Yeshua Explored
Stealing
What if disrespecting someone on Twitter was punishable by death?
You shall not steal. (Exodus 20:15)
A simple command. Perhaps a degree of stating the obvious, surely the essence of civilised behaviour is to be content with what you have and, if not, work hard to attain what you don’t have? Who said we’re civilised, anyway? There are a whole variety of ways we can break this particular commandment. We can be direct and obvious and rob a bank, mug old biddies in the street or raid our kids’ piggy banks. Or we can borrow pencils from work (minor perks) or fiddle our expenses in the great tradition set by some of our (right dishonourable) politicians (major perks). Or we can examine the original context.
The Hebrew word here, ganav, is singular, implying the stealing of a single object. Elsewhere, in Leviticus 19:11, we also see you shall not steal, but, in this case, the word, ganavu, is plural, implying the stealing of many things. The rabbis have much to say about this, particularly the influential Rashi. He suggests that the Leviticus verse conveys the traditional view of the commandment, in the sense of stealing money or property, but that the verse etched onto a stone tablet by the Finger of God has a very different meaning.
Rashi and other rabbis urge us to look at the context, at the preceding commandments, dealing with murder and adultery, each punishable by death. They insist that the “stealing” being referred to here is the type of stealing that is also punishable by death. A clue is in Exodus 21:16:
Anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death, whether the victim has been sold or is still in the kidnapper’s possession.
The word here for kidnap is, again, ganav, the same word as in the Eighth Commandment. Food for thought, but, as we find with rabbis, not everyone agrees and the consensus is that, although kidnapping may have been the primary context, ordinary acts of stealing, burglary and general thievery are also implied. Because of the vagueness of the Hebrew language (to say nothing of the lack of vowels or punctuations in the original script), the Midrash goes further to suggest that the use of the singular and plural forms of the word is a warning against both stealing as a solo act and stealing in the company of others. And, because of this laxity, coupled with some fertile rabbinic minds, other possibilities also spring forth.
- Being discourteous can be seen as stealing. If you greet someone and that greeting is not acknowledged by the other person, then they are deemed a robber for depriving you of the courteous response you deserved! If this was a capital offense then Twitter, that dreadful cradle of bad behaviour, would certainly be the modern equivalent of the ‘killing fields’!
- The rabbis even anticipated copyright crime, the bane of writers such as wot I am. The presenting of someone else’s ideas as one’s own is stealing however you may look at it.
- You don’t just have to be the robber to be guilty. Receiving stolen goods is just an incentive to robbers to carry on robbing and the Talmud tells us that accomplices of a thief are as bad as the thief himself.
- We will finish with a strange one, the stealing of someone’s feelings by making them feel sorry for us in situations when we don’t deserve it. Shades of the fake contrition we see from celebrities who have fallen from their perch and are advised by their PR experts to show an appropriate amount of sorrow.
But there is a form of stealing that is very much in line with rabbinic thinking. It doesn’t take much thought to widen the act of kidnapping to include slavery and its modern equivalent, people trafficking. In fact, when we really consider the implications it is not too hard to be in agreement that the main thrust of the Eighth Commandment is to show God’s abhorrence of the stealing of flesh and blood rather than inanimate objects.
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £10 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
