ABSTRACT
The Bible is practically the sole Hebrew literary survivor of what must have been an extensive culture, with a longer consecutive growth than English culture from 1066-1940. The Bible grew as a small collection of Hebrew books, edited into one, then edited again in Greek translation into the Christian Bible. In both forms, its wisdom could be and was treated as a distillation of centuries of life experience, and especially of agricultural society in the Iron Age. The biblical Hebrew word tzedakah, with its associations of justice and compassion, itself implies empathy with the poor and a conception of charity not with almsgiving alone but with divinely-ordained equity and rights. The Bible sanctions methods used by the poor to survive, such as taking part of a neighboring crop and gleaning leftovers from the harvest. The Bible was created by people with a history and tradition reaching deep into the past and a determination to keep their monotheist faith.
