“The Book Thief” is a 2013 film that follows a young German girl from the borrowing of her first book at the graveside of her little brother, through her formative years in a backwater German town whose citizens fight a minute-to-minute battle to survive World War II, to the start of the writing of her first book in the basement and the loss of her family upstairs and her closest friend next door.

My favorite line is a response voiced twice in the movie: “It wasn’t always mine.”

Her new Papa asks her if the “The Gravedigger’s Manual” (the first of the line of her borrowed books) “is yours?” Later, the young girl asks the refugee hiding in the house if the book he carries is “your book?”

On each occasion, the response is the same: “It wasn’t always mine.”

It wasn’t always mine. Two books. Borrowed.

Two thieves?

Books have been with us for a long time.

The definition of “book” on the Internet is: “A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.” Today, we have e-books you can read on hand-held, pad and tablet. We have recorded books for playback and listen-up. None of these meet the Internet “bound” definition, but they are nonetheless “books” and equally enjoyed for the boundless stories they present.

The first book ever written may be “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” That book didn’t meet the Internet definition either. King Gilgamesh of Sumeria and his amazing adventures were recorded in cuneiform writing (chiseled wedge-shaped characters) on clay tablets. The oldest fragments of this first written story date to around 2100 BC — roughly 4,000 years ago.

That was the first “book.”

Who was the first “thief?”

By the way, a “thief” is defined on the Internet as “a person who steals another person’s property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence.” Today, most thieves, unlike many books, would probably slip within the Internet definition.

The first thief is in the book most often guessed to be the oldest book. The Bible is not the oldest written story – though many believe it to be. The Bible is old. The oldest section of the Bible is the book of Job. The sufferings of Job were likely scribed around 600 BC – some 2,700 years back from the future.

Retuning to the Bible and the first theft, in the first book of Genesis, the third chapter, the text reads: “She took some and ate it.” That was Eve, the wife of Adam, plucking fruit, at the Serpent’s suggestion, from the forbidden tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden. “She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” There you have it! The first theft was committed by Adam and Eve as co-perpetrators.

Though it was recorded later in time in the book of Genesis than the earlier writing of the Gilgamesh saga, the story in the Garden had to have occurred at an earlier point. Adam and Eve were Gilgamesh’s first parents and necessarily older — if not much older.

Interestingly, the scene of the first crime, the Garden of Eden, may be at the same general location as that of the first book. Gilgamesh’s Sumeria and Eve’s Eden are thought to have been situated somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is modern-day Iraq. There, King Gilgamesh ruled in the City of Uruk around 2700 BC (almost 5,000 years ago), long before his story was first chiseled into clay. This suggests that the written story was itself pilfered from a much older oral tradition, as was the theft of Adam and Eve, which necessarily was taken from an even older oral tradition.

We see, then, that the first story in the first written book wasn’t always the author’s: The writer borrowed Gilgamesh from another more ancient source.

We see, also, that the first thing taken in the oldest story wasn’t always the thieves’: Adam and Eve borrowed the fruit from another more ancient source. In turn, we see that the story of the theft was itself appropriated from an older tale of another’s first telling.

Like the borrowings of the little girl and the refugee in “The Book Thief,” the story of the first book and the story of the first theft appear to have similar origins: “It wasn’t always mine.”

In all the cases, the response is to something borrowed from someone else that by the act of the borrowing changed completely the course of things to come.

Perhaps, there is little that is truly ours, most is borrowed, what we have wasn’t always mine, and by the actions of our transfer we have become involved and, to some extent, accountable for what did and will happen?

Grandpa Jim