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Welcome to The Economic Companion to the Bible!

Here, you'll find peer-reviewed scholarship that illuminates the world of the Bible through the lens of the economic point of view.

The Economic Point of View and the Biblical World

The Bible offers the richest and most intricate portraits of human life ever composed. Its sweeping narrative spans nomadic herders, royal courts, temple economies, and imperial administrations. This narrative brims with depictions of people cooperating, bargaining, gifting, governing, and building institutions to make life together possible. Such biblical episodes are not merely theological or moral; they are also economic. Economic dimensions of the Bible remain curiously under-explored, despite the recent explosion of philological, archaeological, sociological, and literary biblical scholarship. The Economic Companion to the Bible seeks to change that by applying the economic point of view, and in particular the framework of rational choice institutionalism, to illuminate the organizational logic of biblical life.

1. The Power of the Economic Point of View

Economics is not the study of money or markets narrowly conceived but of purposeful human action under constraints. From this vantage, the Bible's recurring concern with choice, stewardship, justice, and exchange takes on fresh coherence. The rational choice approach begins from a simple but profound premise: individuals respond to incentives within given institutional settings. Settings like families, clans, covenants, priestly orders, and empires all shape the costs and benefits of different courses of action, and in turn, the regularities of behavior that emerge. This lens, often called rational choice institutionalism, asks not only what people want, but how they coordinate and sustain cooperation when self-interest and social order must be reconciled. That analytic power makes economics indispensable to understanding the everyday workings of biblical societies, from the incentives behind ancient tithing and debt forgiveness to the contracting logic implicit in covenantal oaths.

The economic point of view is both explanatory and humane. It takes human beings as they are, imperfect, creative, and constrained, and asks how the patterns of life we see in the Bible could have persisted. This approach does not reduce the sacred to the secular. Rather, it deepens appreciation for the wisdom embedded in divine revelation by explaining the role of institutions in the pages of the Bible.

2. The Tapestry of Biblical Scholarship

Modern biblical scholarship has never been richer. Excavations continue to illuminate ancient trade routes; textual studies uncover linguistic subtleties; comparative work situates Israel within broader Near Eastern political economies. Yet these advances have largely bypassed the economist’s analytical toolkit. Theologians and historians have fruitfully examined covenant, kingship, and community; economists have studied coordination, property rights, and transaction costs. Rarely, however, have these conversations intersected with rigor and mutual respect.

The Economic Companion to the Bible enters this fertile terrain as a bridge. It stands on the shoulders of extraordinary exegetical and historical labor, drawing deeply from archaeology, ancient law, and textual criticism, while bringing to bear the unifying logic of choice and institutions. Our project assumes that the Bible, while divinely inspired, also describes real human beings in real societies who faced real trade-offs. Economic reasoning offers a way to map those trade-offs systematically, to see how scarcity, incentives, and information shaped the form of covenant law, temple administration, and even family life.

3. Economics: A Missing Lens

In the landscape of biblical interpretation, economics is the missing perspective. Historians explain context, theologians trace doctrine, philologists parse words, but few ask how the institutional fabric of biblical life functioned. How did people coordinate production and distribution in the absence of modern states? What mechanisms sustained trust across far-flung trade networks? Why did certain marriage or inheritance customs emerge and endure? These are, at bottom, economic questions.

Yet when they are posed with the tools of rational choice and institutional analysis, they yield not moralistic or anachronistic answers, but historically grounded explanations. We learn, for instance, why the jubilee system, however divinely ordained, required particular social preconditions to operate; why tithes and offerings could serve as both spiritual devotion and public-goods provision; why covenantal relationships resemble self-enforcing contracts. Economics becomes the missing lens revealing the institutional logic of patterns that once seemed opaque, like rules about gleaning, prohibitions on interest, and parables about stewardship.

4. Beyond the Terms of Trade: The Organization of Economic Life

The Economic Companion to the Bible examines two big questions. The first concerns the terms of trade: prices, quantities, costs, and benefits. The second concerns the organization of economic life: how people structure relationships and rules to overcome the friction of transaction costs.

Some entries will engage the traditional price-and-quantity dimension, including the use of money, the valuation of labor, and the role of taxation and tribute in imperial economies. But many others will address the organizational dimension, asking how biblical communities solved the perennial coordination problems of trust, enforcement, and cooperation. This is the domain of rational choice institutionalism, which recognizes that exchange requires not just willingness but workable institutions such as norms, laws, covenants, and mechanisms for resolving conflict.

Through this lens, marriage contracts become long-term partnerships for joint production; temple systems become providers of spiritual and economic public goods; and covenants emerge as self-enforcing agreements that economize on external enforcement. The great narrative arcs of the Bible, from the patriarchal households to the early church, can thus be seen as experiments in the governance of cooperation. In this way, The Companion will not only interpret biblical economic life but also contribute to the broader field of institutional economics by showcasing the astonishing variety of human arrangements recorded in the sacred text.

5. A New Frontier for Biblical and Economic Scholarship

The convergence of rigorous economics and reverent exegesis promises to open a new frontier. By systematizing this approach in a digital, peer-reviewed companion, our project will provide scholars, pastors, and students a unified framework for exploring how economic reasoning illuminates divine revelation. The result will be neither a theology disguised as economics nor an economics disguised as theology, but a disciplined dialogue between the two.

This initiative grows from a conviction that understanding the economic dimensions of the Bible honors both God and reason: God, because it takes His world and His Word seriously; reason, because it insists that human cooperation follows discernible patterns even in sacred history. By integrating economic insight with biblical fidelity, The Economic Companion to the Bible aims to recover the full humanity of the biblical record. Its households, markets, property systems, and social contracts are all part of the divine drama of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

The goal is not to use economics to judge the Bible, but to use it to understand how economic life unfolded within its sacred narrative.

Caleb S. Fuller | Founder & Editor-in-chief
Associate Professor of Economics, Grove City College