You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
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"I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me."
"You shall not murder."
"You shall not put the Lord your God to the test."
"And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God."
"And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend."
Exodus 20:17, one of the Ten Commandments given to Moses.
Date: c. 13th-15th century BCE (traditional dating)
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Don't let yourself burn with desire for what belongs to someone else—their home, their spouse, their workers, their possessions, or anything that's theirs. This isn't just about avoiding theft; it's about policing your inner life. Wanting what others have poisons contentment, breeds resentment, and eventually drives harmful action. The command targets thought itself, insisting that ethics begins in the heart before it ever shows up in behavior.
Moses delivered this as the tenth commandment at Sinai, unique among the ten for regulating internal desire rather than external acts. As lawgiver shaping a former slave population into a covenant nation, he understood that societies collapse when envy festers. Having fled Egypt after killing a man and spent forty years shepherding, Moses knew how grievance and longing corrode character, and he anchored Israelite ethics in restraint of the heart itself.
In the Late Bronze Age Near East, roughly the 13th century BCE, household wealth meant land, livestock, servants, and wives—listed here as property under patriarchal norms. Surrounding legal codes like Hammurabi's punished theft and adultery but rarely legislated inward thought. Israelite tribal society, newly freed from Egyptian bondage and lacking courts or kings, depended on voluntary restraint among neighbors sharing close quarters, making an internalized ethic of non-envy essential to communal survival.
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