Like it or not — and who among us actually likes it — come April 15, you will need to have filed your 2013 income tax return with the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps one way to feel better about the painful and often inconvenient process is to recognize that it has roots in the biblical concept of tithing. Tithing was something like the original flat tax, meant to redistribute wealth in a more equitable fashion, from each according to his means, to each according to his needs — or, as it says in Deuteronomy 16:17, “Everyone according to what he can give according to the blessing that God gives you.”
Tithing is first mentioned in Genesis 14:17-20, when Abraham, having returned triumphant from battle against a bunch of kings who had kidnapped his nephew Lot and taken him to Damascus, was given a “a tenth of everything” by the king of Salem in recompense. Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, picked up the tradition, dedicating a “full tenth” of what God had provided to him for “God’s house,” the precursor to the Temple.
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