apodekatoō

This is the everyday direction of the word, the one on the lips of the person doing the giving. It describes handing over a tenth of what you have grown or earned, offered to God as an obligation rather than a free gift. In the Gospels it is what a careful, observant Jew does with the crops from his fields, right down to the small herbs in his garden.

When Jesus faults the religious leaders for tithing mint, dill, and cumin while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness, the charge is not that they tithe but that they have lost all sense of proportion. He tells them the small duties should be done without leaving the weighty ones undone. In the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector the same word carries a boast: the Pharisee gives a tenth of everything he acquires, going beyond what the law strictly required.

In every one of these places the word points the same way. The person named is the one paying, and the tenth flows outward from his own hand.

The same verb can run in the opposite direction, describing not the giver but the collector: the one who takes a tenth from someone else. This is its sense in the single New Testament place it carries it, where the priests descended from Levi are said to have a command to collect a tithe from the people.

This taking sense reaches back into the older world of taxes and tribute, where a tenth was a levy that a ruler or a temple exacted. Here the person named after the word is not the thing being tithed but the people being taxed. Using one word for both directions lets the writer of Hebrews build his argument plainly: the one who receives a tithe stands higher than the one who pays it, and so Melchizedek, who took a tenth from Abraham, outranks the priests who descend from him.