Mammon is the ordinary Aramaic word for money or property, personified as a rival master competing for your loyalty.
Mammon is not a special religious term. It's the everyday Aramaic word for wealth, property, cash, the stuff people had in their purses or stored in barns. Jesus uses it the way we'd say "money" in a sentence like "you can't serve God and money." There's nothing exotic about the word itself.
What's striking is the grammar Jesus builds around it. He treats mammon as something you can "serve," a master alongside God, not just a tool you use. English has no trouble translating the noun. The difficulty is that "money" sounds neutral to us, a medium of exchange, while mammon in Jesus's mouth carries the sense of a whole system of trust and security that competes with trust in God. The word covers coin, property, and accumulated resources generally, but the force comes from personifying it as a master.
No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
The classic line: you cannot serve God and mammon as two masters.
I tell you, use worldly wealth to make friends for yourselves so that when it is gone, they will welcome you into eternal dwellings.
Jesus tells hearers to use worldly mammon to make friends for eternity.
So if you have not been faithful with worldly wealth, who will entrust you with true riches?
Faithfulness with mammon is set against trust with true riches.
No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Luke repeats the two-masters saying, pairing God directly against mammon.
The King James Version simply transliterates it as "Mammon," which makes it sound like the name of a pagan deity rather than an ordinary word for cash. Most modern translations render it as "money" or "wealth," which is accurate but loses the personifying edge, since "you cannot serve God and wealth" doesn't quite land as strangely in English as it should.
A popular but unfounded word study claims Mammon was a named Canaanite or Syrian deity of greed, sometimes even ranked in demonic hierarchies. There's no solid evidence for a god by that name in the ancient sources. Jesus is personifying ordinary money as a master you serve, not naming an established idol; the point is about divided loyalty, not mythology.
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