, and widows (Deuteronomy 14:28–29).
There was one more layer on top of all this: gleaning. Landowners had to leave the edges of their fields unharvested, and couldn’t go back for anything they dropped, so poorer people could gather food for themselves (Leviticus 19:9-10, 23:22). No percentage was attached to it, it was simply built-in margin.
Add it all up, tithes, gleaning and giving under this system could pass 12% in a normal year, and pass 22% every third year.
Put it together, and this was never just a ‘tithe’. It was a full system: one part for worship, one part for the family’s own future, one part for people in need. We still use a version of that system today, we just call it something else. Taxes pay for shared services, savings pay for your own future, and giving pays for causes you care about. Tithing folded all three into one habit, which is exactly why the idea still matters today, no matter what you believe.
Three Things Tithing Trains In You 🌱
Honour 🙏 comes first. Nothing you have is fully self-made. The skills you’re paid for are a gift. The way your mind works, the very capacity to think in a way that lets you create value or solve problems, is a gift you didn’t manufacture yourself. Even the job itself, the door that opened, the person who hired you, the moment that lined up right, is a gift, not something you engineered alone. Tithing is a repeated way of admitting that: not a tax on income, but an act of honouring whoever or whatever you believe the source to be. You don’t need any particular faith to feel the weight of that; anyone who’s paid honest attention to their own life can see how much of it they didn’t build by themselves. For someone operating from a Christian faith, that same acknowledgment carries a specific meaning: it puts you in a right posture with God, thankful for the ability to work, earn, and create in the first place.
Budgeting 💰 comes second, and it’s the part people tend to skip past. To tithe, you have to budget. You have to know what’s coming in and decide what goes out before it quietly disappears into everything else. To give ten percent, you have to set it aside, plan for it, anticipate it, expect it. We’re no longer farmers, but the concept still holds: you can’t eat your entire harvest and still have seed left for next season. Tithing turns your salary into a seed rather than a meal, which is exactly the same discipline you’re encouraged to apply to saving and investing. If you can build the habit of tithing, you can build the habit of saving and investing, because both rest on the same underlying skill: putting money down and not expecting an immediate harvest for it. That takes patience. It means putting yourself in a position where you have to give before you feel ready to. That is where the discipline becomes real.
Generosity ❤️ comes third, and it’s the one that keeps the other two from turning hollow. What you sow, you reap, not as a formula for getting rich, but as a description of how gratitude compounds. We don’t give in order to get something back; we give because we’re already grateful, before the giving even starts. Grateful for the people who invested time in our lives long before we had anything to offer in return: a parent who covered things we never thanked them for, a mentor who explained something twice, someone who took a chance on us for no clear reason. There’s a line from Paul, one of early Christianity’s most influential writers, that puts the posture plainly: give what you’ve already decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under pressure, because it’s the cheerful giver who’s noticed, not the reluctant one. You don’t need the theology to feel the truth of it; anyone who’s ever given something out of guilt knows it feels completely different from giving something you actually wanted to give. Honour tells you why you give. Budgeting tells you how. Generosity is what makes you want to.
The Real Question ❓
So before you land on a percentage, or decide whether any of this feels relevant to your payslip, sit with the more honest question underneath it. Are you giving generously? Not measured against what everyone else is doing, but measured against how much you’ve actually been given. And are you able to give without expecting anything back? That’s what separates giving from investing: an investor puts money in expecting it back with interest, a giver doesn’t get that guarantee at all. Learning to be at peace with that, whether or not you ever tithe a single pound, is arguably the whole point.
