Through the Flaming Sword

Thou shalt not covet.

On the face of it, this commandment seems to prohibit inner desire for something that is not yours. But that connotation breaks radically from all the other commandments with its focus on the inner life. The other commandments, and indeed all of Torah, quite consistently and definitely focus on the outer life. Sin in biblical religion is about action, not thought; it’s about what you do, not how you feel.

When Jesus said, Whoever looks at a woman with lust in his heart commits adultery with her, he was giving us a radical innovation of biblical moral faith. The Essenes were the first to go there in their rules and writings some time after 165 BCE, but Jesus took it to a new level. We have retrojected his moral sensibilities back onto Hebrew scripture and onto this commandment in particular.

If this commandment is about outward action, not inward feeling, then it prohibits actions that would deliver on these desires. That is, the tenth commandment prohibits swindling; it prohibits stealing by deceit. (Outright theft is covered by Thou shalt not steal.) It’s a “white collar crime” rather than burglary or robbery. Specifically, the tenth commandment prohibits latifundia, loan-sharking that uses debt as a weapon with which to seize other people’s property unlawfully. 

This commandment lies behind Isaiah’s famous oracle in Isaiah 5:8: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left alone in the midst of the land! The Lord of Hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant.”

Note that, in this context, coveting a wife or servant is not about lust, it’s about property. If your debt is deep enough, you have to hand over people in your family or household as debt slaves, who will pay off your debt with their labor as a kind of indentured servant. The maximum term of service is seven years, according to Deuteronomy. But in the meantime, and assuming your creditor follows Torah in this manner, he has your unpaid labor at his disposal.

Ever since Ronald Reagan repealed our usury laws and allowed banks to charge more or less whatever interest they wanted, banks and other lenders have become legalized loan sharks. Now our entire economy is in violation of the tenth commandment, but the coveters are not people, but corporations in their status as legal persons. Note that in Torah, and in the gospel of Jesus, it is illegal to charge interest on a loan at all.

Louisiana’s ruling elites are probably pretty focused on the wives and maidservants, and on coveting as lusting, given how obsessed some conservative Christians are with sex. But they will be teaching the kids in the schoolrooms they bedeck with their posters a false understanding of this commandment and failing to teach them about God’s good news for the poor, which Jesus proclaimed, namely, that we shall do whatever we can to keep people free in Christ from debt, starting with “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”