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. The tenth commandment is unique in the Decalogue: it prohibits an interior state, not an external action. Coveting is the desire to possess what belongs to another — not yet stealing or adultery, but the desire from which those acts grow. Romans 7:7–8 records Paul saying: I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, you shall not covet. The tenth commandment exposed the interior dimensions of sin that the other nine left implicit. James 4:2 says you desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. The root of the violence that breaks the earlier commandments is the covetousness the tenth commandment identifies.

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