The study of the Ten Commandments benefits from historical context: they were given to Israel after God delivered the nation from Egypt, which He had devastated by plagues that embodied the defeat of one or another of Egypt’s false gods. At Mt. Sinai, on revealing the commandments to Moses, Yahweh claimed—and exercised—sovereign rule over all things, all people, at all times, and in all places.
What gave Him that right? Psalm 24:1–2 explains: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for [emphasis added] he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.”
Jeremiah 18:1–6 explains more fully:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
The Apostle Paul enlarges on this in Romans 9:13–24, applying it to God’s sovereignty in salvation, but the point is clear. Why does God assert authority over everything? Because He made everything.
The Basis of Property
The Biblical understanding of property, and therefore of theft, rests on this principle: Making something is the principal means of acquiring property in it. God has property in all things—the authority to determine their uses—because He made all things from nothing (ex nihilo). And He delegates subordinate authority to some things to people who make them, not from nothing but from something.
The modern understanding of human rights is often traced to John Locke (1632–1704), but Locke (though not an orthodox Christian) built his understanding on Scripture. Regarding the right to property, he wrote in his Second Treatise of Government,
. . . God, as King David says (in Psalm 115:16), has “given the earth to the children of men” . . . in common. But this being supposed, it seems to some a very great difficulty how any one should ever come to have a property in anything.1
1. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988), §25.
After all, if God owns everything, how could anybody else own anything? Locke went on:
God . . . has given the world to men in common . . . And though all the fruits it naturally produces . . . belong to mankind in common, . . . nobody has originally a private dominion . . . in any of them . . . in their natural state; yet, being given for the use of men, there must . . . be a means to appropriate [notice the middle sound: propria] them some way or other before they can be of any use or at all beneficial to any particular man (Emphases added).2
2. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §26.
That is, if you’re going to eat something, you must be able to claim, truly, that it belongs to you before you eat it, because you’re depriving somebody else of eating it. It’s of no use for God to have given the earth to men in common unless there is some ground on which this man may take this bite out of this deer for the support of his life, and that man may not.
So, Locke went on:
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly [note that word, and the sound it shares with the words appropriate and property] his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided . . . he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.3
3. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §27.
Locke’s reasoning is biblical: God by His labor made the heavens and the earth, so all belong to Him. Exercising that authority over them, God gives the earth to the children of men, and so they have common property in it. But until someone mixes his labor—his making—with what God has made, it belongs to no one but God.
The Propriety of Property
I called attention to the words appropriate and properly because they share a common root: prop. It’s in our words propriety, proprietor, and apropos (meaning “fit to purpose,” as in Proverbs 26:1, which says honor is not fitting, apropos, to a fool).
In his book In Defense of Property, 20th-century philosopher Gottfried Dietze developed these etymological connections:
In [Italian] propria means “own,” but also “proper, genuine, [or] right.” Proprietà is the word for both “property” and “propriety.” In Spanish the noun Buena was formerly used for “property.” Today, the adjective bueno means “good.” Propria stands for “own,” but also for justo, “right.” Something done al propria is something done justamente, done correctly, with propriety, con propriedad. Propriedad, in turn, has also the meaning of “fortune,” “wealth,” and “property.” . . . the Latins used proprietas for “propriety” as well as “property,” and proprius for “good” and “proper” as well as for “own.” . . . Furthermore, modern languages show the affinity of property and propriety in words which are not derived from Latin. In English, for instance, another word for property is “goods,” [and] the noun [from the adjective] “good.” A German word for property is Gut. [But w]hen not capitalize [nouns in German are capiatlized], gut [adjectives are not] means “good.”4
4. Gottfried Dietze, In Defense of Property (Regnery, 1963), 25–26.
English Bibles reflect this sense (see, e.g., Eccl. 8:5–6; Matt. 24:45–46; Eph. 5:3–4; 1 Tim. 2:9–10; Jude 1:6). The first use of the word property in the English Standard Version of the Bible is in Genesis 23, about Abraham’s acquiring a field with a cave in which to bury Sarah: “I am a sojourner and foreigner among you,” Abraham said—indicating that he was “out of place” there, that the place was not proper to him. “Give me property among you for a burying place . . . entreat for me Ephron … that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he owns . . . For the full price let him give it to me in your presence as property for a burying place” (Emphases added).
Abraham chose his words carefully. He wanted Ephron to give him a field—not just any field but the field “which he owns.” Not for nothing, but “for the full price” and “in your presence” to ensure that he was not beholden, as if the field had been an outright gift, and so that when the field became his property, there would be no questioning it. Seeming to be generous, Ephron responded, “No, my lord, hear me: I give you the field …” (Gen. 23:11). Yet Abraham would have none of it. He insisted on paying, “So the . . . field and the cave . . . were made over to Abraham as property” (Gen. 23:17–20). They would not have been a proper burying place for Sarah unless they were proper to Abraham.
I’ve spent so much time discussing the word because there is antipathy to private property, often expressed as, “Human rights must take precedence over property rights.” But property rights are human rights. They are proper, good, just.
Why You Shall Not Steal
Now consider a passage directly related to the Eighth Commandment (“You shall not steal.”), Exodus 22:7–9:
If a man gives to his neighbor money or goods to keep safe, and it is stolen from the man’s house, then, if the thief is found, he shall pay double. If the thief is not found, the owner of the house shall come near to God to show whether or not he has put his hand to his neighbor’s property. For every breach of trust, whether it is for an ox, for a donkey, for a sheep, for a cloak, or for any kind of lost thing, of which one says, “This is it,” the case of both parties shall come before God. The one whom God condemns shall pay double to his neighbor (Emphasis added).
Do you see the care with which God protects property? The phrase, “breach of trust,” is prominent. The King James (KJV) and New King James (NKJV) translate that as “trespass,” the New International Version (NIV) as “cases of illegal possession,” and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) as “case of disputed ownership.” The Hebrew word is pešaʿ, and its fundamental idea is a breach of relationship, an act that creates a gulf between one person and another.
Taking what belongs to another—what is proper to him—injures the relationship with him, and that relationship cannot be restored except by the return of what was taken, plus something more to make up for the breach. It would not do merely to return what was taken—that, after all, is expected when someone borrows something with permission. No, theft requires more, for it’s not just the physical object that is in mind but the rightness, the fitness, the propriety of its belonging to its owner, its being his property. Propriety has been broken by impropriety. Propriety must be restored along with property.
Time prohibits our exploring other passages, but I encourage you to take your concordance and look up words like property, belong, possession, own, and owner, and read them carefully to see what they reveal about property and respect for it. What they tell us is that something is fitting and right about property.
Why? Because people—men and women—bear God’s image (Gen. 1:27). As God is a maker, so people are makers. And as God properly owns what He makes, so also people properly own what they make—and what they are given, freely or in exchange, by others whose property it previously was.
This is why stealing is sinful and why God takes it so seriously that, as Proverbs 6:30–31 says, “People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his appetite when he is hungry,” nonetheless, “if he is caught, he will pay sevenfold; he will give all the goods of his house.”5 Even hunger does not justify taking what is proper to another.
5. “Sevenfold” probably does not mean precisely seven times what he stole but—seven being the number of completeness or perfection—everything the law requires in that case, even if it takes all he owns.
Property Rights and Christian Character
This review makes clear that the Eighth Commandment’s prohibition of stealing speaks not just to who has what piece of property under his control but the rightness, the goodness, the propriety—in sum the justice—thereof, and therefore the justice or injustice in our hearts, our own moral character, as revealed by our treatment of our and others’ property. I will extensively quote John Calvin about this subject in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (2.8.45–46), and I will weave in some of my own comments:
The purpose of this commandment is: since injustice is an abomination to God, we should render to each man what belongs to him [according to Romans 13:7]. To sum up: we are forbidden to pant after the possessions of others, and consequently are commanded to strive faithfully to help every man to keep his own possessions.
What does this imply about the determination of some people to use the power of the state to take the property of some and give it to themselves or others? The Eighth Commandment does not say, “You shall not steal unless you are a king” or “a legislator” or “a majority of voters” or “the government.” Since the command issues from the one Lord who reigns above all, it holds even those who wield much authority accountable to an even higher authority.
. . . We must consider that what every man possesses has not come to him by mere chance but by the distribution of the supreme Lord of all.
So theft, envy, and coveting are not simply crimes against a neighbor or crimes against a state. They are acts of rebellion against God’s providence, who alone wields the authority to assign to this person a possession and withhold from another that possession.
Now there are many kinds of thefts. One consists in violence, when another’s goods are stolen by force . . . A second kind consists in malicious deceit, when they are carried off through fraud. Another lies in a more concealed craftiness, when a man’s goods are snatched from him by seemingly legal means.
I would add to this list the instance of when governments inflate currency, which results in the devaluing of preexisting currency; this counterfeiting is legal, but it’s just as immoral as private counterfeiting.
. . . all those arts whereby we acquire the possessions and money of our neighbors—when such devices depart from sincere affection to a desire to cheat or in some manner to harm—are to be considered as thefts.
Note the extent of Calvin’s application. Many of us think ourselves innocent of theft, but still scheme to gain the possessions of others by legal means. This applies even if the ‘neighbor’ whom you defraud is an extremely wealthy corporation with an overly generous return policy. Likewise, the commandment speaks to the common envy today that drives the intent to use the power of government to deprive the wealthy of what is theirs.
Calvin here points out that God’s law is higher than our laws. Even when a court or a vote decides to take someone’s property wrongly, God still counts it as stealing.
Although such possessions may be acquired in a court action, yet God does not judge otherwise. For he sees the intricate deceptions with which a crafty man sets out to snare one of simpler mind, until he at last draws him into his nets. He sees the hard and inhuman laws with which the more powerful oppress and crush the weaker person.
An example of this could be regulations that some businesses support because they protect them from competitors. A stronger company can crush a weaker company through the power of the state. Another example is what’s known as “sue-and-settle.” Someone sues another person, company, or government for a high sum knowing that even if he doesn’t have good grounds for the suit, the defendant will calculate that it’s cheaper to settle for a lesser amount than to pay the legal costs to prove the complaint invalid.
He sees the lures with which the wilier man baits, so to speak, his hooks to catch the unwary.
For example, fine print in credit card contracts often hides dire consequences. People are subjected to staggering interest rates after being enticed by “zero-interest” offers for balance transfers. Without realizing it, some men are lured to bite hidden hooks.
All these things elude human judgment and are not recognized.6
6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Westminster Press, 1960), 2.8.45–46.
Anyone who wants a more detailed discussion of what the Eighth Commandment requires and forbids can benefit by a careful study of Westminster Larger Catechism, Questions 140–142.
All these things bring us to the heart of the matter. Jesus said, “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him” (John 14:21). How we understand and apply the Eighth Commandment, like every other commandment, reveals our spiritual character—ultimately not only our respect for and submission to God’s providence, but our very love for Christ.
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., President of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, is author of numerous books, including Prosperity and Poverty: The Compassionate Use of Resources in a World of Scarcity and Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel. A former Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College, he lives with his wife of 42 years, Deborah, near Memphis, TN, and has 7 children and 19 grandchildren.
