English: “Cursed is he who moves his neighbor’s landmark” — this is one who steals land secretly. Another interpretation: this is one who switches his neighbor’s boundaries, so that a person should not say to his fellow “up to here is mine and up to here is yours” while moving the landmark.
The curse is given two concrete referents: outright secret theft of land and the subtler act of shifting boundary markers.
Type of Learning
Custom (phrase-by-phrase or midrashic expansion of the verse).
What Is Learned
The midrash extracts concrete legal, historical or theological referents from the wording of the passuk, giving the brief biblical language a fuller operational meaning.