The Principle
The Eighth Commandment - "Thou shalt not steal" - is one of the most structurally significant legal texts in human history. In eight Hebrew words (lo tignov), it does something legally profound: by prohibiting theft, it presupposes and protects the institution of private property. You cannot steal what no one owns. The commandment thus encodes two legal ideas simultaneously: that property rights exist, and that the law will enforce them against violation. This double move - from divine command to legal entitlement - is the theological foundation on which Western property law was built, and its influence runs from Moses through Aquinas through Blackstone through Locke to the U.S. Constitution's takings clause.
Biblical Foundation
Exodus 20:15 states simply: "Thou shalt not steal." The Deuteronomy parallel (5:19) repeats it identically. The commandment's simplicity is part of its power: it admits of no exceptions, qualifications, or class distinctions. The same prohibition applies to taking from the rich, the poor, the neighbor, or the stranger.
The broader Mosaic law elaborated the principles underlying the prohibition. Exodus 22:1-4 specified restitution: "If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep." The restitutionary logic - requiring more than what was taken - both punished the thief and affirmed the property right by requiring restoration of what was violated.
Leviticus 19:11 extended the prohibition explicitly: "Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another." The grouping of theft with deception reflects the understanding that property rights extend beyond tangible objects to rights created by honest dealing.
Romans 13:9 lists the prohibition alongside other Decalogue commands as the content of the commandment to "love thy neighbour as thyself" - giving the property right a relational grounding: to respect another's property is to respect their personhood.
Historical Transmission
The early church fathers developed the theology of property through commentary on the Eighth Commandment. Ambrose of Milan's De Officiis (c. 386 CE) argued that property was a divine institution but that its use was socially obligated - owners were stewards rather than absolute lords. This framework, which protected private property while insisting on its moral limits, became the dominant Catholic understanding.
Aquinas in Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q. 66) offered the most sophisticated medieval account, distinguishing between the power to procure and dispense property (which he argued was individual) and the use of property (which he argued must serve the common good). Theft, for Aquinas, was the violation of a right established by both natural law and divine command; but extreme need could justify taking another's property without consent - a principle canon lawyers developed into the doctrine of necessity.
Medieval canon law explicitly cited the Eighth Commandment as divine warrant for the inviolability of private ownership and elaborated detailed property rules around it. The canonist glosses on the Decretum built a comprehensive law of property on the biblical foundation.
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) offered the most influential modern theory of property, and his argument was explicitly theological: God gave the earth to mankind in common, but individuals acquire property by mixing their labor with natural resources, and this labor-created property is protected by natural law - which Locke understood as divine law. The argument drew on Genesis 1:28 (the creation mandate to subdue the earth) as its theological starting point. Locke's labor theory of property became the philosophical basis for Anglo-American property law's treatment of ownership as a natural right.
Blackstone in his Commentaries called property one of the "absolute rights" of Englishmen given by God and guaranteed by law. His account directly informed the American founding generation's understanding of property rights as pre-political and divinely grounded.
Key Champions
John Locke (1632-1704) is the decisive figure in transmitting biblical property theology into modern constitutional law. His Two Treatises shaped James Madison's understanding of property as a right that government exists to protect rather than to create. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) in De Jure Belli ac Pacis had earlier argued from natural law - grounded in divine reason - that property rights were universal and enforceable across legal systems. William Blackstone carried the synthesis into the English legal tradition from which American law derived.
Modern Application
The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause - "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" - is the U.S. Constitution's most direct institutional expression of the biblical property right. In Kelo v. City of New London (2005), the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling allowing the use of eminent domain for economic development sparked enormous controversy; Justice O'Connor's dissent argued that the ruling undermined the foundational principle that government cannot simply take a citizen's property for another private party's benefit - an argument whose deeper roots lie in the biblical tradition she was too secular to cite explicitly.
In Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (1992), Justice Scalia's majority opinion held that a regulation eliminating all economic value of property constituted a taking requiring compensation, citing the historical background of the Takings Clause. Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City (1978) established the modern balancing test for regulatory takings, with Justice Brennan's majority opinion implicitly weighing property rights as presumptively protected.
Scholarly Debate
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous claim that "property is theft" (1840) inverted the Eighth Commandment's logic to argue that private property itself was the original violation - the enclosure of what had been common. Karl Marx developed this into a systematic critique of private property as structurally exploitative. Against this, defenders of property rights from Locke onward have argued that property rights are both divinely mandated and empirically necessary for freedom and prosperity. The tension between the Eighth Commandment's protection of property and the Jubilee's mandatory redistribution reflects a genuine biblical tension between property as right and property as social obligation that both traditions are drawing on.
Comparative Perspective
Islamic law similarly protects private property through the prohibition of ghasb (usurpation) and sariqa (theft), with the Qur'an prescribing severe penalties for theft (Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:38). The Islamic conception, like the biblical, holds that God is the ultimate owner of all property (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:284) and that human ownership is stewardship - a philosophical framework that produced similar debates about the moral limits of property rights. Both traditions distinguish between the right to hold property and the obligation to use it responsibly, though they reach somewhat different conclusions about how much redistribution divine law requires.