Prohibition of coveting

The Prohibition of coveting is the Decalogue’s closing commandment: it forbids coveting a neighbor’s house, wife, servants, ox, donkey, or anything else belonging to the neighbor. By naming both a household’s goods and its relationships, the commandment reaches beyond outward acts of taking to the desire that can precede them.

The Commandment at Sinai

The prohibition appears at the end of the laws delivered at Sinai. It follows commands against murder, adultery, theft, and false testimony, then specifies the neighbor’s house, wife, male and female servants, ox, and donkey before encompassing anything else that is the neighbor’s. The sequence places coveting alongside concrete violations of another person’s life, marriage, property, and standing.

Household, Property, and Kinship

The commandment’s list treats a household as more than a collection of possessions: it includes a spouse and servants as well as livestock and a dwelling. Its repeated reference to the neighbor marks these as relationships and resources that belong within another household’s sphere, not objects available for appropriation.

The wider narrative repeatedly makes family position and household claims consequential: Sarah demands that Hagar and her son be sent away so that her son Isaac will inherit; Jacob’s wives and their handmaids bear children whose place in the family is narrated; and Jacob adopts Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh and assigns them standing among his own sons. These episodes are not presented as applications of the commandment, but they illuminate the social stakes of its attention to spouses, household members, and what belongs to another.

Scope and Significance

The final phrase extends the rule beyond its examples to anything belonging to a neighbor. The command therefore names desire itself as a concern within the law, rather than limiting its reach to the completed acts of theft or adultery prohibited earlier in the Decalogue. Its closing position gathers the preceding protections of neighborly life and household security into a prohibition on wanting what is another’s.