Do not steal.
—Exodus 20:15
When I was ten, I saved my money to buy Elton John’s Greatest Hits on vinyl. I rode my bike to the Jones Store, a large department store a couple of blocks from my home, and went straight to the record department to find the album. To my dismay, the price was $5.98. I’d thought it was $4.98, like most other albums in those days. I had only enough to buy the album for $4.98 plus tax. I was $1 short.
Instead of going home, I had a devious thought. Why not replace the price tag with one from another album that was at the lower price? My heart beat like crazy as I looked around the store. No clerks were in sight, so I carefully peeled a price tag from another album and placed it over the tag on the Elton John album. Then I carried it to the register and waited for a clerk to show up. This was forty-six years ago, but I can still feel the tension of that moment. The cashier finally arrived at the register and rang me up for $4.98. I walked out with my album and a lot of remorse.
I learned that day that I would never make a good thief—though, as I’ll suggest later in this chapter, the Elton John heist would not be my last theft. But the guilt I was feeling, and the innate sense of shame, did keep me from ever switching price tags again.
The eighth commandment, like several of the other commandments, might seem at first so obvious as to appear nearly irrelevant to us. Surely we don’t need to spend time exploring what it means not to steal. All who agree that stealing is wrong, say “aye.” Opposed, “nay.” The vote passes unanimously. Few people think stealing is okay, and most of us would not consider ourselves thieves.
Yet in the ancient Near East, every law code we know of included a prohibition against theft. When we find a law so universal in adoption among ancient people, it suggests that the problem was widespread and needed to be addressed. Generally, laws were written in response to acts that were considered egregious and needed to be regulated. We can assume that stealing made it onto the “top ten” list on the two tablets both because it was deemed serious and because it was a problem in the early Israelite community.
In this chapter, I want to suggest that the same is true of us today. When we look at the applications of this commandment in the Bible, there are a wide array of activities that fall under the category of theft—choices you and I face on a daily basis. We’ll consider these, and then we’ll turn to the words of Jesus, who not only calls us to refrain from stealing but empowers us to practice its opposites: generosity and selfless love.
With this in mind, let’s consider the eighth commandment in its original context.
As a kid, you may have learned the saying, “Finders, keepers; losers, weepers.” The idea was simple. If you find something that isn’t yours, you can keep it. It’s not your fault that the owner lost the item. You find a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. What do you do? Many people would try to find the rightful owner. Some would consider it their lucky day and not think twice about keeping the money.
In Israelite society, “finders, keepers” amounted to taking what wasn’t yours. This was especially important in an agrarian society where sheep and goats had a tendency to wander off. In Exodus 23:4–5 we read,
When you happen to come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey that has wandered off, you should bring it back to them. When you see a donkey that belongs to someone who hates you and it’s lying down under its load and you are inclined not to help set it free, you must help set it free.
These verses outline two different ethical requirements, but they are linked. You are to return what you find that belongs to another. That is what it means to be a neighbor. Keeping what you found would be stealing. Then scripture takes the principle a step further. If even your enemy, or someone who hates you, has an animal in trouble, you are to help it. You do this because this is the very thing you would hope someone would do for your animals if they were lost or in distress. You can hear echoes of this idea in Jesus’s Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12, NRSV), as well as his call to “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27,35).
On a trip to Egypt, traveling through the wilderness on the way to Mount Sinai, I saw a stray camel. When I asked my guide about this camel, he said, “Every camel you find here, every sheep and every goat, belongs to someone. When an animal wanders off, and someone else finds the animal, they always take it back to its rightful owner. This is life among the Bedouin. This is how they live.” Today’s Bedouin live much as the Israelites did 3,300 years ago. And they practice the same ethic God gave to the Israelites on Sinai: “Do not take what does not belong to you.” In other words, “No, finders are not keepers.”
The first time I visited Egypt, I stayed at the Meridien Hotel across from the pyramids. It was late when I checked in, and I went to tip the porter who had brought my luggage to the room. I gave him what I thought was five one-dollar bills. He thanked me and went back to the lobby.
After unpacking, I went to the lobby restaurant to grab a bite to eat. I sat down and was soon approached again by the porter, who had tracked down my guide to translate. The porter said something in Arabic, and my guide translated, “I don’t think you intended to give me this.” The porter then handed me a hundred-dollar bill.
Apparently when I gave the porter what I thought was a five-dollar tip, I gave him four one-dollar bills and a hundred-dollar bill. I’d brought only three hundred dollars in cash for the entire two-week trip. I thanked him profusely and tried giving him an additional tip for returning the money, but he would not accept it.
I was floored. This young Egyptian could have kept the hundred-dollar bill, and I never would have known where I’d lost it. But he did not want to take advantage of me. Character, honesty, and integrity were what I saw in him and in the other Egyptians I met on that trip.
A friend once faced the same decision after going through the drive-through at his local bank. He deposited a check and requested two hundred dollars in cash back. The young teller was obviously new; he didn’t count the money before stuffing it into the envelope and handing it to my friend. My friend pulled away, then decided he should count what was in the envelope. That’s when he discovered the young man had given him four hundred dollars back, twenty twenties instead of twenty tens. He turned back around and returned it to the teller, who was both embarrassed and very grateful.
What price do you place on your integrity? For the Bedouin, the camel is returned. For my Egyptian porter, the hundred dollars is given back. For my friend at the bank, the two hundred dollars was returned to the teller. Each time you find something that isn’t yours, or you are unintentionally given something that you were not meant to have, it is a test of your character.
That’s the positive intent of the eighth commandment. It looks a lot like the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Still, it’s a relatively clear interpretation. But how does this command apply to those of us who wouldn’t think of taking or keeping something that isn’t ours?
I began this chapter with fifth-grade Adam Hamilton switching the labels on an Elton John record. Maybe you did something like that, and maybe you didn’t. But you can excuse me for doing it, because I was just ten years old, and it was just a dollar that I stole. I’ve grown a lot since then.
Then there’s the “finders, keepers” ethic. Maybe you know people who would keep the hundred-dollar bill if someone handed it to them mistakenly, but you know you would return it. And of course, there’s ordinary thieving—taking someone’s donkey or bicycle or cellphone. None of us would do that.
So now allow me to step on your toes (and mine) by seeing if I can find your violation of the eighth commandment. And when I find it, I’m guessing you’ll say, as Methodist pastor James Moore once did in the title of one of his books, “Yes, Lord, I have sinned, but I have several excellent excuses.” Are you ready?
You’re eating out, and your waiter brings you the bill. You notice that the bill is less than it should have been. The waiter failed to charge you for your drinks or an entrée. Do you say anything? Restaurant margins are often fairly slim—net profits typically range from 2 percent to 6 percent.1 If you and your friends have a hundred-dollar check at a full-service restaurant, and your waiter forgot to charge you for drinks or an entrée, if you don’t say anything, the restaurant may have just lost all of the profit on your meal and you’ve consumed something you didn’t pay for. This is a violation of the eighth commandment.
Let’s talk about taxes. Many of you will read this book during Lent, and tax day usually falls close to the time of Easter. Have you ever overstated the value of your donations? Not reported all of your income? Have you been paid in cash and forgotten to report it as income? For as long as people have paid taxes, they’ve tried to find ways to avoid them. The most recent estimates are that tax evasion and fraud cost the U.S. government $450 billion in lost tax revenue every year. About one of every six dollars owed to the government is not paid by virtue of tax evasion. If you don’t pay your share of your taxes, are you smart, or are you stealing from the government, from other taxpayers, or from our children, who somehow, one day, must make up the difference?
Have you ever sneaked into a second movie after watching the one you paid for? Have you borrowed things that you never gave back? Or used someone else’s Netflix account to watch your favorite shows? In any of these scenarios, you have taken something you didn’t pay for.
Have you traded in a car or, worse, sold it without revealing its problems to the new owner or the dealership you traded it to? Is that not a form of stealing too? Or dinged someone’s door without leaving a note? Have you taken credit for someone else’s work? It’s possible to steal even something like praise or affirmation or credit.
It’s possible that I’ve not yet found your violation of the eighth commandment. LaVon and I try to disclose everything we know about anything we sell. We don’t “borrow” anyone’s Netflix. We report all of our income and pay our share of taxes. We’re not doing any of these things above, and I’m guessing that may be true for most of you. So let me try one more example of theft, which my friend Rabbi Art Nemitoff suggested when he and I discussed the commandments. (My friend can be a bit irritating sometimes, as I’ve found is the case with a good rabbi!)
Art suggested that every time we are late for a meeting, every time someone else has to wait for us, we are stealing time from them. Art’s words hit me like an arrow to the heart. Time, for many people, is the most valuable thing they possess. It is more valuable to them than money. Yet, knowing this, I am still routinely late for everything. In fact, I was late just this morning for a haircut.
Let’s play that out a bit. My being five minutes late for my haircut meant that Holly, the woman who cuts my hair, was now five minutes behind. She had another appointment ten minutes after mine, and instead of having a ten-minute break (during which time she also had to clean up her station) she now had five minutes—no time even to sit down and rest for a minute, use the restroom, or get a drink of water. I just stole that time from her. She was gracious as I walked in—she’s used to my showing up five minutes late whenever she cuts my hair. But thanks to Rabbi Art, I now feel a conviction about this act and am working to correct it.
Here’s the point: We’re all thieves, even you.
We’ve all violated the eighth commandment, and God is calling us to stop stealing. But I also think scripture extends this command beyond our individual actions, prohibiting practices that might be widespread or even approved of in society. In fact, many scholars believe that the prohibition against stealing was largely about stealing people—kidnapping and enslaving them.
Slavery was an accepted practice in every ancient culture. And despite having been liberated from slavery themselves, the ancient Israelites continued to practice it. Israelites could sell themselves into slavery to satisfy their debts or sell their children into slavery for similar reasons. Foreigners conquered in war could be forced into slavery too. There are more than two hundred verses in the Bible that seem to accept slavery as a fact of life. They are a reminder that even the biblical authors, to borrow the language Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13:12, saw “through a glass dimly.” Their ethics were shaped by their faith, but also by the context in which they lived. That historical context made it difficult for the biblical authors to imagine a world without slavery.
Israelites were, however, required to place limits around the practice of slavery, at least for their fellow Israelites who were their slaves. There were limits on the punishment of slaves. There was a time limit placed on the period of ownership of an Israelite slave (six years, though foreign slaves could be owned in perpetuity). A slave could be redeemed, their freedom purchased by family or friends. And to the point of the eighth commandment, Israelites were not to kidnap a fellow Israelite and force them into slavery or steal them to sell them to another as a slave. This applied not only to males but also to women, who were sometimes purchased as wives for the slave owner or his sons.
The penalty was harsh if you broke this rule. Deuteronomy 24:7 says, “If someone is caught kidnapping [stealing] their fellow Israelites, intending to enslave the Israelite or sell them, that kidnapper must die. Remove such evil from your community!” The same Hebrew word that is translated in the eighth commandment as “steal” is in these two verses translated as “kidnap.”
Today we call this practice of stealing people and forcing them into slavery human trafficking. This sometimes involves abducting people but can also mean recruiting people through deception, threat, or other form of coercion to perform involuntary labor. We often hear of human trafficking in the sex trade, and that represents the majority of cases brought to trial in the United States. But trafficking may also include work in other fields—agriculture, manufacturing, domestic service, hospitality—and, in some parts of the world, abducting or coercing children to fight in war.
The eighth commandment clearly applies to human trafficking. It also applies to exploiting workers by withholding wages or paying employees a substandard wage. This is what James refers to in his epistle when he writes,
Pay attention, you wealthy people!…Consider the treasure you have hoarded in the last days. Listen! Hear the cries of the wages of your field hands. These are the wages you stole from those who harvested your fields. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of heavenly forces. You have lived a self-satisfying life on this earth, a life of luxury. You have stuffed your hearts in preparation for the day of slaughter. (James 5:1–5)
James’s epistle was written to Christians. Were these words written to members of the Christian communities who were exploiting people or about people who exploited the members of the church? Perhaps both. Throughout scripture we find warnings of God’s anger toward those who enrich themselves by not fairly compensating the workers in their fields or by taking advantage of the poor. The “market” may make it possible to pay someone a subsistence wage, but the biblical idea of justice would call a Christian to ask if the wages being paid are fair, reflect the real value of the labor, and provide a living wage. The commandment may lead us to ask if the compensation we’re providing, and the relative compensation of our employees, is fair and just.
Years ago, one of my parishioners, a man named John, was the vice president of a company in Kansas City that was experiencing a downturn in its business. As the executive team met and discussed their options, the talk turned to letting employees go. The company was not large; I seem to recall they had a few dozen employees. John spoke up and proposed that if each of the executive team members took a pay cut, they would not have to let anyone go for a while, hopefully weathering the storm. When the executive team rejected the idea, he resigned, asking them to use his compensation to retain for a couple more months the employees they had been planning to release.
When businesses were forced to close during the coronavirus pandemic, I spoke with a number of senior leaders of companies in Kansas City who were forgoing their salaries as they continued to pay their employees even when the business was shut down. These were men and women who had already been serious about fair compensation for their employees.
Most of us are not senior leaders in companies, but we all have employees—people who work for us—or people who serve us, even if we don’t think of them as our employees. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, one of the members of our church, Lyn, had been a waitress for forty-one years. She had worked at Denny’s for the last ten. When the restaurant was forced to close, she lost her source of income.
A week later, the men from a Bible study that met once a week at her Denny’s called the restaurant, asking how they could reach Lyn. They had a gift for her, they said. These guys had taken up an offering to cover the tips they would have paid her, plus more for the time she would be unemployed. She was in tears as she told me this. It was a picture of a group of guys thinking about the people who served them, concerned for the vulnerable, and doing something to help.
I’m guessing you can think of people you went out of your way to encourage or to care for during this time as well. That’s the heart of the eighth command—a habit of seeking to care for and bless those around us. As we’ve seen throughout our study of the Ten Commandments, on the back side of every “thou shalt not” is a life-giving “thou shalt.” That’s what these guys were practicing as they sought to care for Lyn, who for years had waited on and served them.
That takes us to Jesus. In his meeting with the rich young ruler, Jesus cites the eighth commandment as an essential practice for inheriting eternal life (Matthew 19:18, Mark 10:19, and Luke 18:20). Do not steal. But then Jesus calls the wealthy young man to give what he has to the poor. For Jesus the command was not just to avoid taking but pointed to a greater principle of loving one’s neighbor: the effort to bless and care for others. It was a rhythm of compassion and generosity Jesus calls us to.
As I wrote earlier, Jesus’s Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12 may be the greatest antidote to our struggle with stealing: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is such a simple guide. Would I want others to let me know if I undercharged them? “Do unto others…” Would I want others to ding my door without saying anything? “Do unto others…” Would I want to be taken advantage of by my employer? Or have credit taken for something I’d worked hard on? How would I feel about someone stealing my time by being perennially late? “Do unto others…” When you’re not sure if what you are about to do is stealing or otherwise unethical, run it through the Golden Rule test. Would I want someone to do this to me?
There’s a second antidote to stealing found in the teachings of Jesus and throughout scripture. We’ll focus on it more in the final chapter of this book, but it is important to mention here as well. If stealing is about taking what isn’t yours (time, money, property, even things like accolades), its antidote would be giving what you have to those who have no right to expect it. Again and again in scripture, we’re commanded to give—particularly to the poor and to those who need what we have. Proverbs 22:9 captures it well: “Happy are generous people, because they give some of their food to the poor.” And Jesus, who speaks about generosity as a primary virtue of the Christian life, evokes it in one of his most powerful parables: the parable of the sheep and the goats. Here he describes what will happen at the final judgment of the world:
Then the king will say to those on his right, “Come, you who will receive good things from my Father. Inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world began. I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:34–36)
The blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven will be those who gave, whether it was drink, a warm welcome, clothing, or care.
Jesus regularly warned his disciples about the lure of wealth and possessions—the motivation behind much stealing: “Watch out! Guard yourself against all kinds of greed. After all, one’s life isn’t determined by one’s possessions, even when someone is very wealthy” (Luke 12:15). “Stop collecting treasures for your own benefit on earth, where moth and rust eat them and where thieves break in and steal them. Instead, collect treasures for yourselves in heaven, where moth and rust don’t eat them and where thieves don’t break in and steal them. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19–21).
Generosity, not greed or desire, is meant to be our way of life. This means generosity not only with our resources but also with our praise, with giving credit, with our desire to bless others, with our faithfulness to God. We are not meant to steal or take; instead we are meant to give and share.
At the peak of the coronavirus epidemic, I stood in front of our church as people drove up with groceries in their trunks that they had purchased for people in Kansas City who were struggling. It was thirty degrees and raining, the rain freezing on the cars and trees. Yet five women were busily collecting the groceries and thanking each of the hundred drivers who stopped by that morning for their selfless acts. I walked into the church to find women who were preparing medical-grade fabric with instructions so that our members could make fifteen thousand masks at a time when our hospitals were nearly out. Meanwhile, a doctor was helping volunteers convert fifty gallons of 190-proof alcohol into hand sanitizer for homeless shelters that couldn’t find sanitizer in our city. And this was just a fraction of what happened in that one twenty-four-hour day as people tried to give food, protective equipment, and, more than anything, encouragement. Here’s what I noticed about all these volunteers: They all seemed joyful.
In life we’re either givers or takers. But Jesus was right when he said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” This is the life-giving back side of the eighth commandment. Don’t steal, do give. They are two sides of the same coin.
Since we’ve learned in this chapter that we’ve all broken the eighth command, I can’t end without mentioning the one Gospel story in which Jesus himself interacted with two convicted thieves. Whether we’ve engaged in outright theft or lived lives of complete generosity, I believe this story offers hope to us all.
Matthew and Mark tell us two thieves were crucified with Jesus, one on either side. The Greek word used for these two was lestai, which can signify not just a petty thief but a violent criminal (as well as a rebel). Luke uses the word kakourgoi—literally, “people who did bad things”—to describe them.
As Jesus hung on the cross, hearing the insults of those who crucified him, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” One of the thieves, hearing this, started to mock Jesus. But the other spoke up for Jesus, defending him. Then he said to Jesus, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “I assure you that today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43). I love this moment. At the end of his life, wracked with pain, Jesus forgives and offers eternal life to a thief.
I’m a thief. You’re one too. I didn’t realize how much of one I was until I really studied the eighth commandment. But I love the fact that, to the end, Jesus was still forgiving sinners. And the final sinner Jesus forgave before he died was a thief. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.
Your character is seen in the small things, and I see all the small things. I’ve seen every good and right and selfless act you’ve ever done. I’ve also seen the times you took what wasn’t yours. As I forgave the thief on the cross that day when he asked for my mercy, I will forgive you. Don’t forget, my child, that you’ll find the deepest meaning and the greatest joy not by what you acquire but by what you give.