Where did money come from? Does it matter?

Does the historical origin of an idea, method, or system matter when considering how to respond to it?

Modern psychology began with Freud, whose personal life, ideas, and methods have received robust critiques. Does that mean modern psychology is flawed?

The administrative structures of many nations were built by colonialists. How is that relevant?

If something has Christian origins does that mean it is necessarily good? 

``Holy Money—A Brief History and Why It is So Complicated to Handle,'' is the title of Chapter 3 of  Money Matters: Faith, Life, and Wealth by R. Paul Stevens and Clive Lim.

They consider recent scholarship that argues that the origin of money was not the barter system but actually religion, Babylonian and Jewish, .. 

Caroline Humphrey’s definitive anthropological work on barter concludes. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever being described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

The authors state (p. 40)

Money, since its beginning, has been a spiritual matter and was created within the temple for the sacred management of the temple. The earliest use of money was within a canopy of sacredness to moderate the wealth of the temple and to justly distribute goods among the residents of the city.

 Thus, "money has a soul". They continue.

Like all the “principalities and powers” named in the Bible (Eph. 6:12), money has a dark spiritual side. As we saw in the temple context, money demands devotion, devotion that should be rendered to God himself.

On the one hand, I found this chapter interesting.  My wife less so. But, I remain to be convinced that the issue of the origin of money is that crucial to developing a Christian response. 

In ancient life, whether Jewish, African, South Asian, or Babylonian, everything had a religious dimension, and much of life (food, family, politics, economics, warfare,...) was centred around temples. Some was pagan and evil. Some was good and promoted human flourishing. That is a long way from the world that the readers of this book live in.

Some, or even many readers, may find the chapter heavy going, and the momentum and interest build by the first two chapters may wane.