Beware the modern assumptions about "gifts"

Our attempts to comprehend ancient conceptions of the gift have resulted in relativizing modern assumptions, especially the Western notion of the “pure gift” (1.3). We have suggested in outline the gradual transformations that have shaped the distinctively modern ideal of a gift-without-return. In this sketch, large-scale social, political, and economic changes were connected to the emergence of the preference for the one-way gift. This latter may have roots in Lutheran theology, but was universalized in Kantian ethics with its resistance to externally imposed obligation. We have thus become wary of the protestations of Derrida and others that a gift is truly such only if it entails no reciprocity or return. That peculiarly modern presumption does not correspond to the assumptions of antiquity and should not be allowed to determine what Paul or his fellow Jews might have understood by the grace or gifts of God.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 185