I REALLY WISHED that I knew Bible quotes to give her at the time.
I think "Physician heal thyself" would have been a good one.
That is a bit too atomized. Verses or chapters are better examples. If I may make this anti-semitic joke: Jesus was a Jew. The bible is filled with sections about money as a result.
It's not anti-Semitic to note that the Old Testament is basically the Torah, which is a set of vital scriptures identified by the earliest Jews as containing all of their most important knowledge. That knowledge did include maxims about business and money management because those activities were vital to the survival of the community and the people in it.
A lot of factors combined to create the association between Judaism and finance.
First, the earliest Hebrew people emphasized literacy to the point of obsession. The bar mitzvah tradition, by which a boy is recognized as a man by the rest of the community, includes public demonstration of his reading skills. This tradition goes back thousands of years, and it produced a community of people who knew how to read in a world where the vast majority of others were illiterate and often innumerate. Work that required record keeping (and the accounting and banking professions definitely do) also required literacy. So there was an automatic skill overlap.
Second, the Jewish tribes didn't integrate well with other cultures. There was never a lot of voluntary intermarriage, and the community was always visibly separate even during times where there was no overt conflict and Jewish people lived harmoniously for generations with people from different communities (which was actually the norm). However the lack of intermarriage made it almost impossible for Jewish families to form ties with, say, the Roman patrician families during the Republic era or with landowning aristocrats during the medieval era. So ownership or control of land, the primary means of production prior to the Industrial Revolution, simply wasn't an option for Jewish families in Western Europe. The skilled trades also weren't much of an option for people who were ineligible for guild membership or who were otherwise unable to get their sons apprenticed. Even knowledge based professions that required admission to a university were sometimes inaccessible. Commerce, however, had no such barrier to entry.
Third, at some point in history every single group of people in the world has been dominated, defeated, enslaved, driven out, or otherwise on the losing end of a conflict with some other group. Being a very visible group that obviously does not integrate with other cultures has, at times, resulted in attack. A lot of Jewish people have had to flee their homes over the last several thousand years. Having a profession where it's possible to stash resources elsewhere, or pick up and move on short notice, has literally saved people's lives.
Now, let's suppose I was in charge of writing down what was important. Suppose I was writing only the most important things: something that would be studied, memorized, copied out, and the first thing grabbed and rescued in case of emergency. Along with the important family lineages and the information about divinity, should I also include the maxims and skills that allow me to provide for my family, and that would allow my children or grandchildren to start over from scratch in a new country, if they had to? I'd like to think that I'd be smart enough to do that, and to provide them with the tools to save themselves.
So, yes, the Torah talks about money and business.
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