The Ninth Commandment--and the Tenth

A noble knight of God confronts the Seven Deadly Sins.

“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.”

This passage is awkwardly split into two commandments in the traditional Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish formulation. This requires a bit of rewriting:

9. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s goods.

The argument for this is that otherwise you are classifying spouse as a belonging, which is wrong—not just to us moderns, but to traditional Jewish thought.

On the other hand, this would seem to condemn the same sin, “covetousness,” twice.

But one covets a person in a special way. The Hebrew word here can mean either “covet” or “lust.” One does not lust after Lamborghinis.

So it is two sins, lust and covetousness. You shall not lust after another’s wife or husband; you shall not covet anything that belongs to another.

Most interesting about these two commandments is that they presuppose the ability to control our desires. They are saying the desire is sinful, regardless of the action.

This goes against current received wisdom, which holds that desires and urges are like the weather; we can only control whether we act on them or not.

And the modern teaching, thanks to Freud, is that we should indeed whenever possible act on them. Otherwise we are repressed. And will no doubt over time go mad.

Yet we also know this is not true, if we stop and think for a moment.

Because, after all, we hold people responsible for “hate,” and punish them for it. When we marry, we vow “to love and to cherish.” Obviously, we could not do so if we thought the ability to love or cherish was out of our control.

No doubt it takes discipline to learn not to lust, not to envy. It takes discipline to be moral in general. Emotions can be addictions, and grow worse if we indulge them.

Developing good character is a matter of fighting such addictions.