Respect of Property

When I was living in the Netherlands a friend of mine asked me to help him pick up a Mercedes for a friend. My friend asked if I wanted to drive the Mercedes. Heck yeah! As a twenty-one year old I didn’t even calculate the risk of driving someone else’s very expensive car in unfamiliar territory. I was just excited that I could now tell everyone I met, “I drove a Mercedes!” I drove responsibly – mostly because I was following my friend in his car – and no damage was done. But what if I got into an accident? What if this very expensive car was carjacked while I was the one in the driver’s seat? I didn’t think of any of that all those years ago, but I think about it now. And if community is going to work, respect for other people’s stuff will need to be encouraged.

And in Exodus 22:1-15 respect for other people’s property is exactly what God demands in this set of guiding principles. How do you encourage respect of ownership? Let’s say a person steals an ox – a farm implement – and slaughters it to feed himself and his family, or sells the beast. Well, in that case said thief was required to pay five oxen to replace the one he stole. The goal here is not about fairness, the goal is to derail thievery. If you understand that if you are caught you are going to have to pay five oxen, you are really going to think hard about taking another person’s ox. And if a flock animal is stolen, slaughtered, or sold, the restitution price is four flock animals. Again, the goal is to keep community working. If there is not consequence, no stiff penalty, there will be no respect of property rights. Verses 2-3 deal with a thief that breaks in and then verse 4 deals with stolen animals that are found alive in the thief’s possession. Some have seen this is a separate issue thrown into the middle of the guiding principles dealing with animals. However, in the Middle East, the average household had a room in their house for the animals to bed down for the night. It was only the wealthy who had a detached stable. So, if a person breaks in to steal an animal and in the process finds himself dead, the owner of the house will not be held guilty, unless it is daytime. The idea is most likely that if the sun had risen he would be able to see the thief and allow the authorities to exact the appropriate penalty. In the middle of the night and in his house where his family is also sleeping, the owner has a right to use extreme force to protect property and family. If the animal is found alive in the possession of the thief, the restitution price is double.

The next guiding principles deal with negligence that leads to loss of crops. If a person is careless with his grazing animals; if he has let them consume his own field and then sends them out and they consume another person’s crop, he was required to make restitution from the best of his crops. You cannot pay the debt with last year’s moldy leftovers. If a person allows a fire to get out of control and that fire destroys already harvested grain or a field, the person who started the fire is responsible to make restitution. Though we are not told, because of the similarity and close proximity, the payment was most likely to come from the offender’s best produce. If community is to work, negligence that leads to damage must be compensated. We feel the necessity of this don’t we?

What if you are hired to keep money or property for someone and a thief steals the item or items? If the thief is caught he must pay double the cost of the items. If a thief cannot be produced the person who was keeping the items must appear before God and somehow his guilt – you know if he took the items himself and claimed a thief took them – or innocence will be determined. The word translated “judges” here is Elohim “God”. And for every record of transgression concerning property, when there is a dispute, both parties are to appear before God. Whoever God determines to be guilty must pay double. How this is to be done we are not told. What if you pay someone to keep your animals and it is killed or maimed? The person in possession of the animals makes a vow before Yahweh that he was not culpable. That was considered sufficient. A vow was a much more serious thing back then. Maybe we should learn something here. What if somebody borrows an animal and it dies. Can you say restitution boys and girls? Sure, I knew you could. What if he rented it? The rent covers the risk of loss.

My parents taught me to be more careful with other people’s stuff than my own. There is a responsibility here that honors or disrespects community. This is more important than things. It is about respect for the other person; their belongings and their livelihood. Community works only if I respect.