Rabbi Chaim of Friedberg adds a moralistic teaching that argues that just as if one’s blood becomes partially infected or otherwise corrupt, it ruins a person’s entire body, so too if a person accrued some money illicitly, this will not only cause that money to disappear from his wealth, but will actually bring his total financial ruin. He additionally writes that just as sometimes a person needs to lose some blood for their overall health (in earlier times this referred to bloodletting, although nowadays we can understand this as undergoing a blood test), so does one need to let go of some of his money by giving charity and alms for the sake of one’s overall fiscal success.
If mammon means “money” and damim also means “money,” that makes the two words synonymous. Nevertheless, as we will see, several writers have already explained how these two terms actually differ from one another.
Rabbi Eliezer Herstik wrote in Ragli Mevaser (his glosses to Sefer HaTishbi) that damim denotes the value or price of something, while mammon refers in a more general way to any property or money that may comprise one's assets.
Along these lines, Rabbi Yosef Teomim-Frankel (1727–1792), author of the Pri Megadim, writes in one of his letters that mammon refers to “cash” or mobilia (whose value is already known,) while damim refers to moveable property whose value is unknown and therefore must be evaluated in order to be used as currency.
Alternatively, Rabbi Teomim-Frankel argues that the word damim must be Hebrew (explicitly pointing to Rashbam’s aforementioned comment that explained damim in Ex. 22:1 as referring to “money”), while its semantic counterpart mammon is Aramaic. Building on this, he relates the word damim to the Hebrew term dimyon/demot, which refers to something which only appears to resemble something else. This ostensibly fits with his understanding of damim as property whose value must be evaluated, as in the meantime it only “appears” or “resembles” capital, but cannot yet be actualized as such until an estimation has been carried out.
In a similar way, Rabbi Shimon Yehuda Leib Goldblit in Leshon Chachamim writes that damim relates to the word dimyon ("imagination"), as a person “imagines” that the value of money equals that of all possible commodities. This reflects the popular conception that "money answers everything" (Ecc. 10:19).
Another generic term for “money” used in Rabbinic Hebrew is maot. For example, think of the phrase maot chitim (literally, “money of wheat”), the name of the traditional alms given to the poor before Passover. This word for money is the plural form of the coin maah, which is the equivalent to the Biblical geirah (see Targum to Ex. 30:13), and was then borrowed as a general term for “money.”
The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah §22:8) expounds on the term maot as a portmanteau comprised of mah (“what”) and l’eit (“for a time”), alluding to the ephemeral nature of material wealth as something that could easily pass with time. A student of Ritva (cited by Midrash Shmuel to Avot 2:8) cites this Midrash slightly differently, as saying that maot is related to the word ivut ("crookedness"), as money can cause man to become “corrupt” and ultimately be purged from This World before his time. The Tosafists (Da’at Zekanim to Num. 32:1) cite yet another version of this Midrash, which states that money (or at least the avaricious pursuit of it) causes justice to become “corrupt/perverted.”
Another general term for “money” in rabbinic parlance is zuz, which originally referred to a specific coin, but then expanded to refer to “money” in general. The Midrash (Bamidbar Rabbah §22:8) explains that zuzim are called so because — as liquid assets — they can "move" (zaz) from their owner's hand to somebody else’s very quickly.
A similar thing probably happened to the word kesef, which originally referred to the metal that we call “silver,” but then actually became another word for “money.” I used to think that the word gold in German/English was related to the German/Yiddish word gelt (via Grimm’s Law about the interchangeability of the d and t sounds) in a way that parallels how “silver” in Hebrew became a general word for “money.” However, upon further research, it seems that the consensus of linguists is to trace the word gold to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root ghelh (which is the more direct ancestor of the English word yellow and the German/Yiddish word gelb), while they trace gelt to the PIE root gheldh ("to pay/award," an ancestor of the English word yield).
Before we conclude, I want to discuss the etymology of the English word money. Again, when I was younger, I used to think that this word somehow derived from the Mishnaic Hebrew term mammon. However, a cursory look at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that the English words money and mint both derive from the Latin moneta. Moneta, in turn, was the name of a Roman goddess in whose temple money was coined in classical times. It is also often stated that Moneta was actually just an epitaph for the Roman goddess Juno.
But my original connection between money and mammon might not be that far off: One of the currencies often mentioned in the Mishnah is the maneh (“mina”), which is a coin valued at 100 zuz. The word maneh ostensibly derives from the same Hebrew root as the words moneh (“counting/appointing”), manah (“portion/lot”), minyan (“number/quorum”), and — as I wrote earlier — mammon. They also seem related to the name of the idolatrous deity Meni (Isa. 65:11), who was said to “allot” to man his destiny. Professor Theo Vennemann Nierfeld actually proposes that the Latin term moneta is a cognate of the name of the god Meni, which means that the English words money and mint in fact have a Hebrew origin.
