Part of a series on the |
Ten Commandments |
---|
Related articles |
"Thou shalt not steal" (Biblical Hebrew: לֹא תִּגְנֹב, romanized: Lōʾ tig̲nōb̲) is one of the Ten Commandments[1][2][3] of the Jewish Torah (known to Christians as the first five books of the Old Testament), which are widely understood as moral imperatives by legal scholars, Jewish scholars, Catholic scholars, and Post-Reformation scholars.[4][3][5][6][7]
"Steal" in this commandment has traditionally been interpreted by Jewish commentaries to refer to the stealing of an actual human being, that is, to kidnap.[8][9] With this understanding, a contextual translation of the commandment in Jewish tradition would more accurately be rendered as "Thou shalt not kidnap". Kidnapping would then constitute a capital offence and thus merit its inclusion among the Ten Commandments.
Nevertheless, this commandment has come to be interpreted, especially in non-Jewish traditions, as the unauthorized taking of private property (stealing or theft), which is a wrongful action already prohibited elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible that does not ordinarily incur the death penalty.