“You shall not commit adultery.
Not to desire another person's property or belongings
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
וְלֹא תִתְאַוֶּה בֵּית רֵעֶךָ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מהשים מחשבתנו לחמוד מה שיש לאחינו ולהתאוות בו שזה יהיה מבוא לעשות תחבולה לקנותו, וזהו לשון האזהרה בזה הענין אמרו לא תתאוה בית רעך, ואין שני לאוין אלו בענין אחד אבל הלאו הראשון והוא לא תחמוד מזהיר לקנות מה שיש לזולתנו, ולאו שני מזהיר אפילו להתאוות בלבנו לבד. ולשון מכילתא נאמר כאן לא תחמוד ולהלן הוא אומר ולא תתאוה לחייב על התאוה בפני עצמה ועל החמוד בפני עצמו, ושם אמרו מנין שאם התאוה שסופו לחמוד שנאמר ולא תתאוה ולא תחמוד מנין שאם חמד שסופו לאנוס ולגזול תלמוד לומר וחמדו שדות וגזלו. ובאור זה שאם ראה דבר יפה אצל אחד אם גברה מחשבתו עליו והתאוה בו עבר על לא תתאוה, ואם התעסק באהבת הדבר ההוא עד שישתדל להגיעו אצלו ולא יסור מחלות פניו ולהכביד עליו שימכרנו לו או יחליף אותו אליו במה שהוא יותר טוב ממנו הנה כבר עבר על לא תחמוד גם כן אחר שקנה הדבר שהיה לחבירו ולא היה רצונו למכרו אבל הכביד עליו והערים עד שלקחו ויהיה שלו כבר עבר שני לאוין לא תתאוה ולא תחמוד, ואם נמנע האיש ההוא מלמכור או להחליפו באהבתו בדבר ההוא הנה הוא יקחהו באונס והכרח בחוזק אהבתו בדבר ההוא בנפשו עובר על לא תגזול, הנה זה ההפרש בין לא תתאוה ולא תחמוד. (ואתתנן, שם):
He prohibited us from putting our thoughts to coveting that which is our brothers' (fellow Jews), and to desire it. For this is the entranceway to fabricating machinations in order to acquire it. And the language of the prohibition about this content is His saying, "you shall not desire your neighbor’s house" (Deuteronomy 5:18). And these two negative commandments are not about the same content. Rather the first negative commandment - and that is, "You shall not covet" - is prohibiting the acquisition of what is someone else's; whereas the second negative commandment prohibits even only to desire it in our hearts. And the language of the Mekhilta (Mekhilta d'Rabbi Yishmael 20:14:2) is, "Here (Exodus 20:14) it states 'You shall not covet,' and later, it says, 'You shall not desire' - to make liable for desiring in itself, and for coveting in itself." And there, they said, "From where [do we know] that if one desires; in the end, he will covet? As it is stated, 'Do not desire [...] and you will not covet.' From where [do we know] that if he does covet; in the end, he will use force and steal? [Hence] we learn to say, 'and they will covet fields and steal [them]' (Micah 2:2)." And the explanation of this is that if he saw something nice with someone else: If his thought about it overwhelms him and he desires it, he has transgressed, "You shall not desire." But if he becomes occupied with the love of that thing, to the point that he makes efforts to bring it to himself - and he does not cease from begging him and pressuring him to sell it to him or to trade it to him for something better than it - behold he has already also transgressed, "you shall not covet." Once he acquired the thing that belonged to his fellow, who did not want to sell it - but he pressured him and tricked him, until he acquired it and it became his - he has already transgressed two negative commandments, "You shall not desire," and, "You shall not covet." However if that man prevented himself from selling or exchanging [it] - on account of his own love for that thing - [the man who desires it] will surely take it by duress and force, as a result of the intensity of his soul's longing for that thing. He will [then] transgress the prohibition of, "you shall not rob." Behold, that is the difference between, "You shall not desire," and, "You shall not covet." (See Parashat Vaetchanan; Mishneh Torah, Robbery and Lost Property 1.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
No court-imposed penalty is recorded.
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Kept as an ethical principle
- Reconstructionist Kept as an ethical principle
- Karaite Binding
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Rabbinic aggadah
- Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, Ba-Hodesh 8 expanded it homiletically
Philo of Alexandria
- De Decalogo 142-153 rationalized it
- De Specialibus Legibus 4.79-94 rationalized it
The New Testament
- Romans 7:7 reinterpreted it Paul cites ouk epithymēseis ('you shall not covet') as the law that awakens consciousness of sin, treating the prohibition of desire as exemplary of the law's reach into the interior
- Romans 13:9 reinterpreted it subsumes 'you shall not covet' among the commandments summed up in the love of neighbor
The Church Fathers
- Augustine, De Spiritu et Littera (treats 'non concupisces' / Romans 7 among its discussions of law and grace) read it spiritually
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- egyptian negative confession declarant disavows theft and wrongful taking of another's property ('I have not stolen,' 'I have not robbed,' 'I have not taken away food'); shares the broad ethical concern against acquisitive wrongdoing but operates as a post-mortem declaration of innocence rather than as intra-communal law regulating interior states Relationship to the parallel: shared theme Ch. 125 (Declaration B, negative confessions 1-42) Faulkner, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, rev. ed. (1972)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
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UDHR Article 18-19
This framework classifies the relation as a substantive tension.
The Deuteronomic formulation uses the verb '-v-h (to crave/long for), which scholars broadly read as targeting the interior emotional state itself — more explicitly a thought-prohibition than the Exodus version's kh-m-d. No court penalty attaches (punishment_class: none), so the conflict remains normative rather than penal, but the commandment's explicit claim to regulate subjective desire is in direct tension with the post-Enlightenment principle that interior mental states are beyond the reach of legal obligation.