Thou Shalt Not Steal

The theft of a person

"Thou shalt not steal" is one of the most well-known exhortations in the moral vocabulary of the West. Everyone knows it, but it means something much bigger than most people think.

The classical rabbinic interpretation puts it this way: "Our rabbis taught: 'You shall not steal.' The text speaks of one who steals persons."

That reading has lost none of its relevance. Slavery is illegal in every country in the world today, and 50 million people are living under it. One of the best definitions of slavery I have ever come across comes from the 1926 League of Nations Convention on Slavery, which defines slavery as the exercising of the powers attached to ownership of a person. In other words, trying to turn a person into property.

Human trafficking is the act of moving someone into slavery. Taking away someone's freedom is the ultimate act of theft. It is, in essence, stealing everything from someone, including the person. It is orders of magnitude worse than the theft of all of someone's possessions, because what is stolen is a long string of future moments: moments of joy and connection, and everything that a person would choose to do and cherish. There is hope for every survivor, but we should also speak plainly: enslaving someone can only be described as a life-ruining act.

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Ultimately, the command is unqualified, and most scholars take it to cover stealing of property and persons alike. But it was given in a time and place where land was held collectively by kinship groups, and people's property was almost always their means of subsistence—land, animals, tools, stored grain. Stealing a family's ox or seed grain could push them into debt bondage within a season or two, harming their capacity to be free.

We are less likely today to commit such acts, or have them committed against us. Thank God for the progress by which they have become much rarer than they were in the days of the Exodus. But it was not always so. The people who first received this commandment had just come out of slavery themselves.

A people who were once slaves

The Exodus of the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt is the founding event for God's people. They themselves were in slavery, and He led them out of it. And they were meant to never forget it. He opens the Ten Commandments with a reminder that He is the God "who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." This was the stated legal, spiritual, and relational basis for how Israel treated slaves, sojourners, and the poor. The Passover was created specifically so that future generations would recall and rehearse the journey out of slavery. Deuteronomy 6:21 instructs the Israelites to tell their sons "we were slaves in Egypt" not that their ancestors were. The Mishnah, the earliest written collection of Jewish oral law, says each person is obligated to see himself as though he personally came out of Egypt.

It is worth asking why. Why was God so determined to ensure that His people stay connected with the fact that they once lived under the yoke of slavery?

Here is a first answer. There is something about experiencing an injustice that often makes us uniquely attuned to it, and fills us with compassion we might not otherwise have for those living under it. A person who lost their spouse to cancer may start an organization dedicated to preventing it. A man who was wrongly imprisoned may give the rest of his life to freeing others in the same situation. God wanted His people to specifically and especially remember, and identify with, those living under slavery, whose personhood had been treated as someone else’s property.

What Jesus read in the synagogue

Jesus takes up the same thread. In Luke 4, right after He has been tempted in the desert, just before He begins His ministry, He walks into a synagogue and reads from a scroll. The scroll He is reading from is the chapter from which Love Justice gets its name, Isaiah 61, which says "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

However one reads the first three of the five purposes for which He was anointed, the fourth is unmistakable, because Jesus does not simply read what Isaiah 61 says. He pulls in Isaiah 58, for years the unofficial organizational theme scripture of Love Justice: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?"

This is not a slip of memory. In His first recorded sermon Jesus chooses to splice together Isaiah 58 and Isaiah 61, bringing the one kind of fasting God chose—loosing chains and breaking yokes—into the middle of His own mission statement.

So, the earlier question: why did God insist His people remember their enslavement? Because people rescued out of an injustice cannot look away from it, and He wanted His people to be people dedicated to loosing the chains of injustice and setting the oppressed free. Jesus would later tell us that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40).

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Remembering so we do not become the oppressors

But there's a second answer to this question. Nearly every scripture in which God tells us to "remember when you were slaves" communicates a duty towards the weak: the slave, the sojourner, the widow, the laborer (Deuteronomy 15:15, 24:17–22). God wants us to remember to ensure that we do not become the oppressors. Deuteronomy 8 warns that prosperity tempts you to say "my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth" (8:17). Remembering that we were once slaves reminds us that we are not self-made. Our freedom and prosperity are gifts we receive.

Moses makes the same point in Deuteronomy 6, just after his exposition of the Ten Commandments. When God brings them into the land, He tells them, they will live in "flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant. Then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."

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Remembering the slavery God rescued His people out of is how we remember how much of our prosperity and affluence is a gift we inherit. Economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that the country and family you were born into determine roughly 80% of your lifetime income. Too many people alive today were born into slavery; let those of us who were not remember that it was God who rescued us out of it.

"Of those to whom much has been given, much will be required." – Luke 12:48

That is not an abstract question for me. I recently led a discussion with a racially diverse group of our team members at the Love Justice program headquarters here in South Africa, where the pain and injustice of inequality and privilege are etched into the topography itself, cutting the land with razor wire and electric fences. Someone made the point that "we are not responsible for the sins of our ancestors." I think that is mostly true. But I also think it is beside the point. Knowing that someone is poor, and that God led us out of slavery, and that nothing I have is ultimately mine, is enough to oblige me to do what I can to set the oppressed free.

The Bible goes further than that, with a provision there is no record of Israel ever practicing: the Jubilee of Leviticus 25. Every 50 years, slaves go free, debts are released, and land returns to the family that originally held it. The stated rationale is that "the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; you are strangers and sojourners with me" (Leviticus 25:23), and "they are my servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves" (Leviticus 25:42). What we inherit is ultimately not ours anyway.

The year of the Lord's favor

There is a fifth purpose for which Jesus was anointed in Luke 4, the one that follows the "true fasting" of Isaiah 58: "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." The word Isaiah uses for 'liberty' (deror) is the Torah's technical term for the Jubilee release (Leviticus 25:10; Ezekiel 46:17), and 'the year of the Lord's favor,' a proclaimed year of release, is the Jubilee year.

It was a Jubilee Israel had never practiced. Under Roman occupation, it no longer could. By proclaiming every captive free, every debt canceled, everything stolen restored not as a statute but in Himself, Jesus was proclaiming the greatest release in history, with His people enrolled in the work of making it visible.

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We get to be a part of that, and we are called to be. The Western church is one of the largest funders and staffers of anti-slavery work in the world. For many years, the donors of Love Justice have prevented the stealing of thousands of people each month, proclaiming the commandment "thou shalt not steal" to dozens of thieves of human beings each month. They are still doing so.

To my knowledge, few if any of our donors have ever been enslaved. But they did what the Mishnah asks. They saw themselves as people who had personally been brought out of slavery, and they took action so that others would not have that precious freedom stolen away.

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