“Well, bring your Bible, Edith, and give Marty mine, and I will show you some of the passages about giving. The first mention in the Bible of giving tithes to the Lord is when Jacob was at Bethel.”
“Wasn't that when he slept on a stone pillow, and had the beautiful dream of angels going up and down a ladder that reached to heaven?” Edith asked.
“Yes; and you remember the Lord appeared to him in the dream, and promised to be with him wherever he went. And Jacob made a vow to the Lord, in which he said, 'And of all that thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee.' You will find it all in the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis.”
“Yes,” said Marty, after turning the leaves a few minutes. “Here it is: I never noticed it before.”
“Then,” Mrs. Howell went on, “you know when God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt into the promised land, he gave them a great many laws, for they were just like children, and had to be told exactly what to do on every occasion. Among other things he told them how to give. Edith, find the eighteenth chapter of Numbers and the twenty-first verse.”
Edith found the place and read, “And behold, I have given the children of Levi all the tenth in Israel for an inheritance, for the service which they serve, even the service of the tabernacle of the congregation.”
“Why should the children of Levi have it?” asked Marty.
“Because the tribe of Levi was set apart for the service of God in the tabernacle, and afterward the temple, and had no 'inheritance' of land to till and pasture flocks upon like the other tribes; so the rest of the nation was instructed to provide for them. So you see these tithes were for what we should call the support of the gospel; and Levi was the ministering tribe.”
Then Mrs. Howell showed the children passages in Second Chronicles and Nehemiah where bringing tithes is spoken of, and in Malachi where the people are rebuked for not bringing them. Then she bade them turn to places in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke where our Saviour commends the giving of tithes, though he says that there are “weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”
“But tithes were not all the Israelites gave,” Mrs. Howell resumed, after the little girls had read the verses. “They gave in many other ways. Let me take that Bible a moment, Marty. Here in Deuteronomy, twelfth chapter and sixth verse, you see that many things are mentioned besides tithes—vows and free-will-offerings and the firstlings of the herds and of the flocks. Then at their feast times, three times in the year, they were told, in the sixteenth chapter of the same book, the sixteenth and seventeenth verses, that every man was to give as he was able.”