The Capital Sin Of Kidnapping

The supreme form of theft is stealing a human, and it is a sin that demands the death of the wrongdoer (Exodus 21:16), whereas theft of mere property is treated much less severely.  There are many reasons why someone might abduct another person.  Perhaps they want to hold them for ransom, or perhaps it is meant to be a disorienting act of personal revenge.  It could be to sell them to another party for profit or to make them work as a slave for the kidnapper.  It could also be a prelude to another capital sin like rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) or murder (Exodus 21:12).  There is no single possible motivation for such an act.

The kidnapping is in all circumstances, irregardless of what comes next, what the Bible labels a capital sin.  There does not have to be enslavement or the selling of a human being or murder or sexual abuse for the sin of kidnapping to deserve death.  As Exodus 21:16 says, the act itself merits the killing of the perpetrator no matter if the victim was sold or kept by the abductor.  Even so, many instances of unjust enslavement and labor, physical assault, murder, and sexual abuse, not limited to just nonconsensual sex, could be avoided entirely if kidnapping was not practiced or if it was caught and swiftly reacted to in this way.

Though Deuteronomy 24:7 is specifically speaking of the fellow Israelites the original recipients of Mosaic Law would have lived among, not only does it still emphasize that execution is the just reaction to abduction of Israelites, but Exodus 21:16 had also already clarified very early in Yahweh's moral revelation that to kidnap anyone at all is both evil and a capital crime; the same laws apply to natives and foreigners (Leviticus 24:22) because the same moral obligations and rights are shared by all people.  Nationality, gender, race, age, and religion do not have anything to do with this, although devotees of religion that are logically impossible or without evidence are of course fools, but not fools without the same baseline value as other humans.

Mosaic Law is with so many things the only clear or direct place in the Bible where moral issues are explored thoroughly.  It is also not the case that kidnapping is never directly addressed as a universal sin in the New Testament, though the general prohibition of theft in both testaments would already by necessity indirectly condemn the ultimate expression of theft in the stealing of an actual person.  In 1 Timothy 1:8-11, Paul mentions slave trading alongside murder and homosexual behaviors as sins that obviously defy the obligations revealed in Yahweh's laws, and slave trading cannot occur without one type of abduction or another.  Again, the selling, unjust confinement, or stealing of a human is justly responded to with execution in every case.

One cannot kidnap God, but one can abduct the beings fashion in the divine image, and like murder or rape, kidnapping deserves the most harsh of God's required punishments--not because mere death is a worse fate than many tortures of ancient pagan and contemporary societies, but because it is the worst of the morally permissible or mandatory penalties.  Many forms of torture are universally evil and objectively far worse, even aside from the moral aspects, than simple execution, and kidnapping is among the sins singled out as deserving the most severe human treatment which does not go beyond justice into far greater evils than abduction.