to tithe: to hand over a tenth of a harvest or herd as a due, or to claim that tenth from someone else.
This verb is built on the number ten, and it is the action behind the noun for a tithe (מַעֲשֵׂר). It is rare, appearing only nine times in seven verses, and every one of those verses sits inside a setting of law, vow, or royal power. The tenth it names is never a round number someone thought up on the spot: it is a share that one party owes and another has a right to.
The one thing an English reader has to watch is which end of the transaction the word describes, because the same verb serves both parties:
- the farmer who sets aside a tenth of everything his field produces (Deuteronomy 14:22)
- the Levites who go out and gather that tenth in the country towns (Nehemiah 10:37)
- the king who takes a tenth of a household's fields and flocks for his own officials (1 Samuel 8:15)
Nothing in the word itself settles which side is meant. Only the sentence around it does, which is why English versions have to keep changing their wording.
That double duty is part of what makes Samuel's warning about a king so sharp. The word for what Israel owes God is the word he uses for what a king will take from the people, and the first hearers would have caught the overlap: the tenth that marked the land as God's was about to be claimed by a man in a palace.
The earliest use is a promise rather than a law. Jacob, sleeping at Bethel with nothing, vows to give back a tenth of whatever he is given. By the time of the law codes the tenth is fixed, and its destination keeps moving: eaten by the worshiper's own household at the sanctuary, stored in the towns every third year for the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow, handed over to the Levites who own no land. The verb stays the same through all of it, which is one reason readers still argue over how many separate tenths the law actually required.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the king's tenth in 1 Samuel 8:15, 17 belongs to the same institution as the cultic tithe, and so whether the verb has one institutional referent or two.
- majorityThe royal tenth is the historical kernel of the institution: a crown land tax, matching the Ugaritic royal mʿšr granted to officials as a prebend, which was only later assimilated to the priestly-cultic system, so Samuel's usage is the same institution at an earlier stage.; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972), 210-224; Henri Cazelles, "La dîme israélite et les textes de Ras Shamra," Vetus Testamentum 1 (1951): 131-134
- minorityA strict royal-tax-first derivation is unwarranted: Leviticus 27 preserves archaic cultic features (the animal tithe selected by passing under the rod) that cannot descend from a royal cash levy, and Mesopotamian temple tithes for cultic service are not a late invention, so the royal tenth of 1 Samuel 8 is a parallel secular exaction rather than the parent of the cultic due.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Yale Bible 3B (2001), excursus on 27:30-33
- minorityRoyal and cultic tenths coexisted at multiple sanctuaries until centralization fused them into a single Jerusalem temple revenue stream, so both uses of the verb reflect real institutions and neither is derived from the other.; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (1989); Marty E. Stevens, Temples, Tithes, and Taxes (Hendrickson, 2006)