Thou Shalt Not

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Have you ever wanted something you can’t possess? Of course you have. Silly question. Owen’s dump truck in the sandbox, Fiona’s Girbaud jeans in middle school, Kyle’s test scores, Carrie’s VW, a sky-high piece of carrot cake, a perfect body, a way with words, someone else’s wife, husband, house, life.

Coveting. Old Moses & Co. spent a lot of time (not to mention stone tablet word count) on the idea. To covet is to sin by that Old Testament definition. But setting aside (for a moment, or forever) whether “to sin” is relevant here, is there a difference between desiring and coveting?

Desire is fleeting by nature—the gaze, broken-hearted behind dressing room doors at Nordstrom, at the price tag on the perfect dress you’d almost certainly forget once it had been hanging in the back of your closet for a week or two, hangers all dressed up with no place to go. Or the heady rush, four drinks in, of dancing with a stranger at a bar conveniently just around the corner from your place, and asking if he’d like to come up, just for a minute, you know, and you’re halfway through (and look, it only took a minute after all!) before you realize that you don’t really want him, or any of this, at all, and you wish it wasn’t your place because then you could just leave but no, now you’ll have to kick him out unless (you hope) he’s as eager to get away as you are.

Even the kind of desire that gallops, unbridled, over the first heady weeks and months of a relationship that looks an awful lot like love—that’s fleeting, too, replaced by something that’s infinitely steadier and more valuable, sure, but also less heady—more of a contented amble.

Desire can be irrational, stupid, even damaging in certain specific ways. But it can also fuel ambition and inspire excellence. Or it can surprise and sustain us, uprooting us from our humdrum lives long enough to remember what’s worth pursuing and what’s worth staying home for.

But coveting? That’s something else entirely. To covet is to allow desire to shape thoughts, words, actions. Desiring can feel like momentary madness. Coveting feels deeper, darker, both more intentional and more insane. In the Bible, the problem with coveting—the “sinfulness” of it all—is that the manservant or the maidservant, or the neighbor’s wife or house or Mercedes or what have you—replaces God as the heart’s highest aspiration. But even if we leave God out of it, as I’m apt to do, coveting still twists judgment, warps vision.