Is it OK to covet?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This contradiction exists entirely in the King James English and dissolves on inspection of the Greek. The KJV's "covet to prophesy" in 1 Corinthians 14:39 translates the imperative ζηλοῦτε (zēloûte), from ζηλόω (zēloō) — to be zealous for, to strive after, to earnestly desire — the same root family that yields "zeal" and "zealot" and that Paul uses positively for striving after the higher gifts (1 Cor 12:31, ζηλοῦτε δὲ τὰ χαρίσματα τὰ μείζονα). The prohibitions Paul quotes from the Decalogue in Romans 7:7 and 13:9 ("Thou shalt not covet") translate οὐκ ἐπιθυμήσεις, from ἐπιθυμέω (epithymeō) — to desire or lust after, here the illicit grasping after what is not one's own. The condemnations in Ephesians 5:3 and Colossians 3:5 use a third word, πλεονεξία (pleonexia) — greed, the grasping desire for more, which Colossians glosses as idolatry. Three different Greek words, three different concepts, all flattened into the single English verb "covet" because Jacobean English deployed that word across a wider range than modern usage does.

The harmonization is therefore not a clever maneuver but simple lexicography, and the strongest apologetic statement of it is also the correct one. Archer notes the distinction; Fee (NICNT 1 Corinthians) and Thiselton (NIGTC) both render zēloûte in 14:39 as "earnestly desire" or "be zealous for," with no semantic overlap with the epithymeō of the Decalogue prohibition. Modern translations remove the appearance of contradiction by translating the words differently: the ESV and NIV give "earnestly desire" or "eagerly desire" for 1 Corinthians 14:39 while retaining "covet" for the Decalogue citations and "covetousness"/"greed" for the Ephesians and Colossians vice lists. There is no textual variant in play and no manuscript dispute; the underlying Greek is stable. The issue is purely one of seventeenth-century English vocabulary.

It is worth being precise about what is and is not contradictory. As a matter of the New Testament Greek, there is no tension at all: Paul commands zeal for prophecy and condemns illicit desire and greed, which are wholly distinct dispositions. As a matter of the KJV's English, the same word "covet" does appear to be both commanded and forbidden — but that is an artifact of translation choice, not of anything the authors wrote. A reader working only from the King James and not checking the Greek will perceive a contradiction that the source text does not contain. This is the textbook profile of a translation contradiction: it appears in one English version, is invisible in the Greek and in modern renderings, and requires only minimal exegesis to dissolve. The SAB's framing is King James-centric and would not register the problem in any contemporary translation.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonized — the text does not contradict itself; the seventeenth-century translation does.