Money and Greed

Reading these passages

Almost everyone who quotes 1 Timothy 6:10 gets it wrong, and almost everyone who corrects them gets it wrong too.

The popular version — money is the root of all evil — is not what the verse says, and the standard correction supplies the missing three words: the love of money. That correction is right and it is where most discussions stop. But the Greek has one more thing to say, and it changes the sentence again.

A root, not the root

The King James reads: For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

In the Greek, the word for root has no definite article. It is a root, one among others. And the phrase rendered all evil is pantōn tōn kakōn, which in this construction means all kinds of evil rather than every instance of evil. Put together, Paul's claim is that love of money is a root of all sorts of wickedness — a wide claim, but not the claim that it is the single origin of everything wrong with the world.

That matters in both directions. It stops the verse being used to blame one vice for the whole human problem, and it stops the correction being used to shrink the warning down to nothing. Paul is not saying money is uniquely dangerous. He is saying it will get you into more different kinds of trouble than most things will.

The word he uses for the love itself is philargyria, literally love of silver — and the metaphor he pairs it with is agricultural. A root is not the fruit. It is the part underground that you do not see, and the whole point of the image is that what shows above the surface will not look like money at all.

Which way the arrow points

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

This is usually quoted as a diagnostic — look at where your money goes and you will discover what you really care about. That reading is useful and it is the reverse of what the sentence says.

Jesus does not say your treasure reveals your heart. He says your treasure relocates it. The heart follows the money rather than disclosing it, and the tense is future: there will your heart be. It is a statement about cause, not evidence.

Which is why the two verses before it are commands about where to put things rather than questions about how you feel. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth — and then the reason, which is not that earthly treasure is wicked but that it does not survive: where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. The objection is to the storage, not the goods.

Mammon is not a thing

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Translators have generally left mammon untranslated, and that is a considered decision rather than laziness. The word is Aramaic, meaning wealth or property, and Jesus uses it here as the name of a master — the sentence is not about two possessions but about two employers, and the verb throughout is serve.

Notice also what the alternatives are. Not "serve one and ignore the other". Hate and love; hold to and despise. The sentence does not allow for a polite arrangement in which one is prioritised and the other kept on as a hobby. It insists the relationship is exclusive, and it says so as a statement of fact about how people work rather than as a rule imposed from outside. No man can, not "no man may".

Those who want to be

1 Timothy 6:9 is precise about who is being warned, and it is not the rich: But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.

The Greek is hoi boulomenoi ploutein — those intending, wanting, resolving to be rich. The subject is an appetite, not a bank balance, and a person can hold it at any income. Which makes the warning considerably harder to sidestep than the version that only applies to other people.

Proverbs makes the same distinction structurally. He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch. Not he that has riches. He that trusts in them — and the contrast offered is not poverty but a different kind of rootedness, which keeps the agricultural image running.

The question Jesus refused

Luke 12:15 is nearly always quoted without the exchange that produced it, and the exchange is the most interesting part.

Someone in the crowd interrupts with a request: Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. It is not an unreasonable thing to ask. Inheritance disputes were a matter for rabbinic arbitration, the man is appealing to a teacher he evidently respects, and for all the text tells us his complaint may have been entirely just.

Jesus will not take the case. Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? Then, to the whole crowd rather than to the man: Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

Notice what has happened. A man asks for a ruling on who is owed what, and gets a warning about wanting instead. Jesus does not say the brother is in the right, and does not say the man is. He declines the entire frame of the question, which is a considerably more uncomfortable response than either verdict would have been — and the parable he tells next, about a farmer with a very good harvest and no time left to enjoy it, ends on the line the whole passage has been building toward: So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

The verses that only describe

One passage on this page is not advice at all, and it is worth separating out because Proverbs is regularly misread as promising things it is merely reporting.

The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

There is no command in that sentence and no approval either. It is an observation about how power actually distributes, offered flatly. Proverbs does this often — it describes the world as it runs and leaves the reader to decide what to do about it. Read as endorsement it is monstrous. Read as it is written, it is a warning about what a debt actually costs, phrased in the language of ownership: the borrower does not merely owe, he serves.

Ecclesiastes supplies the mechanism underneath all of it: He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity. The trap is not that money fails to deliver. It is that it fails to deliver specifically to the person who loves it, because appetite and object are mismatched by nature. Increase cannot close a gap that increase opened.

And the counterweight, from a man writing to thank people for money he says he did not need: Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. Learned, not felt. It is presented as a competence acquired over time, which implies it can be, and implies it has to be.