There's a half of "Thou shalt not steal" most of us have never heard: Do not walk past. It reads like a mission statement for the people watching the world's most vulnerable transit points.
Our monitors are trained for a lot of things. They are trained to notice how a child is being moved through a border crossing. They are trained to listen for stories that start to come apart under questioning. They are trained to recognize the moment when a family connection becomes a lure, when a wage offer is too high to be real, when an adult walking fast with a baby is doing something other than taking her home.
But mostly, they are trained for one thing: they do not walk past red flags of trafficking.
The command "Thou shalt not steal" is one of the most familiar lines in Scripture. Most people, asked to name a few of the Ten Commandments, could recite this one.
But in a recent episode of BibleProject's series on the Ten Commandments, teacher Tim Mackie points out something easy to miss. Ancient Jewish teachers didn't just read a negative command as a prohibition. They read it as having a positive flip side—not only don't do X, but actively do the opposite of X. Jesus does this throughout the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you." He isn't contradicting the law, he is unfolding it.
Applied to "Thou shalt not steal," what unfolds is something most of us don't think of as part of the commandment at all.
Earlier this month, our founder and CEO, John Molineux, wrote about one half of this unfolding. In classical rabbinic interpretation, "Thou shalt not steal" was first and most seriously a prohibition against stealing a person—the only form of theft Torah law treats as a capital crime, equivalent in weight to murder.
John's piece traces that reading through the Exodus story and into the mission of Jesus. It is what makes human trafficking a straight-line violation of one of Scripture's oldest commandments. That is one half of the eighth commandment, but there is another.
The other half shows up a few chapters later, in Deuteronomy 22, in two verses that are easy to read past:
"You will not watch the ox of your neighbor or his sheep or his goat going astray. You will certainly return it to your neighbor."
"You will not see the donkey of your neighbor or his ox fallen on the road and ignore it. You must help them and get up along with them."
Both passages are built around the same inversion. The Hebrew behind "thou shalt not steal" is not only forbidding you to take what belongs to your neighbor. It is also forbidding you to watch what belongs to your neighbor be lost, when you are in a position to help.
The sin named is not only action. It is inaction ... which is a different kind of commandment than most of us grew up hearing. Walking past counts.
For most of us, Deuteronomy 22 reads like a passage about ancient agriculture. Oxen and donkeys and sheep belong to a world that isn't ours. This makes the command feel distant—the kind of thing you underline, but don't carry into Tuesday morning.
For a Love Justice monitor standing on a train platform in Bangladesh, the command is literal.
Last month, staff at a railway station noticed a 17-year-old girl at the far end of the platform. She wasn't quite waiting for a train, but she also wasn't quite leaving. Most of the people around her were on their way to somewhere else—they walked past.
The monitors watched her for twenty minutes before they approached her for questioning.
She was there to meet a man she had never seen in person. He had reached her two months earlier by mistake, a "wrong-number" call, and the conversation had kept going. Our teams in the field see this recruitment method a lot. Eventually, he offered her a restaurant job and told her to come to the station where his cousin would pick her up.
The monitors called the man to verify the story. But he immediately hung up and then switched off his phone. So our team then called her mother and sent her on a train safely home after some counseling and education about the dangers of trafficking and how to find safe foreign employment.
Two months of grooming that fell apart in a single afternoon, because someone was there, and did not walk past. She was intercepted and protected from trafficking! She is free.
And hers is not the only story like it. It also happened in the four stories we shared from four countries this spring, in the three-month-old baby carried through cities by a woman who did not even know the baby was a girl, and in the children traveling across borders with strangers paying for their trips. The common thread, every time, is the same—a monitor who did not walk past.
That is the eighth commandment, in its positive form, acted out in real time.
But "do not watch your neighbor's ox go astray" assumes a particular thing: that you are somewhere oxen tend to go astray.
A monitor is not at a train station by accident. They're stationed there because someone decided—and kept deciding, month after month, year after year—that it mattered to have eyes on that platform. That the moment a baby is carried past too fast, or a story stops holding together under questioning, or a 15-year-old is being moved with the wrong person, there should be someone there to keep them safe.
That decision is made by donors, half a world away, who have taken Deuteronomy 22 at its word. Donors like you who decided that watching someone's life be stolen, when they could help, is not an option they want to live with. When you give, you get to enter in and keep them free.
When Scripture said do not watch the ox go astray, it assumed a village—a world where your neighbor's loss happened within walking distance of someone who could do something about it. The world is bigger now. Train stations, border crossings, bus depots, and social media feeds stretch across continents, and most of what is being stolen on them is stolen out of sight of anyone who would help.
But not out of sight of you.
When you give to Love Justice, you are paying for someone to stand in the places most of the world cannot see. You are funding the one thing the eighth commandment, in its positive form, actually requires: someone there, watching, who refuses to walk past.