“You shall not steal.” (Exodus 20:15)
The commandment assumes something the modern world argues about constantly: that some things are genuinely ours and not ours. Remove private property and the commandment says nothing at all.
But then a harder question arrives. The Bible also says the earth belongs to the LORD and everything in it. If everything is God’s, in what sense is anything mine? And if I am only a steward, can I really be robbed?
What the Word Covers
Three Hebrew words for taking what is not yours
Ganav — the word in this commandment. To take by stealth, secretly, without the owner knowing.
Gazal — to seize openly by force. Robbery rather than theft.
Ashaq — to oppress, defraud, extort. Taking through pressure, position or a rigged arrangement.
The commandment uses the first word. But as with every commandment in the Decalogue, naming one form forbids the whole family—and Israel’s law goes after the third form relentlessly: withheld wages, false weights, moved boundary stones, lending that traps the poor.
There’s an interesting scholarly question worth mentioning here. Some argue the original force of this commandment was kidnapping—the stealing of a person. The same verb is used in Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7, where stealing a man carries the death penalty, and the surrounding commandments all concern persons rather than possessions: life, marriage, reputation.
Most commentators think the commandment is broader than that. But the observation is a useful corrective. Whatever else it forbids, the commandment certainly forbids treating a human being as property—and that gives it something urgent to say about trafficking and bonded labour, which aren’t historical curiosities in much of the world.
The Property Question
Now back to the problem in the opening.
Scripture insists on God’s absolute ownership, and it doesn’t hedge. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). Of the land itself God says, “The land is mine, for you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Leviticus 25:23). Moses warns Israel against ever saying in their hearts, “My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17).
And yet the same law protects private property at every turn, punishes theft, requires restitution, and forbids moving a neighbour’s boundary stone.
Both are true, and holding them together is the whole point. God owns absolutely. Human beings own really, but derivatively. We’re stewards with genuine rights over what has been entrusted to us—and stewards who will give an account.
| POSITION | WHAT IT SAYS | WHERE IT FAILS |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute ownership | What’s mine is mine, to use as I please. And I owe nothing to anyone | It ignores that nothing was self-generated. The owner is a tenant who forgot the landlord. |
| Nothing is really owned | Property is a fiction; taking from the rich isn’t theft | The commandment itself refutes it, and so does every law protecting the poor man’s cloak and the widow’s field. |
| Stewardship | Property is real and protected, but held in trust and subject to obligations | Nowhere—but it’s uncomfortable, because it never lets an owner say “mine” as a conversation-ender. |
One law captures the balance better than any argument. Israelite farmers were told not to reap to the very edges of their fields, and not to go back over the vines a second time, so the poor and the foreigner could gather what was left (Leviticus 19:9–10).
Notice the structure. The field was genuinely his—nobody else could plant it, sell it or harvest the bulk of it. And his claim on it stopped short of the edges. That’s stewardship in one sentence: real ownership, limited claim.
Why Does This Earn a Place in the Ten?
1. Because property is the output of a person
Work isn’t a consequence of the fall. Before there was any sin, humanity was placed in the garden to work it and keep it (Genesis 2:15). Work is part of what it means to bear the image of God who makes things.
So what a person earns isn’t merely stuff. It’s hours of their life, turned into something. To steal is to help yourself to a portion of somebody’s life—which is why the sixth, seventh and eighth commandments belong together. Each takes something from a person that wasn’t offered.
2. Because theft runs downhill
In every society, most theft isn’t committed by desperate people with crowbars. It’s committed by people with leverage, and it flows towards those who cannot resist it.
Israel’s law is strikingly alert to this. A day labourer’s wages had to be paid before sunset, because he is poor and counting on it (Deuteronomy 24:14–15). Weights and measures had to be honest (Leviticus 19:35–36). Boundary stones couldn’t be moved (Deuteronomy 19:14)—a quiet, deniable theft that takes a neighbour’s land a few inches at a time.
James, writing centuries later, has lost none of the heat: he warns us the wages of the labourers who mowed our fields, if kept back by fraud, are crying out against us (James 5:4).
God went further than prohibitions. He built limits into the system itself, so loss couldn’t harden into permanent dispossession.
- Every seventh year, debts between Israelites were released (Deuteronomy 15:1–2).
- Every fiftieth year, at the Jubilee, ancestral land returned to the family that had lost it and Israelites who had sold themselves into service went free (Leviticus 25:10).
- Land, in fact, could never be permanently sold at all—what changed hands was the number of harvests remaining until the next Jubilee, and the price was calculated accordingly (Leviticus 25:15–16).
Read that again and notice what it does. A family could lose everything through misfortune, foolishness or a bad decade, and there was a date on the calendar by which they got their land back. Failure was survivable. Poverty didn’t become a caste.
These were civil laws for one nation in one land, and as we noted earlier in this series they’re not binding on any modern state as written. But they tell us what God thinks about a system in which the same families are permanently at the bottom.
Christopher JH Wright has argued Israel’s economic laws are among the clearest windows we have into God’s concern for the poor, precisely because they address structures rather than only individual conduct.
3. Because we cannot give away what isn’t ours
This argument is easy to miss. And decisive.
Generosity requires ownership. If nothing’s mine, I can’t truly give you anything; I can only redistribute what belongs to everyone—or to someone else. Redistribution may be necessary, but it’s not, by itself, a virtue in the giver. God protects property partly because there must be something we’re free to give away.
Notice how carefully this distinction is preserved in Acts. The early believers shared their possessions with extraordinary freedom. Yet when Ananias lied about the sale of his property, Peter’s rebuke assumes his ownership at every stage: “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?” (Acts 5:4).
Nobody was compelled to give. The property was theirs. The decision was theirs. And precisely because they were free not to give, their generosity meant something. That’s what made it beautiful.
4. Because every theft requires a lie
It’s worth noticing how tightly the eighth and ninth commandments are joined. Theft almost never travels alone.
The burglar relies on concealment. The fraudster relies on a false description. The employer who underpays relies on a story about market rates that he does not believe. The employee claiming hours he did not work relies on a timesheet that is not true. Take deception out of theft and most of it becomes impossible.
This is one reason the Decalogue is a structure rather than a list, as we argued in the introduction to this series. The commandments hold each other up. Break one seriously and you’ll find yourself breaking a second to protect the first.
5. Because theft is a statement about God
Underneath every act of theft is a sentence: God hasn’t given me enough, and I will take what He withheld.
That makes Commandment 8 a first-commandment problem in disguise, and it’s why Commandments 8 and 10 are so closely joined. Theft is what discontent does when it finds an opportunity.
The Many Faces of Theft
Most readers of this article will never break into a house. But very few will get through a year without breaking this commandment.
| FORM | WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE | SCRIPTURE |
|---|---|---|
| Dishonest dealing | Weighted scales, misdescribed goods, hidden faults in what you sell | Proverbs 11:1; Leviticus 19:35–36 |
| Withheld or squeezed wages | Paying late, paying below agreement, structuring work to avoid obligations | Deuteronomy 24:14–15; James 5:4 |
| Time theft | Taking pay for hours you didn’t give; work done badly on purpose | Colossians 3:22–23 |
| Bribery and corruption | Paying or taking for what should be free, or to obtain what’s not deserved | Exodus 23:8 |
| Tax evasion | Concealment and false declaration, as distinct from lawful planning | Romans 13:6–7 |
| Debt not repaid | Borrowing without intending, or without seriously trying, to return it | Psalm 37:21 |
| Taking credit | Plagiarism, passing off another’s work, quietly absorbing a colleague’s idea | Proverbs 22:22 |
| Waste and neglect | Damaging or squandering what was entrusted to you by someone else | Luke 16:1–12 |
| Stealing people | Trafficking, bonded labour, holding a worker’s passport or papers | Exodus 21:16; 1 Timothy 1:10 |
And one more, which Scripture names directly and which most sermons avoid. “Will man rob God? Yet you’re robbing me… in your tithes and contributions” (Malachi 3:8). Whatever a Christian concludes about the mechanics of giving—and we address that below—Scripture is willing to use the language of theft about what is withheld from God.
Work is where most of us meet this commandment
For the majority of readers, this commandment will be tested at work far more often than anywhere else—and in both directions.
Employees can take without ever opening a till: hours claimed but not worked, effort withheld, expenses inflated, a job done to the minimum that will not be noticed. Paul addresses exactly this, telling servants to work heartily as for the Lord and not for people, and adding that they are serving Christ in it (Colossians 3:22–24). A Christian’s work ethic isn’t a matter of temperament. It is an eighth-commandment issue.
Employers can take on a much larger scale, and Scripture treats their version as the graver one. Underpaying because the labour market allows it, delaying payment because cash flow is convenient, classifying staff to avoid obligations, extracting unpaid hours because refusal would cost someone their job—all of this is theft conducted with paperwork.
Two modern errors
This commandment cuts against two opposite instincts, and most readers will feel one more than the other.
The first says if something is legal, it’s permitted. But law is the floor, not the ceiling, and much of the most damaging taking in any economy is entirely lawful. The steward will be asked what he did, not what he could get away with.
The second says because the whole system is unjust, individual taking doesn’t really count. Real injustice exists, and Scripture says more about it than most churches do. But the commandment was given to people who lived under empires and wasn’t suspended on account of them. A person who steals because the system is corrupt has joined it rather than opposed it.
When Is Taking Not Stealing?
Israel’s law is more interesting here than most people expect.
Three cases the law handles carefully
Eating as you pass. “If you go into your neighbour’s vineyard, you may eat your fill of grapes, as many as you wish, but you shall not put any in your bag” (Deuteronomy 23:24). A traveller could satisfy hunger from another man’s field. He couldn’t harvest it. This is the law the disciples were keeping—not breaking—when they picked grain on the Sabbath.
Hunger. “People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his appetite when he is hungry” (Proverbs 6:30). Note what follows in the next verse: he must still repay, and repay heavily. Desperation explains; it does not erase.
Restitution rather than imprisonment. Israel’s ordinary penalty for theft wasn’t a cell. It was repayment with a penalty on top—double, or four and five times over for livestock (Exodus 22:1, 4). The system was built to restore the victim, not merely to punish the offender.
That last point deserves more attention than it gets. Biblical justice for theft is aimed at the person who was robbed. Zacchaeus understood this instinctively: the evidence that salvation had come to his house was that he was giving half his goods away and repaying fourfold what he had defrauded (Luke 19:8–9). Nobody had asked him to.
What the Commandment Requires
Paul gives the fullest positive statement of this commandment anywhere in Scripture.
“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” (Ephesians 4:28)
Notice there are 3 steps, not one. Stop stealing. Work. Give. Paul isn’t satisfied with a reformed thief who now takes nothing; he wants a former thief who has become a source of supply for other people. The remedy for theft isn’t abstention. It is generosity.
| WHAT IT FORBIDS | WHAT IT THEREFORE REQUIRES |
|---|---|
| Taking what belongs to another, openly or by stealth | Honest work, and honest gain |
| Fraud, dishonest weights, misdescription | Truthfulness in every transaction, including the ones nobody audits |
| Withholding or delaying wages | Paying promptly, fully, and above the legal minimum where you can |
| Exploiting the weak because they cannot resist | Actively defending those who are being defrauded |
| Debt neglected and obligations dodged | Repaying what is owed, and restoring what was taken |
| Hoarding as though ownership were absolute | Deliberate, planned generosity—leaving the edges of the field |
| Waste of what has been entrusted to us | Faithful stewardship, including of time and ability |
The One Who Reversed It
3 details from the Gospels sit oddly beside each other. Together they say something.
Jesus was poor. He said the foxes had holes and the birds had nests, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay His head (Matthew 8:20). He owned nothing worth stealing.
His inner circle contained a thief. John records it flatly: Judas kept the moneybag and used to help himself to what was put into it (John 12:6). The betrayal was transacted for 30 pieces of silver.
And He died between 2 thieves, one of whom received the kingdom of God in his final hours having contributed nothing whatsoever to it (Luke 23:43). The dying thief is the clearest picture in Scripture of receiving what we didn’t earn and could never repay.
Paul draws the whole thing together in one sentence: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). That’s the exact inverse of theft. Theft impoverishes another to enrich yourself. The cross impoverished God Himself to enrich others.
And Paul writes that sentence, incidentally, in the middle of an appeal for money for poor Christians in Jerusalem. He isn’t making a theological point in the abstract. He’s asking people to open their wallets. And he’s telling them why.
How This Commandment Is Actually Kept
Not chiefly by locking things up or by scrupulous accounting, though honesty in small sums is where character is actually built.
It’s kept by contentment, because theft grows in the gap between what we have and what we’ve decided we need. And it’s kept by generosity, because a person who is regularly giving things away is very unlikely to be quietly taking them.
Underneath both is a question about God. The thief believes, at some level, provision is his own problem to solve. The Christian has been told our Father knows what we need. That belief either shows up in our bank statement or not at all.
There’s a simple diagnostic worth carrying. Look at the transactions nobody will ever check—the expense claim, the hour on the timesheet, the cash in hand, the download, the item that was undercharged at the till. Character is not what you do under audit. It is what you do when no audit is possible, and this commandment lives almost entirely in that territory.
Next in this series: the ninth commandment. Having protected life, marriage and property, the Decalogue turns to the one possession that can be destroyed with nothing but words.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Is downloading films, music or software without paying really theft?
Yes, though the reasoning has to be stated carefully because nothing physical goes missing. What’s taken isn’t the file but the creators’ right to be paid for their work, and Scripture is emphatic workers deserve wages—Paul quotes the principle twice (1 Timothy 5:18). The argument that a copy costs the maker nothing confuses the price of duplication with the cost of creation, which took years of somebody’s life. Two honest qualifications: laws vary between countries and some claims made by rights holders are excessive, and there’s a real difference between a student in a poor country who cannot access a textbook at any price and a comfortable professional avoiding a subscription. The test isn’t “did anyone notice” but “am I consuming someone’s labour on terms they didn’t agree to”.
Was the early church in Acts communist?
No. The passages describing it are nevertheless genuinely radical and mustn’t be softened. Believers sold property and distributed the proceeds so no one among them was in need (Acts 4:34–35), which is a rebuke to most modern churches. But three features distinguish it from communism as a system. It was voluntary, as Peter’s words to Ananias make explicit: the property was his before the sale and the money his afterwards. It was local and occasional rather than a permanent structure, and the same Jerusalem church later needed collections sent from elsewhere. And no state was involved: nobody was compelled, and nobody’s goods were confiscated. Scripture leaves the ownership of property intact and then applies enormous pressure to how it is used.
Does the Bible forbid charging interest?
The Old Testament forbids charging interest to a fellow Israelite in need (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:35–37) while permitting it to a foreigner (Deuteronomy 23:20), and that distinction is the key to reading it. The loans in view are subsistence loans to a neighbour in distress, and profiting from a brother’s desperation is what is condemned. Calvin argued commercial lending—capital advanced to a business that expects to profit from it—is a different transaction altogether, and Reformed churches have generally followed him. That doesn’t make all lending clean. Interest rates that trap the poor in permanent debt are precisely what the original laws were aimed at, and the modern versions—payday lending, exploitative microfinance, bonded labour dressed as credit—fall squarely under this commandment.
If my employer underpays me, may I make up the difference myself?
No. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And Scripture never permits private restitution taken by stealth—the whole point of this commandment is that people don’t take on their own authority. Taking supplies, hours or money to balance a ledger we’ve calculated privately puts us in the wrong alongside our employers, and it usually costs us the moral standing we’d need to challenge them. What we may and should do is different: ask openly, negotiate, involve a union or a labour authority where one exists, seek other employment, and speak the truth about what’s happening. Where an employer is genuinely defrauding workers, that’s a serious sin which God says He hears about directly (James 5:4). But the remedy belongs to lawful authority and to God, not to a private adjustment.
If I stole in the past, must I confess it and pay it back?
Repentance that costs nothing is usually not repentance. The biblical pattern is restitution wherever restitution is possible, and Zacchaeus is the model: nobody demanded repayment, and he offered fourfold. Begin with what’s practical—who was harmed, how much, and can it be returned or repaid over time. Where the person can’t be traced or the sum is beyond you, an equivalent gift to those in need is a reasonable substitute, and where confessing would seriously harm an innocent third party, take wise counsel before acting. Two cautions: your forgiveness doesn’t depend on repayment, since it rests on Christ’s work rather than yours. And where a criminal matter or an employer is involved you should speak to a pastor and possibly a lawyer before making any disclosure.
Is paying a bribe stealing, if it’s the only way to get something I am already entitled to?
This is one of the hardest practical questions for Christians in much of the world. Scripture condemns bribery repeatedly and mainly addresses the taker, who perverts justice and blinds the clear-sighted (Exodus 23:8), so the greater guilt lies with the official who has turned a public duty into a private toll. That doesn’t make paying innocent, since every payment strengthens the system and makes life harder for the next person, who may not be able to afford it. The distinction most Christian ethicists draw is between a bribe that buys an advantage we aren’t entitled to, which is clearly wrong, and extortion where payment is demanded for a service already owed, which is closer to being robbed than to robbing. Even then the goal should be to resist, to delay, to escalate, and to build a reputation for refusing—many Christians in corrupt systems have found the reputation itself eventually reduces the demands.
Am I robbing God if I don’t tithe?
Malachi’s charge is real, but it was addressed to Israel under a covenant with a specific system of tithes supporting the temple, the priests and the poor. The New Testament does not repeat the ten per cent figure as a law. What it does instead is arguably more demanding: give regularly and in proportion to income (1 Corinthians 16:2), generously, cheerfully, and as a deliberate decision rather than a reflex (2 Corinthians 9:7). Many Christians use the tithe as a sensible starting benchmark rather than a ceiling, and it seems wise. What no Christian should conclude is that freedom from a fixed percentage means freedom from the obligation, or that giving nothing is a legitimate application of grace.
CONTINUE THE SERIES: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
This post is part of our series working through the Ten Commandments. It follows Why God Gave the 10 Commandments—And Why These 10?, The First Commandment: Why Does God Demand Exclusive Worship?, The Second Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Idols?, The Third Commandment: What Does “Taking God’s Name in Vain” Mean?, The Fourth Commandment: Why Did God Command a Day of Rest?, The Fifth Commandment: Why Must We Honour Our Parents?, The Sixth Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Murder?, and The Seventh Commandment: Why Does God Care About Adultery?.
Related Reads
- Why God Gave the 10 Commandments—And Why These 10?
- The First Commandment: Why Does God Demand Exclusive Worship?
- The Second Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Idols?
- The Third Commandment: What Does “Taking God’s Name in Vain” Mean?
- The Fourth Commandment: Why Did God Command a Day of Rest?
- The Fifth Commandment: Why Must We Honour Our Parents?
- The Sixth Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Murder?
- The Seventh Commandment: Why Does God Care About Adultery?
- The Ninth Commandment: Why Does God Care About Truth?
- The Tenth Commandment: Why Does God Care About What We Desire?
- Bribery and Corruption in the Bible: What Scripture Teaches
- More than Tithing: How Grace Motivates Sacrificial Giving
