Generosity and Giving

Reading these passages

The strangest sentence about giving in the Bible reverses who is receiving: He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.

Read the grammar rather than the sentiment. The poor person is not the recipient in that clause. The transaction has been reassigned — what looks like charity moving downward is described as credit extended upward, with God named as the debtor and repayment promised.

Whatever else that does, it removes the possibility of condescension. You cannot look down on someone you are not actually giving to, and the posture of the benefactor becomes unavailable when the beneficiary has been redefined.

The manner, not the amount

Paul is unusual among writers on this subject in caring more about how than how much: Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.

The word behind cheerful is hilaros, from which English gets hilarious. It is stronger than the translation lets on — not merely willing, but glad.

The two things ruled out are worth naming precisely, because they are the two commonest ways people actually give. Grudgingly is giving while resenting it. Of necessity is giving under pressure, whether social or ecclesiastical. Paul treats both as a different act rather than a lesser version of the same one.

And the mechanism is in the clause before: according as he purposeth in his heart. The decision is made in advance and in private, which is exactly what makes the pressure of the moment irrelevant. A sum settled beforehand cannot be extracted by an appeal.

Two words for the same eye

Proverbs has an idiom that English keeps but does not explain: He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed; for he giveth of his bread to the poor.

The Hebrew for a generous person is literally a person with a good eye — tov ayin. Its opposite, the evil eye, appears elsewhere in Proverbs to describe the stingy, and it has nothing to do with curses. It describes a way of looking at what is in front of you.

That is a different account of generosity from the one usually offered. It is not a behaviour bolted onto a person who would otherwise keep things. It is a description of perception — what someone sees when they look at a need, and whether the seeing arrives before the calculation.

The proverb beside it makes the same point by consequence rather than metaphor: He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse. Hiding the eyes. The failure described is again visual, and it is active — not failing to notice, but declining to.

A problem with no completion date

Deuteronomy is unsentimental about the scale of what it is asking: For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.

Notice the logic of therefore. The permanence of the problem is given as the reason for the command, not as an argument against bothering. That is the opposite of how the observation is usually deployed. If the poor will always be there, the instruction cannot be a project with a finish line; it has to be a standing obligation, and Deuteronomy says so in the same breath that concedes the futility.

The phrasing is physical too. Open thine hand wide — the Hebrew is emphatic, an intensified form. A hand can be open a little.

The question John asks

The sharpest thing on this page is not a command. It is a question, and it is left unanswered: But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

The King James bowels is not squeamishness or archaism for its own sake. The Greek is splanchna, the inward parts, and the ancient world located strong feeling in the abdomen the way we locate it in the heart. The image is of something physically closing.

What makes the sentence hard is the three conditions John stacks before he asks anything. You have the means. You see the need. You close anyway. He is not describing someone who cannot help, or has not noticed, or is weighing competing claims. He is describing the case where all the excuses have already been removed, and the question he puts to that person is not comfortable.

James is doing the same work with a definition: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. Widows and orphans were the two groups in that society with no legal standing and no male protector — which is to say, the people from whom nothing could be recovered.

The measure, and who it belongs to

Luke 6:38 is quoted as a promise of return, and it is one, but the image underneath is commercial and worth seeing properly: Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom.

That is a grain merchant filling a container past honesty. Pressed down to settle it, shaken to remove the air, then heaped until it spills. It is the exact opposite of the false measures Proverbs condemns, and the picture would have been immediate to anyone who bought food by volume.

Then the clause that gets left off: For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. The promise and the warning are one sentence. Whatever scoop you have been using is the scoop that comes back.

And the line Paul attributes to Jesus, which appears nowhere in the gospels: It is more blessed to give than to receive. Paul introduces it as something the Lord said, and it is the only such saying preserved outside the four accounts. Whatever its provenance, the early church evidently knew it well enough that Paul could quote it without explanation.