A man left a dinar — a single silver coin — with a woman for safekeeping. She didn't want to forget where she had put it. She dropped it into a jar of flour and went about her day.
Later that week, without thinking, she scooped flour from that same jar and baked a loaf of bread. Later still, she gave that loaf to a poor man who came to the door.
By the time the owner returned for his coin, the coin was gone — eaten, probably, in pieces of bread by a hungry stranger.
The woman had every reason to confess the mistake. Instead she panicked. She took an oath, invoking the Name of the Holy One, and swore she had never received the coin at all.
Within days, one of her children died.
The Midrash of the Ten Commandments preserves this story as a commentary on the third commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain" (Exodus 20:7; Gaster, Exempla No. 377).
The story is deliberately harsh. The woman had done nothing fraudulent with the coin itself — she had not spent it, pocketed it, or plotted to steal. She had, by sheer accident, given it away as tzedakah to a hungry man. Heaven might even have blessed her for that.
But when she swore a false oath on the Name, she crossed a line that no accident could excuse. The sin was not the lost coin. The sin was the casual use of the Name to cover an embarrassment.
The Torah warns us because words to God are not like words to neighbors. A false oath is not a social fib; it is a tear in the fabric that holds language and truth together. The Midrash taught through this cruel little story that heaven takes oaths literally, even when we do not.