Honest Weights and Measures
Across the Abrahamic and Dharmic traditions, the integrity of the merchant's scale is treated as a sacred trust, not a mere commercial detail.
The Torah commands, 'You shall have honest scales, honest weights' (Leviticus 19:36), and the Qur'an warns the defrauders 'who, when they measure for themselves, take in full, but when they measure or weigh for others, give less' (Surah Al-Mutaffifin 83:1-3). Ancient marketplaces ran on trust, and the dishonest weight was the archetypal sin against the community because it stole invisibly, transaction by transaction. The deeper teaching is that wealth gained through deception carries a hidden debt that erodes the soul long before it erodes the reputation. Honest dealing, by contrast, builds the one asset money cannot buy: a name people trust. Behavioral economics confirms that trust is the true currency of commerce — markets with high trust have lower transaction costs and compound prosperity faster.
A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.
Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed that 'virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,' and that much economic backwardness can be explained by a lack of mutual confidence — a precise modern restatement of the ancient law of honest weights.
Hebrew Bible
Written about in
- What the prosperity traditions say about truth and lying
The library carries this principle twice, under nearly the same title, one of very few repetitions among the 108. The second entry adds the Qur'anic version and a sharper claim: deception erodes the one who profits from it long before it touches his reputation.