Introduction

The prohibition of robbery (ha-gezel) is the sixth Noahide law. In the rabbinic attempt to derive these laws from Gen. 2:16, this prohibition is found in the words, “from every tree of the garden you may surely eat, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil you may not eat.” The transgression of the command was considered to be tantamount to robbing God. By extension, then, robbing humans was considered prohibited. On the level of plain meaning, this prohibition makes the most evident sense from the wording of the verse than the other prohibitions.

The prohibition of robbery requires the concept of property. If society is a human necessity, then most would agree that at the minimal level it functions as medium for economic exchange, of things between persons. There is division of labor, because exchange presupposes that different persons are related to different things in different ways. This relation of people to things is what we call property. Society prescribes the rules whereby these relations change.

The necessary prohibition of robbery, if there is to be a consistent systemof division of labor, is brought out with great cogency by Saadiah Gaon:

The Double Standard of Robbery

As noted previously, there are a number of distinctions between Jewish and Noahide law concerning robbery. We are dealing with four possible relations: a gentile robbing another gentile; a gentile robbing a Jew; a Jew robbing a gentile; and a Jew robbing another Jew.