Should a legal system based upon the Bible include private property rights?

The Bible is pro-private property rights. There are many passages that support this. Accordingly, all Governments — throughout the world, nationally, and locally — should protect private property rights. God knows that personal ownership of private property is fundamental to every individual’s ability to express his best possible self as a reflection of his being created in God’s image (I will unpack that idea in this study). In addition, private property rights are fundamental to personal and national fruitfulness (we will see examples of this in what follows also). So read on, my friend, and learn more about how you can justify such beliefs based upon what God has said in His Word.


This is most definitely a personal opinion question. Different people are going to feel quite strongly about various answers. Some people are going to emphatically favor this type of legal system while others are going to emphatically be against it. My recommendation is to pick whichever argument you feel more passionately about. Your reader will "hear" that passion. My other recommendation is to consider who your reader is. Is he/she likely to want one answer over the other. If that is the case, then consider giving your reader the information he/she wants.
Regardless of how you answer this question, it is a persuasive argument. A strong thesis is needed, and then at a minimum three pieces of support. If an argument only has a single piece of supporting evidence, the argument doesn't come across that forcefully.
Personally, I would argue in favor of a legal system that is based on biblical teachings and includes laws about private property rights. I think arguments could be made that many other legal rights systems are based on biblical principles; therefore, the private property rights should be as well. Otherwise, it appears that certain things are being singled out to be biblical, while others are not. I think this will lead to more problems than anything else. Additionally, being based on something doesn't mean it is following every single aspect of it in a word-for-word fashion. Let's use book to movie adaptations for a parallel comparison. There are plenty of times that a movie states that it is based upon a book. Readers always notice the changes that are made, in order to adapt that book into a movie. The movie isn't exactly like the book anymore; it's based on the book. The core of the story is still there, but certain things were changed to work best in a new medium. Laws about property rights can work the same way. They can be based on biblical principles, but they can be adapted to modern day societal norms.

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