EXOD465 In the Ten Commandments, "You shall not steal" appears in the singular form and is understood by the sages to refer to the act of kidnapping and the selling of slaves. The injunction against stealing in its usual sense appears in the Bible in Leviticus [19:11] in the plural. Answering a Chasid's question as to this distinction, a Chasidic master replied, "Kidnapping of men for sale as slaves is a marginal act in our society, whereas common theft and fraud is something we are all too guilty of." No functioning economic society can exist for very long without a legal system to prevent fraud. It would be misleading, however, to consider the communal edicts, halakhic decisions, and homiletic literature against theft, in its widest connotations, as simply constituting Jewish interpretations of a universally accepted dictum. Rather, the majority of authorities (in contrast to Maimonides [Shmoneh Perakim, chapter 6], saw the prevention of theft or dishonesty as part of a distinctly Jewish socioreligious morality based on the notion of the Divine source of wealth. [Malbim, Commentary on the Bible, Exodus 20]. The Divine source of wealth makes all form of theft and dishonesty religious crimes, over and above their social aspects. Furthermore, society's concept of morality, economic and otherwise, are flexible, and change from one generation to another and one cultural group to another. However, forbidding stealing as part of a Divinely related law makes the injunction definitive and absolute, and provides a yardstick that cannot be blurred by conventionally accepted infringements.