The Purpose of the Tenth Commandment
The previous article explained that the purpose of the Sixth through Ninth Commandments was to keep the state from violating inalienable rights such as life, marriage, property and justice. This final Commandment was the perfect conclusion to the Ten Statements of good governance because it put a cap on the state’s role and power in everything else that was not specifically enumerated as a state function.
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An earlier article explained that the Decalogue was addressed to the elders; i.e. governing officials and understood as being primarily concerning their authority and responsibility. We will examine that first and then the secondary applications for all citizens of Israel (and perhaps for all humans). In that light let us examine the principle for good governance in the final Tenth Commandment. See below:
Exod 20:17— “You [governing elders] shall not covet your neighbor’s house,…wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
This probably is the most misunderstood of the ten. As with the other commandments the personal pietistic interpretation simply sees them as moral precepts instead of governmental policy. But the Hebrew word (chamad) translated “covet” has two meanings, both to covet and to take (Josh 7:21; Micah 2:2). Both intent and action. Jesus in Mk 10:19 spoke of covetousness as a sin of action – to defraud or deprive someone of what belongs to them.
Robert Ingram in The World Under God’s Law explains it this way: “It does not say, ‘Thou shalt not covet a hat like Mrs. Jones’, …It says you must not want Mrs. Jones’ hat. …[That is] the difference between a crime and a bad disposition.” You can’t have what belongs to your “neighbor.” It is more than the emotion; it is the scheme and action to take it.
So this commandment (especially in light of the rephrasing by Jesus) meant the prohibition of fraud, coercion or deceit to obtain something belonging to another. Notably, it is not just the material goods (i.e. “house” “ox”) of another person, but their legal relationships as well (i.e “wife”, “servant”). It is all encompassing when it says “anything that is your neighbor’s.” Being inclusive of relationships shows that it is about every private decision that an individual makes. Those are to be sovereign liberties that no one can interfere with, so long as a citizen’s choices do not violate the previously-identified inalienable rights of life, marriage, property, and justice (for example, no one has a private right to kill a preborn baby because such a choice violates the right to life. Also the choice of a marriage partner cannot violate the natural binary family created for producing and raising children.)
Since the primary audience was the governing leaders (i.e. elders), then the first group that is prohibited from doing this is the state itself. Ancient pagan governments (and many throughout history) claimed authority to control all spheres of life and were totalitarian over the private sectors of society. Here God tells Israel that government leaders must not deprive citizens of their rights by seizing control or regulating the private sector, nor permit citizens to interfere in their neighbor’s affairs. The state must stay out of the individual’s sovereign private choices (unless they violate an inalienable right such as life, property, marriage, or justice), and the state also must keep citizens from intruding on each other’s decisions. Understood in this is freedom of thought and of speech and of religion. The state cannot deprive a person’s rights of conscience.
A simple restatement, then, of the tenth commandment is: Your government shall not violate individual sovereignty/liberty of its citizens. And its job secondarily is to keep all other citizens from interfering in each other’s freedoms.
So, this Tenth Commandment is extremely important. After identifying specific things that the state must not do, and identifying the supreme importance of the family institution and individual inalienable rights, here God says for the state to stay out of everything else. All other powers are reserved to other institutions and sovereign citizens. The U.S. Constitution said essentially the same thing in its Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The idea is for the government to give maximum freedom to its citizens; do not try to regulate everything. The state may give incentives to private citizens to “love their neighbor” by defending each other’s rights and taking responsibility for their welfare. The 8th commandment prohibited the state acquiring property (i.e. not steal), but this commandment regarding coveting prohibits it from infringing on another kind of property – internal, i.e. on the liberty of the citizen to make decisions about everything else.
This is important due to the nature of covetousness. Jesus in Mk 10:19 refused the desire of the young man who asked Jesus to make his brother divide the inheritance with him. Often, we will turn to others, even the state, to do our covetous work. This was illustrated in the story of the two women who came before Solomon in 1 Kgs 3, each claiming that the same baby was her own. Ingram notes that: “Just as the forces of law can be used to punish wickedness, they also can be misused to accomplish wickedness ….Just as some people are prone to use the force of government to harm an enemy by bearing false witness against him, so some people would use the force of government to seize another’s man’s property by entering a false claim to a rightful share. Both actions are themselves criminal.”
Ingram adds another insight: “…There is a universal mark of the covetous person. Like the false mother before Solomon, he says, ‘Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it (1 Kgs 3:26).’ If I can’t have what belongs to somebody else, destroy it. For someone else to have what I have not is ‘unfair.’ If I can’t be rich, then divide the wealth, share it, wipe it out.” Our culture today often coddles such thinking. In the name of fairness and equity and other euphemisms, they bully those who possess things they do not into giving up their property and liberties.
It can happen in many ways – through abusive unionization, or through use of social media and public rallies and such, to shame, menace and threaten until policies are adopted that violate individual sovereignty and private property. Freedom to think or speak differently from the crowd or from the politically-correct “woke” policies of banks, governments, universities, or media, is fundamentally protected by this commandment. The state must protect individuals from losing their jobs or careers or being cancelled by the bullies of the dominant or favored culture. Sadly, today the state more often uses its coercive power to support the bullies and violate the liberties of the sovereign citizen.
This final Commandment then was the perfect conclusion to the Ten Statements of good governance because it put a cap on the state’s role and power in everything else that was not specifically enumerated as a state function. This final transcendent principle was that government shall not infringe individual citizen liberty and sovereignty in everything else. All other rights and powers are natural rights held by individual citizens.