Riches

Riches, in Scripture, means material abundance — wealth, property, goods, and the power they confer — and, by extension, any fullness a person trusts in or is measured by. The Hebrew word rendered "wealth" in Deuteronomy 8:18 (ḥayil) also carries the sense of strength or might, which fits the verse's deliberate contrast with "my power and the might of my hand" in Deuteronomy 8:17; the Greek of the New Testament uses ploutos and related words for riches and the verb ploutein for becoming rich, as in 1 Timothy 6:9 and Revelation 3:18.

The text says both that wealth comes from God and that it is perilous. Deuteronomy 8:18 grounds the ability to gain wealth in Yahweh's gift and ties it to covenant, while Proverbs 10:22 attributes wealth to Yahweh's blessing "and he adds no trouble to it." Against this, Deuteronomy 8:17 warns against crediting one's own hand, and the New Testament warnings are sharp: 1 Timothy 6:9 describes those "determined to be rich" as falling into a snare, 1 Timothy 6:10 names the love of money "a root of all kinds of evil" while noting that money itself is not so named, and 1 Timothy 6:17 locates the danger in arrogance and in hope "set on the uncertainty of riches" rather than on God, who "richly provides us with everything to enjoy." 1 John 3:17 makes the practical test concrete: possessing "the world's goods" while closing one's heart to a brother in need empties any claim to God's love.

Scripture also uses riches figuratively for what is acquired from God. 1 Timothy 6:18 commends being "rich in good works" and ready to share; Revelation 3:18 sets the counsel to buy "gold refined by fire, that you may become rich" over against self-assessed prosperity. In Matthew 19:26 Jesus answers the disciples' astonishment at the difficulty of a rich person entering the kingdom by relocating the possibility from human means to God — "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible" — and Matthew 19:29 promises a hundredfold and eternal life to those who have left property and family for his name's sake.

Christian traditions weigh these texts differently. Historically, monastic and mendicant traditions have read the warnings as counsel toward voluntary poverty, while other traditions stress wealth as a gift entrusted for stewardship and generosity, and prosperity-oriented readings treat material blessing as a mark of divine favor; Catholic and Orthodox social teaching and Protestant ethics have each developed their own accounts of ownership and obligation. One way to read the whole witness is that Scripture consistently treats riches as good when received as gift and held loosely, and as spiritually dangerous when they become the ground of confidence — but which emphasis a given church makes normative is a confessional matter, not one the texts settle by themselves.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.