Answers about…
merchants in the Bible

The Hebrew word translated as merchant is from a root meaning “to travel about,” “to migrate,” and hence “a traveler.”

In the Middle East in ancient times, merchants traveled about with their merchandise from place to place (Genesis 37:25; Job 6:18), and carried on their trade mainly by bartering (Genesis 37:28; 39:1).

After the Hebrews became settled in Canaan they began to engage in commercial pursuits, which gradually expanded (Genesis 49:13; Deuteronomy 33:18; Judges 5:17), till in the time of King Solomon they are found in the chief marketplaces of the world (1 Kings 9:26; 10:11, 26, 28; 22:48; 2 Chronicles 1:16; 9:10, 21).

After Solomon’s time, their trade with foreign nations began to decline. After the Exile it again expanded into wider foreign relations, because now the Jews were scattered in many lands.

Merchant peoples include the Phoenicians, Ishmaelites, Midianites, and Hebrews.

What is an Agora?

Greek: ἀγορά —transliteration: agora —meaning: market; literally “gathering place”

This is an open place in a city that was commonly used to buy and sell and to meet with others, especially in Greek and Roman cities. Athens’ ancient agora is well-known. Agoras were usually in a city’s center or near the harbor.

Is being a merchant a legitimate profession in the Bible?

The Bible treats buying and selling as ordinary work, and it never condemns merchants as a class. What it condemns, repeatedly, is dishonest measures, profit taken by crushing the poor, and wealth pursued as if God were irrelevant.

Trade is assumed to be legitimate.

Joseph’s brothers sell him to a caravan of Ishmaelite merchants on the way to Egypt (Genesis 37:25–28). Solomon’s court had its own traders and depended on the merchant fleets of Tyre (1 Kings 10:15, 28–29).

The capable woman of Proverbs 31 is compared to merchant ships: she brings food from afar, makes linen garments, and supplies the merchants (Proverbs 31:14, 18, 24). Jesus uses a merchant as a positive picture of the kingdom—a man who sells everything to buy one pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45–46). None of these passages treats commerce itself as suspect.

Honest weights are a moral test.

The law requires just balances, weights, and measures (Leviticus 19:35–36; Deuteronomy 25:13–16). Proverbs calls a false balance an abomination to the Lord and a just weight his delight (Proverbs 11:1; 16:11; 20:10, 23). The same standard reappears in records of the prophets. A merchant who loves to oppress, with deceptive scales in his hand, is set beside covenant-breaking (Hosea 12:7). Amos pictures traders who can hardly wait for the Sabbath and new moon to end so they can shrink the measure, inflate the price, and sell the needy for a pair of sandals (Amos 8:4–6). Micah asks whether God can overlook wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights (Micah 6:11). The sin is not the sale; it is the rigged sale.

Commercial power is judged when it turns predatory.

Tyre is the Bible’s best known great merchant city. Ezekiel 27 describes her as a ship loaded with goods from every coast, then wrecked; Ezekiel 28 traces its fall to pride in her beauty and trade. Isaiah 23 calls her the marketplace of the nations whose merchants were princes. Zephaniah hears a cry from the market district when the traders are cut off (Zephaniah 1:11).

Nehemiah’s complaint is narrower: merchants from Tyre were selling on the Sabbath inside Jerusalem, and he shut the gates against them (Nehemiah 13:15–22). The offense is Sabbath-breaking and the pressure it put on the city’s life, not the existence of a market.

Jesus drives merchants out of the temple courts, not out of the economy.

In all 4 Gospels Jesus overturns the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling doves (Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46; John 2:13–16). His charge, quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah, is that they have made the house of prayer a den of robbers. The scene condemns commerce that exploits worshipers and crowds out prayer, especially the poor who needed an acceptable sacrifice. It is not a general ban on trade.

Warnings to merchants

James told merchants who say “today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and trade and make a profit” that their life is a mist; they ought to say “if the Lord wills” (James 4:13–16). The rebuke is against planning as if God did not exist, not against the journey or the profit.

Revelation 18 is harsher. When Babylon the Great falls, the merchants of the earth weep because no one buys their cargo anymore—gold, linen, scented wood, wine, oil, and “slaves, that is, human souls” (Revelation 18:11–13). They stand far off, mourning the loss of the luxury trade. The picture is of a commercial system grown rich on exploitation, not of every shopkeeper.

Taken together, Scripture expects merchants to use honest measures, refuses them any right to price the poor out of life, and treats great trading cities as liable for judgment when wealth becomes their glory. It also counts skilled trade among ordinary good work and is willing to let a merchant stand for someone who rightly prizes the Kingdom of God above everything he owns.

Original language words

Hebrew: רָכַל —transliteration: rakal —meaning: traders, merchants (1 Kings 10:15; Nehemiah 3:32)

Hebrew: כְּנַעַנִי —transliteration: Kna'aniy —meaning: Canaanite, merchant (Job 41:6; Proverbs 31:24)

Hebrew: סָחַר —transliteration: sachar —meaning: merchant, trader (1 Kings 10:28; Isaiah 23:8; Ezekiel 38:13)

Greek: ἔμπορος —transliteration: emporos —meaning: a merchant, or a shipboard passenger —occurrences: 5 (in Gospel of Matthew and Revelation)

Greek: κάπηλος —meaning: a retailer, or petty tradesman

Greek: καπηλεύω —transliteration: kapéleuó —meaning: peddler, to make a trade —occurrences: 1 (2 Corinthians 2:17)