Economic Genesis

Economics is a topic that most of us have heard about without having much understanding of its actual meaning. We know it has implications and stakes in many other fields, including things like politics, law, medicine and business. Headlines and news articles talk about the economy ad nauseam. However, there is minimal discussion about what an economy actually is, and it is even more rare to hear an agreement about what is good or bad for the economy.

Economics and economies are very complicated and difficult to describe. Many of us think of an economy as a system for the production and distribution of the goods and services we use in everyday life. And this is true to an extent, but it doesn’t tell the whole picture.

In this book we will be using the biblical narrative throughout this discussion to illustrate the principle of economics. Through the early stories in the Bible, we see brief understanding of the basic principles of economics. These principles, shown early in the bible, which will come to dominate our lives as individuals and as societies, include production, scarcity, and debt. In addition to addressing these topics, we get some explanation of their fundamental nature and how we are designed to relate to them.

The first humans start out in a perfect garden given to them by God called the Garden of Eden. This garden was a system for the production and distribution of goods and services, but it wasn’t necessarily an economy; all physical wants and needs were available in unlimited abundance. Without scarcity there is no need to economize, and therefore no economics.

In the beginning, humans had access to everything ever created. Every animal, every plant, and every tree. Everything ever created was available for them to do with as they wished. Reading the story of Eden, you could say humans weren’t designed to need economics. If Adam and Eve wanted anything, it was given to them.

However, the role of humans was more than just existence. Yes, even in a perfect paradise, God assigned humans a job. It was Adams responsibility to work and care for the garden. As we drag ourselves out of bed to go to the office in the morning, we might wonder how a perfect world could involve work.

Production

Put simply, it is in our nature to produce things. We take inputs and create outputs. You need only to look around you to see how much we like to produce. We are constantly surrounded by thousands of years of invention and creation. Almost everything you interact with daily is from human production: the building you are in, the snack you are eating, the paper or screen you are reading this on. We love to make things.

Sometimes we think that if we didn’t need to be productive we wouldn’t. If we lived in a perfect world, with everything we wanted provided to us, maybe we wouldn’t work. Maybe we would just bask in the glow of perfection all day.

However, very few of are able to just do nothing all day every day. It is not in our nature. We are designed to create stuff and to do stuff. God knew this about us and made it a part of our plan. He put us on the earth with a purpose and gave us two directives: to work and care for our environment.

It is very telling that even in a perfect world we were meant to labor and to be productive. It is in our nature to create, to be useful, and to be of service. Adam used his time and energy and worked with his land and resources. This was a fundamental part of his life.

Today, this is called labor. In academics, we call it an economic input. The Hebrews used the word “avadah.” In this book, we will focus on the development of Hebrew society, so it is important to understand their deep connection between work and worship. This word is translated in Adam’s story as “work,” just as it is in other parts of the Bible. However, in later verses, this word is translated as “worship,” as in “to worship you, O God.” The Hebrews viewed work as a very spiritual act. Labor, to a Hebrew, was so intertwined with their spiritual connection that, in their language, it could be difficult to distinguish between an act of work and an act of worship.

The second directive was to exercise great care over the garden, or “shamar” in the Hebrew language. While given as a primary directive to the original humans, this is historically treated as a secondary concern in the process of production. We are good at finding ways around things that don’t personally benefit us or creating rules in our favor. This will be a theme throughout our economic history.

For instance, we have developed the concept of externalities to refer to an undesirable effect on the environment caused by production. When a company pollutes, or causes damage to the earth or society, this is an externality. Companies would like to avoid externalities, but they do not regard externalities as completely detrimental to their business model.

Externalities are a cost outside of a company’s internal expense calculations. This means they do not appear in profit and loss statements unless the company is required to correct the damage. This correction typically happens when an outside governance or authority requires it.

With production being a part of our design and a part of our original objectives as humans, it is understandable why it has been the central focus of so much of our history. You would think that something so fundamental to our nature would always be fulfilling or enjoyable, and perhaps it was to start. However, in the story of Adam and Eve, something happened that changed the plan.

The first humans did not accept the deal that God offered. Adam was given the perfect job, the perfect wife, the perfect family on the way, and not a worry in the world. However, his pride made him believe he could do better on his own. He believed there was something better out there; that the environment that God created and said was good was not as good as what he and Eve could do on their own. So they rebelled. After they rebelled against Gods plan, the deal changed, as did our understanding of labor.

The directive still stood: work and care for the land. However, because we rejected Gods plan, our labor now comes with stipulations. Our survival now depends on our labor. In addition to this, we are cursed to labor painfully, and we will never be able to produce everything we desire. Through painful toil, we eat food from the ground all of the days of our life.

It was difficult to wrap my head around the idea that all work is painful, so I spoke with a newer pastor about the idea. Surely, someone who found their calling as a spiritual advisor and leader, must see the possibility of labor without pain. What I came to understand is that even when you find what you believe to be a calling from God there are still painful parts: dealing with people in pain, spending time away from your family, the opportunity costs of other paths you have given up to pursue your calling.

It is important to note that labor can also be fulfilling, and today we don’t all have to physically toil and put our bodies through physical discomfort to labor, but the pain is still there. I’m not going to try to convince anyone that labor is always painful in some way, but it is a reality of our life. All labor involves some form of physical, mental, or emotional pain.

Despite this, labor and production are still the original goals and objectives of humans. Our rebellion earned us another economic stipulation from God as well though. This stipulation, that we will never produce all we desire, brings us to the next major principle of economics.

Scarcity

Economics exists because we have unlimited desires, but limited resources to fulfill those desires. Put simply, we will always want more than we can have. One of the fundamental tenets of economics is that scarcity has always, and will always exist. This applies to everything from individuals and companies to governments and nations.

In the first biblical story, Adam and Eve had everything. While the modern conveniences of today did not exist, everything that was ever created was theirs for the taking. Metaphorically, it could be said they were the wealthiest people in all of human history. They had access to all the land, every type of animal, every type of plant; everything that was ever created was given to them anytime they asked.

However, a fact of economics is that scarcity always exists. Even in this garden they had scarcity. God created one tree, which represented wisdom that only God possessed, and made it off limits to the humans.

This tree was very appealing and likely something they encountered daily. While the humans knew this resource was both off limits and bad for them, they could not help but want it. It was the one thing they could not have. The only scarcity that existed to them.

In a way you could say this allegory sums up the nature of economics. We have unlimited desires, but limited resources. This story in the bible would indicate that even when scarcity does not exist, we will still invent it. We will always want more than we can have.

Scarcity is often viewed as an issue that only affects the poor. And while It’s true that scarcity does disproportionately affect those in need, scarcity is about wants, not needs. A person who owns a hundred houses and a person who owns no houses still experiences the desire to purchase another house. While their lives and motivations are different, as is their effect on society and their capacity to act, the scarcity remains.

Scarcity exists because of the limited resources of the world, but scarcity is also a part of our human nature. Why would someone who has five hundred million dollars keep striving to be a billionaire? Why are people with extreme wealth often so unhappy and unfulfilled with their lives? They have basically every physical resource the world has to offer. Scarcity is a reality of those who struggle for bread and shelter, but scarcity is also a reality of those at the top of our economic systems. Our desires will always outweigh our resources.

Adam and Eve’s desires outweighed their sense, and they ate the fruit. As a punishment from God, we now know what true scarcity is. No matter how much we work we will never have all the things that we want.

The lifestyles that many modern societies lead would be considered unbelievable prosperity by many other countries and even by earlier generations. However, it is never enough to satisfy everyone completely. That is the real constraint. That is what scarcity means.

Nothing has been more pervasive in human history than scarcity, and all the requirements for economizing that go with scarcity. We can organize our societies as capitalist, socialist, feudalist, or any other kind of system we want. We can enact any sort of policy, practice, or institution we can think of. However, the unmet desires and trade-offs that scarcity requires will always exist.

One final principle of economics also came into existence when the first humans rebelled. And this principle has been possibly the most pervasive, complex, and abused principle in all human history.

Debt

When we talk about debt, we’re typically talking about purchasing something we don’t have money for right now. For instance, we can purchase a house and then use our income to pay for it over the course of 20 or 30 years. A lump sum is provided for the purchase, and regular payments are made to pay back the debt, plus interest, over time.

In business school they teach students to compare the value added by a capital purchase to the cost of debt required to purchase it. If a new piece of equipment increases efficiency by $100 per month and the debt payments are $90 per month, it is a good purchase. It adds more value than it costs.

However, the reality of debt and its history is much more pervasive than we often realize. Almost all our economic and monetary systems are built on the idea of debt. Up until the 1970’s the United States Dollar was based on a debt of gold from the government. The US government set up a system that said they would buy back every dollar printed with a fixed amount of gold. This guarantee was so strong that holders of these documents of debt, or dollars, from the government could trade them for goods and services as if they were gold.

The US monetary system is no longer secured by gold. However, the size of US economic system, the labor force dependent on the dollar, and the nations guarantee to defend the dollar with the force of the largest military operation in the history of the world is enough to allow people to still trade these government debts and use them in determining value for goods and services.

Most of us pay debts to the government, either directly or indirectly, as property taxes. In return, the government will defend our ownership of this property. We pay a debt to the power company every month for the electricity they provide. We pay a debt to the grocery store so that we can eat. We are paid a debt by our employer for the regular use of our labor, though the amount of that debt is negotiable and often a point of contention.

This modern system of debt is thousands of years in the making and can be very complicated to unpack. Debt throughout history is even more pervasive and harder to conceptualize. It was created through governments, wars, and religions, and took many forms. Often it resulted in subjugation, indentured servitude, and slavery, among other things. Even in modern, developed societies, people are labeled as criminals and used as indentured laborers to pay their stated debts to society.

In the story of the first humans we are introduced to debt on a spiritual level. In the Garden of Eden God freely gave everything to the first humans, there was no expectation of anything owed. But, after they rebelled, everything changed. The humans were now indebted to God for what he gave them.

Debt will be continue to be a theme throughout the Bible, and our history, but our first introduction to debt shows us at least a few main components of debt. For one, debt is a natural and constant part of our lives. We also see that debt is not clear or simple, and just like with Cain, one of the sons of Adam and Eve, debt can affect us on a very deep emotional level, even causing us to lose our minds sometimes.

It is interesting to note that nobody told the sons of Adam and Eve that they were in debt to their creator, but their offerings clearly suggested a sense of indebtedness to God. Cain and Able were the first generation born into this new economic agreement, and they believed that sacrifices and offerings were required as payments for the land and resources provided by God.

Up to this day, even people with no spiritual affiliations can feel this natural debt in their lives. As soon as we are able, we are required to give back to the systems and people that create us. That could be our families, or our teachers, our nations, our institutions, or something else. One way or another we need to earn our living.

Everybody understands the concept of earning a living and it says a lot about how natural indebtedness is in the world. Even existing is not something that we are just entitled to at birth. If we don’t give back by working or following the traditions and rules required of us, our lives will be difficult if not outright impossible. Debt is a daily part of the life of every human in existence.

The second thing we can see is that debt is not clear or simple. Often it doesn’t seem fair or reasonable either. In the story of Cain and Able, the first humans born outside of the perfect Garden of Eden, both brothers attempt to pay toward the debt they owe to God. Both give from their agricultural goods. They give from things they have worked the land to acquire and things that have significant value to them.

However, God accepts one of the offerings and rejects the other. Even though they both have the same debt, one is able to repay this debt, but the other is not. God explains that he rejects the offering because of what is in Cains heart, but Cain does not understand. He murders his own brother, who had nothing to do with his debt at all.

One of the next stories of debt in the Bible is of a man named Noah who curses his grandson and the descendants of his grandson to perpetual slavery. Noah gets drunk on wine and passes out naked in his tent. His son finds Noah and, rather than covering Noah up, tells his brothers about it. I’m not sure how I would react if I found my dad passed out drunk and naked on the floor, but it is hard to see how this reaction warrants the punishment of perpetual slavery.

Up to this day, people still struggle to understand debts and where they come from. Sometimes we acquire a debt for something we didn’t do or didn’t receive. Sometimes we are born into debt. Sometimes the extent of our debt is unknown. Sometimes our debts are indirect, or caused by someone else. Sometimes our debts are unpayable. Sometimes they disappear with no need for repayment. We can have monetary debts, spiritual debts, physical debts, emotional debts, or any other kind of debt under the sun.

On a Macro level, debts can be even more complicated. To maintain its economy in 2025, the US currently has a national debt over $36 trillion dollars. Many experts say this is too high. Many other experts say there is room to increase the debt. This number, and denomination, of dollars would be meaningless to someone of the past, and it is unclear if anybody in the future—besides academics and history buffs—will understand this figure.

Finally, we see in the story of Cain and Able that debts can have a deep emotional and mental effect on us. One very important aspect of debts is that we accumulate them from both ends. For every debtor, there is someone owed. All of us experience both positions throughout our lives. It is impossible to make it through life without owing a debt to someone or something. Plus, anyone who has ever held a dollar or other government currency was owed one of the most powerful debts ever created.

We all know the difference between being owed something and being indebted. We experience the clear and distinct difference in all aspects of our emotional, physical, and mental state. We know the feeling of being out on the town, with a pocket full of cash. We can feel 10 feet tall. We know that the world owes us something and we are here to collect. There is a certain madness in that feeling, and the actions it can drive us too.

However, in the case of Cain we see the other end of the debt spectrum. A modern example of this could be the position of being forcibly removed from our living situation because we can’t pay the rent. There can be a feeling that our debts are insurmountable. A feeling of knowing that we owe the world more than we can produce. This type of debt can drive a person to extreme actions. People will lie, murder, cheat, and do anything else under the sun to avoid, or get out from under, a debt like this.

What if it, as in the case of Cain, our debt was something so big and so important that we could never hope to earn it or pay it back? Cain gave the best of everything he had, and it didn’t even count as a payment toward his debt. No matter how hard he worked or what he gave, he felt his life was going to be marred by this debt forever. This type of debt can lead us to do something as mad as murder. History is riddled with stories of people who have been driven to madness by smaller debts than these. This type of debt can shape our lives and actions in ways we don’t even see coming.

Our relationships to debt, the scarce resources we compete for, and the constant production required just to maintain life are no small matter. The way we organize these things influences so much of our lives and societies. But what role does economics play in all of this?

The Role of Economics

Though many early prophets were described as wealthy, economics is not about personal finance. Economics will not tell you how to get rich. It will not tell you how to run a business, nor will it give you a foolproof way to predict the stock market.

Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It is the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making. Economics attempts to understand and formalize the way we utilize our limited resources, as individuals and as a society. It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it's not all about money.

A good way to understand economics on a small, or micro scale is to look at a medical team that is sent to a battlefield. As soon as the team arrives, they must quickly decide how to allocate resources. Doctors, nurses, and medical supplies are almost always in short supply, and with so many injuries, the team must decide where medical care is most impactful. Some soldiers are so close to death that treatment would be useless, and some are healthy enough to survive with no immediate care. For the sake of everyone involved, allocations are necessary and must be made.

As more people and more resources become involved, the impact of economic decisions becomes larger. Millions of people are affected by government economic policies, sometimes billions. These decisions can raise generations of people from poverty and starvation, or they can do the opposite and create living conditions that are not survivable for the poor and marginalized in a society.

In the above-mentioned medical scenario, the goals are almost universally agreed upon. The medical team wants to save and heal as many people as possible. To do this they use data measured from many battlefields, over time, to determine the best procedures and rules to maximize the objectives. Large scale, or macro-economic analysis works much the same way. It is a study of cause and effect. We look to the past to determine the best economic policies or systems for the future. We look back at the things we tried and hopefully use the data to create a better path forward.

It would be useful to create real world experiments and use the scientific method to experiment with new hypotheses in an economy. However, economies are massive organizations, with many stakeholders, and are difficult to alter. Attempts to change economic systems have led to wars and ended civilizations among other things. The risks are huge, and with so much at stake, experiments can be unethical or outright impossible. On top of this, many large-scale, or macroeconomic goals are not so straightforward. Even the way economists measure success in an economy can be hotly debated.

The first story of societal development in the Bible, paints a picture of a society with no economic policies, no rules, and no regulations. Essentially, God leaves the world with no guiding principles or rules, and nobody in charge. We are not given all the details of the issues that arise, but to make a long story short, the world degrades into anarchy and fails miserably. This anarchy rule was so bad God decided the best option was to wipe everyone out and start over with a flood. Noone knows the intentions of God at any point, but the outcomes of this initial period of history are clear. A society with no systems, or very poor systems, fails and the people suffer. Regardless of how success is measured, it is generally accepted that if we are to function properly as a society, systems are necessary.

It will be thousands of years after the Bible is written before the word economics is even a part of our language, and longer before it becomes a formal science; written about and studied by rulers and academics. When modern economists discuss the history of the discipline they typically start in the 1700’s when academics such as Adam Smith began writing on the topic of political economy. These ideas would later evolve into modern economics.

However, as we can see, the principles of economics have been a part of our lives since the first time we took a bite of food from the earth. So, while the formal study of economics is a recent development in our history, the idea of using rules and systems to organize our resources is not. Economic rules and systems have been around since the beginning of civilization.

In the Bible, god gives his people only two rules after the flood, both of which relate to economics in some way: you must not murder, and you must not eat animals which are still alive. And while these rules relate to more fields than just economics, they are clearly applicable. Requiring animals to be slaughtered prior to consumption is a matter of production. We create similar food production rules in our modern times to ensure the safety of everyone involved. As our understanding evolves, new rules are created for better efficiency or protection.

The other rule god gives at the beginning of our civilizations could be applied to economics with the statement “you must not murder over scarce resources or debts.” After all, this was the reason for the first murder in the Bible, and this rule is foundational for having a functional economy on any level. These rules have become engrained to the point of common sense among almost all cultures in the world. These are the first rules, but it is going to take a lot more than that to organize our societies in a functional way.

Up until our modern day, how we understand and utilize economics continually evolves. Through trial and error we have devised many systems for production. We have also tried many ways of distributing the scarce resources we interact with and organizing our debts. As we grow, some systems and rules become engrained in our culture and some go by the wayside.

Economic ideas can become so ingrained into our societies that they are not ever discussed or challenged. Here are some ideas that were considered the only way to organize resources at one point or another in our history: the King owns all the land and decides who will lord over it, any white man inherently has more value than any black man, the governments purpose is to control all means of production and distribute to each according to their need, the sole purpose of production is to generate profit for the shareholders, or the only way to organize a production is as a company with an authoritarian structure.

Ideas can become mythologized as the natural order of things. Schools still often teach that our current monetary systems evolved from primitive barter systems, where goods and services were traded directly between participants. From this start we made the natural progression to monetary systems so that we could have uniform metric for valuation and trading. However, while this story is still taught in economic curriculums, historians have not been able to find any evidence of this type of barter system ever existing in the world.

Ideas like these can become unspoken starting points for education systems or policy making. Although they are not natural laws of the world, like gravity, they are often treated as such and to challenge them places you as an outsider. Ideas like this can become ingrained to the point that some people can not even see the point of creating or following a passion if it doesn’t align with these ideas.

Different frameworks about the proper way to organize our economies evolve. Some are implemented and some are violently opposed. We come up with new words and language to describe and affect our systems. We try new organizational structures on large and small scales.

For instance, the term ‘leverage’ gained popularity in finance during the 1920s, though the concept of financial leverage existed earlier. Leveraging is essentially the use of debt to increase returns on investments. It is named after a lever in physics, which amplifies a small input of force into a greater output of force. It was a common practice in the 1920’s American stock market to purchase stocks with high amount of debt. If a person could obtain debt at 5%, the stock price only needed to go up 6% for them to make money on that debt. If almost all the stocks are going up 15% to 20%, how could they lose?

Well, this practice, amongst many others, led to the largest economic depression to hit America so far. The government had to make many changes, and implement new rules, to reduce the risk taking behaviors in the economy. The popularity of leverage as a financial practice waned for a while after this. However the popularity of this practice has returned multiple times since. It would be several decades later until the American government would begin more serious regulation on leveraging* practices, though leveraging it is still a common practice.

The biblical narrative on economics should be viewed in the same way, as an evolution over time. The coming eras for the people of the Bible will display their economic behaviors under sovereign ruling nations, under organizational structures give to them directly by God, and under systems they themselves create and govern. Over time things evolve. New technologies and new ideas emerge to create new eras of thought and organization. New words and language evolve to describe things.

So who makes the rules and what’s the process? In the next iteration of our biblical journey, we finally get a leader. God puts someone in charge to rule. He is the first person in biblical history who will make the rules and shape society the way he chooses, but he won’t be the last.