Reserve fund

Were these statues of Gold erected in many of the city states a graven images of superstition or symbols of and reserve funds or man made systems and institutions?
The temples were often treasuries and operated as banks. The statues were their vault. That gold was their "reserve funds". In the time of famine or war statues were some time sent to the mint to make coins to pay for the needs of society. Religion was the way in which you took care of those needs, individually and collectively. The golden calf was part of a system proverbs describes a one purse.
In Proverbs 1 we are warned to not go that way nor consent because "their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed blood..." where the people are snared in a net of their own making.
This same warning is repeated by Peter concerning covetous practices that makes us merchandise and curse children.

Your hearts treasures

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Where is the treasury reserved for you?

Is your reserve fund a well without water?

Because people today have such difficulty in accepting the fact that the first banks were the temples built by communities we just put a few of the resources that verify that banks and temples were consistently linked, especially at the time of early Christianity.

These systems operating through temples allowed society a way of securing economic loyalty of the people but when carried to far often secured the people in a snare of bondage as surety or collateral for debt and owing tribute in the form of a temple tax.

• "The first banks were probably the religious temples of the ancient world, and were probably established sometime during the third millennium B.C. Banks probably predated the invention of money. Deposits initially consisted of grain and later other goods including cattle, agricultural implements, and eventually precious metals such as gold, in the form of easy-to-carry compressed plates. Temples and palaces were the safest places to store gold as they were constantly attended and well built. As sacred places, temples presented an extra deterrent to would-be thieves. There are extant records of loans from the 18th century BC in Babylon that were made by temple priests/monks to merchants. By the time of Hammurabi's Code, banking was well enough developed to justify the promulgation of laws governing banking operations." Read full article at History of banking, EARLIEST BANKS

or at Banking Overview

• "Like many other ancient civilizations, Greek banking [and therefore Roman banking] was often centered around the Temple. Grecian temple bankers took deposits, made loans, and engaged in money-changing (i.e., exchanging currencies), as well as services in validating the purity and authenticity of coinage. Greek foreign exchange services were provided by merchants, money-changers, and pawnbrokers, and both private and city-government backed money lenders operated out of temple banks."

"The Bank of Delos operated through credit transfers, while silver and gold was vaulted in the treasuries of the Temple of Apollo. " History of Money: The Temple Bankers and Money-Changers of Ancient Greece & The Island of Delos By Knight of Coins, March 8, 2015

Banking from Mesopotamia to Egypt

• "Banking can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia, where people tried to find secure places in temples and royal palaces in order to safely keep their grain and other goods. They usually made transfers recorded on receipts by both the depositors and their goods keepers and also a third party. The worldwide famous Code of Hammurabi makes reference to certain private houses in Mesopotamia which got involved in banking transactions, and laws regulating such operations."

Grain was often stored as a reserve fund in Egypt. "In Egypt, the centralized system and the excellent organization of harvests in state warehouses facilitated the development of the banking system." A Sketch History of Banking, Camelia Maria Manea, University of Pitesti

The Parthenon

• "The Parthenon also had a function as treasury of the Delian League and a reserve fund. For example, every tributary town was supposed to send an ambassador to the Panathenaea and offer a cow and a panoply.

"This was again similar to the Persian example, because one of Persepolis' main functions was that of treasury. Both buildings, Apadana and Parthenon, were an empire's focus points of politics, religion, and finance, and it is possible that Athenian artists had learned from their older Ionian colleagues how the great king had invited his subjects to be his collaborators." Persian Influence on Greek architecture, Architecture: Parthenon frieze, All content copyright © 1995–2018 Livius.org. created in 2002; last modified on 25 November 2018.

Inventory in marble

• "The list of treasures which, from the time of Perikles to the downfall of Athenian supremacy, was stored in the Parthenon and the other temples on the Akropolis, are among the most complete and curious documents which have been handed down to us on Greek marble.
  

"The treasures in the Parthenon itself, which was deposited there immediately after completion (B.C. 438), and which was called the treasure sacred to Athena, was composed of various precious objects dedicated by States or individuals, the tenth of the spoils of war, the money accruing from sacred lands, and lastly the balance of the income of the State not required for current expenses, and which was kept as a reserve fund only to be drawn upon for some special necessity.

"A board of ten treasures, appointed by lot yearly from the wealthiest class, took charge of this sacred deposit; and it was their duty on going out of office every year to take stock of the treasure, and to hand it to their successors as pe inventory. Every fifth year at the great Panathenaic festival, the registers of the four preceding years were inscribed on marble stelae, the series of which is nearly complete from B.C, 434 to the downfall of Athens, B.C. 404. The inventories specify a great variety of precious objects, adding the weight in every case where it could be ascertained. As we read through this list of statues, crowns, cups, lamps, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and other ornaments, all of gold or silver and many of them, doubtless, exquisitely fashioned, and..." "The silver mines of Laurium furnished one of the principal sources of Athenian revenue. These were leased by the State to individuals on certain conditions defined in documents...."

The bank of Athena

"The common treasury of the league had been removed from the island of Delos to Athens, and located in the temple of Athena on the Acropolis. This transfer,—a bold step which Pericles had strongly advocated,—was a formal recognition of Athens as the capital of a wide empire.

"Almost all the cities which had originally been her free allies had now become her subjects; year by year their tribute flowed to the temple on her citadel. And these revenues were administered by Athenian officials, subject to the authority of Athens. The revenues proper to Athens herself had been greatly enlarged by the development of the silver mines of Laurium in Attica, and by the acquisition of gold mines in Thrace.

"Thus the organisation of finance had assumed a new political importance. It should be noticed that the idea of a public treasure—a permanent store on which the State could draw in emergencies—had not hitherto been fully worked out in a Greek democracy. The economical basis of the old Greek commonwealth was different from that to which we are accustomed. The Greek city was, in this aspect, more like a corporation possessing property, and paying its current expenses out of that property.

"The Greek citizens were like joint administrators of a trust fund, for the common benefit. To take a modern illustration on a small scale, we might compare them to the Fellows of a College, in whom is vested the administration of the College property.

"The Greek city depended very little on direct taxation of the citizen. Hence it had small opportunities of forming a public reserve fund of any magnitude. That would have had to be done mainly out of its annual income, and at the cost of retrenchments which would not have been generally popular.

"Of course, where a despot had contrived to obtain the supreme power in a Greek city, he could exact from his subjects the means wherewith to form a public treasure.

"Peisistratus did so, when he was despot of Athens; so also did the Sicilian despots, and many more. Thus, a power based on money had hitherto in Greece been characteristic of a tyranny, not of a free commonwealth. But Pericles saw that the imperial position of Athens, and the naval power on which her Empire rested, could be secured only by creating a public reserve fund on an adequate scale. And since the tribute paid by the subject allies was now at the absolute disposal of Athens; since, further, in any emergencies that might arise, the interests of Athens would be identified with those of her dependents; it was now comparatively easy for a statesman to effect this object. He was further assisted by the peculiar relation which existed between public finance and religion.

"The temples were the public banks of ancient Greece; the safest places of deposit. Under the provisions made by Pericles, the public funds lodged in the temple of Athena on the citadel were of three kinds. First, the fund designed to meet the current expenses of the State, which were consigned merely to the temporary guardianship of the goddess. Secondly, there were moneys which were formally consecrated to Athena, and which were made her own property. These could not be touched, except by way of loan from the goddess, and under a strict obligation to repay her; to take them in any other way would have been sacrilege. Thirdly, there were certain definite sums, also consecrated to her, which could not even be borrowed from her, except in certain specified cases of extreme need;—as if, for example, a hostile fleet threatened the Peiraeus.

"The care of these funds, and the administration of all the other sources of Athenian revenue, were organised under Pericles on a complete and elaborate system. Thus it was his merit to secure for a free State that financial stability which had elsewhere been only a pillar of despotism. We see an immediate result of this in the simple fact that the Peloponnesian war lasted 27 years. Without the treasure on the Acropolis, the naval resources of Athens must have collapsed in a very much shorter time." The Age of Pericles (1889) by Richard Claverhouse Jebb, page 119.

Melting the gods

• The Archidamian War By Donald Kagan, Cornell University Press, 1990 - History - 392 pages. Writes in 1990 about "the great statue of Athena on the Acropolis" being melted down as a "reserve fund" to make coin to support the military efforts.
• This is repeated in 2013 book A New History of the Peloponnesian War By Donald Kagan, Cornell University Press, Jan 14, 2013 - History - 455 pages.

• See also Athenian Finance and the Treasury of Athena, Loren J. Samons II, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Bd. 42, H. 2 (1993), pp. 129-138, [ https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436281 Published] by: Franz Steiner Verlag.
• Thucydides and the Decrees of Kallias, Benjamin D. Meritt, Hesperia Supplements, Vol. 19, Studies in Attic Epigraphy, History and Topography. Presented to Eugene Vanderpool (1982), pp. 112-121, Published by: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, DOI: 10.2307/1353977, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1353977

The sanctified Aerarium of Rome

Aerarium (from Lat. aes, in its derived sense of ``money) the name (in full, aerarium stabulum, treasure-house) given in ancient Rome to the public treasury, and in a secondary sense to the public finances. The treasury contained the moneys and accounts of the state, and also the standards of the legions; the public laws engraved on brass, the decrees of the senate and other papers and registers of importance. These public treasures were deposited in the temple of Saturn, on the eastern slope of the Capitoline hill... In addition to the common treasury, supported by the general taxes and charged with the ordinary expenditure, there was a special reserve fund, also in the temple of Saturn, the aerarium sanctum (or sanctius), probably originally consisting of the spoils of war, afterwards maintained chiefly by a 5% tax... The later emperors had a separate aerarium privatum, containing the moneys allotted for their own use, distinct from the fiscus, which they administered in the interests of the empire. From a 1911 Encyclopedia

• AERARIUM "The state-treasury of Rome, into which flowed the revenues ordinary and extraordinary, and out of which the needful expenses were defrayed. It was kept in the basement of the temple of Saturn, under the charge of the gum story. A special reserve fund was the Aerarium sanctius, in which the proceeds of receipts from the manumission-tax (one twentieth of the freed slave's value) were deposited in gold ingots.

"When Augustus divided the provinces into senatorial and imperatorial, there were two chief treasuries. The senatorial treasury, which was still kept in the temple of Saturn, was left under the control of the senate, but only as a matter of formal right. Practically it passed into the hands of the emperors, who also brought the management of the treasuries under their own eye by appointing, instead of the quaestors, two praefecti aerarii taken from those who had served as praetors. Besides, they diverted into their own Fiscus all the larger revenues, even those that legally belonged to the Aerarium. When in course of time the returns from all the provinces flowed into the imperial treasury, the senatorial Aerarium continued to exist as the city treasury.

"The Aerarium militare was a pension-fund founded by Augustus in A.D. 6, for disabled soldiers. Its management was entrusted to three praeefecti aerarii militaris. It was maintained out of the interest on a considerable fund, and the proceeds of the heritage and sale duties."

The Gerousia of Sparta

The honesty and integrity of those in charge of these great stored wealth had already come into question when Lysimachus, the successor of Alexander the Great, transferred overseeing of the operations of the funds of temple from the priests to the more trustworthy gerousia, an appointed council of elders.

• The "officer, although he may have been also the priest of the eponymous hero of the tribe, was essentially a patron or benefactor who gave financial aid to the prytanes in the performance of their duties."
• The Gerusia administered, "the great sanctuary, far the most important thing at Ephesus, the sacred 'bank' on which the financial welfare of the city depended."
• The eponymous archon, the chief magistrate, was honored as "a benefactor to the individual citizens privately and to the city publicly, and as having saved the city in a great famine by means of the grain money".

And under Herod and the Pharisees the same path of unrighteousness had become the system. But Christ like Moses had a better way if the people will repent and follow that way.

In the book "Temple Cleansing and Temple Bank" by Neill Q. Hamilton, explains the "function of the Jerusalem temple as a bank. A brief history of banking in temples in the ancient world will prepare us for an understanding of the Jerusalem temple bank." The word Corban, meaning sacrifice, is also translated treasury which suggests the sacrifices of the people were kept in a vault like the function of the Golden calf which was a common form of protecting the Reserve funds required in many banking and welfare systems and seen in so many of the Temples throughout history like those at Ephesus and Rome.

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