Thou shalt not steal

"Thou shalt not steal" is one of the Ten Commandments of the Torah, which are widely understood as moral imperatives by legal scholars, Jewish scholars, Catholic scholars, and Post-Reformation scholars.

"Steal" in this commandment has traditionally been interpreted by Jewish commentaries to refer to the stealing of an actual human being, that is, to kidnapping. With this understanding, a contextual translation of the commandment in Jewish tradition would more accurately be reflected as "Thou shalt not kidnap", with kidnapping being a capital offence and thus included among the Ten Commandments.

Nevertheless, and especially in non-Jewish traditions, the commandment has come to commonly and colloquially be understood or interpreted to prohibit the unauthorized taking of private property, or theft, which is a wrongful action that does not ordinarily incur the death penalty and is prohibited elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.

Ancient usage

Significant voices of academic theologians (such as German Old Testament scholar A. Alt: Das Verbot des Diebstahls im Dekalog (1953)) suggest that commandment "you shall not steal" was originally intended against stealing people—against abductions and slavery, in agreement with the Talmudic interpretation of the statement as "you shall not kidnap" (Sanhedrin 86a).