At our Tikkun Layl Shavuot last week, Bruce Elman — a retired law professor and dean, an expert on Constitutional law — asked a deceptively simple question: Why does the Ninth Commandment use two different words?

In Shemot, the prohibition reads: Lo ta’aneh b’re’aykha eyd sheker — “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour” — using sheker, a deliberate falsehood, an outright lie.

In Devarim, Moses restates it: Lo ta’aneh b’re’aykha eyd shav — nearly identical, but the final word shifts to shav — “vain,” “misleading,” “deceptive.” Not necessarily a lie. Something more insidious.

The Torah, it turns out, gave us a taxonomy of falsehood long before the internet did.

Rashi reads shav as a broadening: where sheker in Exodus governs formal legal testimony, shav in Deuteronomy extends the prohibition to all speech, in all contexts, always. Ramban (Nachmonides) goes further — sheker is the lie you know you’re telling; shav is the false impression you create without technically lying at all: the selective omission, the misleading framing, the out-of-context statistic. The Sforno renders shav as “empty” — speech drained of truth-content, performing information while conveying none. The repetition is not redundant. It is a moral expansion.

In........

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