The Eighth Commandment Conquers All

By Khen Lim

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We tell ourselves we know exactly what the Eighth Commandment is about but what we don’t know is how deep and wide we fail to look to gain a more profound view of how important and far reaching it is in our lives. In fact there are two very good cases that can be made of the Eighth Commandment, both of which are startling in their dynamic. One is unique by comparison with the others while the other is breathtaking in how far and wide its tentacles of influence are.

Here is one commandment that arguably precedes the other nine. We simply know it as “Do Not Steal” but the word ‘steal’ has an added dimension of pre-empting many of the other commandments before and after it. 

From the sixth (Exodus 20:13), murder is nothing but the stealing of another’s life. In the seventh (v.14), adultery is when we steal the modesty of another’s spouse. In the ninth (v.16), bearing false witness is stealing the trust of another person in believing what we say. In the last commandment (v.17), covetousness is taking what doesn’t belong to us.

This is the unique aspect of the Eighth Commandment. It is almost as if God has left it open-ended and as we shall see, it is possible that He did that on purpose. In comparison to the Eighth, many of the others are, as God prefers, specific. The fifth (v.12) tells us that, specifically, our parents must be honoured. The sixth (v.13) explicitly lays down the law against taking the life of an innocent fellow human. The seventh (v.14) expressly warns us of not getting amorous with a married spouse other than our own. All of these are specific. They have particular nuances that cannot be read or interpreted in ways other than the ones they are intended to address.

On the other hand, the Eighth Commandment brooks no hints as to what it is that we are forbidden from stealing. Seen from the other end, it is God’s way of saying to us that we cannot take what belongs to others without their authorisation or sound consent or their genuine willingness to actually give it away. Whatever that belongs to another person, we have no right to take. And in the case of someone’s married spouse, no permission can ever be granted whatsoever.

There are three little details I like to bring to your attention concerning this commandment:

Servitude

Firstly, the precept of stealing undergirds all forms of taking without authorisation. Other than material things (including someone’s spouse), we are also not allowed to steal another fellow being. In other words, we are talking about slavery, the act of kidnapping and selling people into bondage or servitude.

Detractors of God’s Word tell us, under no uncertain terms, that the Bible condones slavery. Other than what the Egyptians were doing to His people (before they were set free), the kind of slavery in the Bible was more akin to indentured slavery, which Wikipedia defines as a “labour system where young people paid for their passage by working for an employer for a certain number of years.”

You could say that Jacob, after escaping from the clutches of a very angry twin brother, Esau, went into indentured servitude under his future father-in-law, Laban (Gen 29:15-20). In that particular case, indentured servitude can more specifically refer to the selling of oneself to another for an agreed period of time so as to work off a debt.

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In Jacob’s case, that ‘debt’ is Laban’s youngest daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage. As you’d agree, it has nothing to do with kidnapping free people. Jacob was certainly at liberty with his offer and therefore it was him who proposed a term of seven years (v.18) for Rachel’s hand.

In contrast to indentured servitude, God expresses something completely different with this commandment, the type that we see in abundance in Africa and the type that inspired John Newton to compose ‘Amazing Grace’ in 1748 while on the voyage in a slave ship heading back to England. It is these types of slavery that are expressly forbidden by God and defined by the Eighth Commandment.

Totalitarianism

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Secondly, stealing must also apply to the taking of property that does not belong to us. While it is pretty obvious in terms of one stealing another’s land property title to wrest ownership, we must also be able to see a bigger picture in this. In the creation and maintenance of a free and respectable society, individual ownership must be observed even by governments but this is not always the case. Totalitarian regimes that confiscate privatised properties constitute stealing.

During the ancient and medieval world, pockets of the wealthy gentry owned all the lands but the majority of the peasantry would toil on them to lace the pockets of their noble owners. In nineteenth century Europe, the e-merging socialists put up strong arguments that private properties be taken away from their owners and given to the “people”  who, for all intents and purposes, refer to the apparatchiks and useful instruments of the Communist regime.

In the Communist world, this theft of property became even more larcenous. From something so simple, it spread very quickly to thefts of all forms of personal freedom. Inevitably that all encompassed freedom of speech and personal expression, freedom to own and run a business, freedom to leave the country, freedom to adorn one’s own political stripes and the freedom to escape from a life forced upon them. In the end, it is just one massive fraudulent theft of life, a life that was meant to be lived in accordance to God’s commandments including the Eighth.

Entirety of life

And that leads us to the third detail. When there is a theft of life, it inevitably takes into account the theft of one’s own trust and dignity and before we know it, even our intellectual property is breached. In other words, the very things that were our personal ideas, our labour of love and the work we sweated over the years; all of these can be taken away from us without our consent.

Stealing at this level can be in the form of libel, slander, defamation or even just vicious rumours and gossips, all of which damage a person’s reputation in the worst possible way. In so many cases around the world, people commit suicide because they failed to handle their depression. Even if many do not resort to suicides, their reputation aren’t always fully restorable.

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Humiliation is also a form of stealing a person’s dignity. Waiters that are be-rated in front of dining guests in public is a good example but so are students who are demoralised by their peers and then have their dignity shredded into pieces once their humiliation is posted for everyone to see on social media networks.

A simple deception exemplifies theft of a person’s trust. In Hebrew, this is called g’neivat da’at, which literally means, ‘stealing knowledge.’ Tricking someone into buying a lemon of a car is a good example. Here the car salesman chooses not to reveal all the flaws of the second-hand car in order that he may profit from his naïveté and lack of knowledge. A similar case is when a woman has her heart broken into pieces by a man who proclaims insincere love just so he could use her body for his sexual gratification.

There is hardly any aspect of the human life that one apparently cannot not steal. And in some cases, theft can harm so irreparably that the life of the victim is forever and irreversibly damaged. If there is only one commandment out of all ten that you must choose, it might as well be the Eighth because it alone will cover many of the others in a single master stroke. And if only man were to view the commandments in this way, we would have had a truly beautiful world.

Therefore, keep this (commandment) and you will keep them all.

גְנֹֽ֔ב

Note: (Israeli Hebrew: ganab, gaw-nab’), Hebrew verb to mean to steal. According to the 1981 NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Hebrew-Aramaic), the translation for the word can cover (1) stolen, (2) brought to me stealthily, (3) carries away, (4) deceived, (5) kidnapped, (6) steal away, (7) steals him away, (8) stolen away or (9) stolen you away, depending on the Scriptural context. The use of this word can be found throughout Genesis, Exodus, Proverbs, Samuel, Leviticus, Job, Deuteronomy, Hosea, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Kings and Joshua. In Exodus 20:15, it is written לֹ֣֖א תִּֿגְנֹֽ֔ב׃ ס to mean “You shall not steal.”