Covetousness - UPDV Updated Bible Version

Covetousness in scripture is the closed fist: the inward pull of desire that seeks what is not one's own, hoards what is, and is never satisfied with what Yahweh has supplied. The vice runs the length of the canon — from the tenth word at Sinai, through the prophets' indictment of judges, priests, and prophets working for hire, into the Wisdom literature's diagnosis of the silver-lover's vanity, and on to the apostolic verdict that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." It is the inverse of liberality, and the page on Liberality treats the same cluster of texts from the giving side; the present page focuses on the grasping pole — greed, idolatry, the love of money, the misery of hoarding, and the parsimony that withholds even Yahweh's portion.

The Tenth Word and the Inward Reach

The Decalogue plants the prohibition at the level of inward desire, before any outward act has occurred: "You will not covet your fellow man's house, you will not covet your fellow man's wife, nor his male slave, nor his female slave, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your fellow man's" (Ex 20:17). Where the other commands restrain the hand and the tongue, this one restrains the eye and the heart. The psalmist registers what happens when the heart is left to it: "For the wicked boasts of his soul's desire, And the covetous curses, [yes,] scorns [the Speech of] Yahweh" (Ps 10:3). The covetous man does not merely transgress a rule; he stands in functional opposition to Yahweh.

Jesus reissues the warning in his own idiom: "Take heed, and keep yourselves from all greed: for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses" (Lu 12:15). Paul names it more bluntly: "Put to death therefore your⁺ members which are on the earth: whoring, impurity, immoral sexual passion, evil desire, and greed, which is idolatry" (Col 3:5; cf. Eph 5:3, "But whoring, all impurity, or greed, don't let it even be named among you⁺, as becomes saints"). To covet is to give to a thing the worship that belongs to Yahweh. Proverbs sets the moral vector: "The leader who lacks understanding is also a great oppressor; [But] he who hates covetousness will prolong his days" (Pr 28:16).

A Covetousness That Spreads Through the People

The prophets diagnose covetousness as a national disease, not an individual failing. Jeremiah generalizes the indictment: "For from the least of them even to the greatest of them everyone is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even to the priest everyone deals falsely" (Jer 6:13). Micah catches it in the act of social outworking: "And they covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away: and they oppress a [noble] man and his house, even a man and his heritage" (Mic 2:2). Amos extends the picture to those "who pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek" (Amos 2:7). Ezekiel exposes the inward register beneath outwardly devout listeners: "And they come to you like the coming of a people, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear your words, but don't do them; for with their mouth they show much love, but their heart goes after their gain" (Eze 33:31). Habakkuk pronounces the woe over the gains themselves: "Woe to him who gets an evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the hand of evil! You have devised shame to your house, by cutting off many peoples, and have sinned against your soul" (Hab 2:9-10).

Avaricious Men: A Gallery

Scripture builds the doctrine through portraits as much as precept. Jacob's twenty years under Laban end in protest: "These twenty years I have been in your house; I served you fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your flock: and you have changed my wages ten times" (Gen 31:41). Achan's confession is the classic anatomy of covetousness in three verbs — saw, coveted, took: "when I saw among the spoil a goodly Babylonian mantle, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, and took them; and, look, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it" (Josh 7:21). Saul refuses to obey the ban "but Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and the oxen, and the seconds, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not completely destroy them: but everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed completely" (1Sa 15:9) — the spared things are the desirable things. Samuel's own sons fail on the same axis: "And his sons didn't walk in his ways, but turned aside after greed for monetary gain, and took bribes, and perverted justice" (1Sa 8:3).

The narratives of the kings repeat the pattern. Ben-hadad's threat against Ahab is the threat of covetousness in royal scale: "but I will send my slaves to you tomorrow about this time, and they will search your house, and the houses of your slaves; and it will be, that whatever is pleasant in your eyes, they will put it in their hand, and take it away" (1Ki 20:6). Ahab in turn covets a private vineyard: "And Ahab spoke to Naboth, saying, Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near to my house" (1Ki 21:2). Gehazi turns the prophet's refusal into private gain: "But Gehazi the attendant of Elisha the man of God, said, Look, my master has spared this Naaman the Syrian, in not receiving at his hands that which he brought: as Yahweh lives, I will run after him, and take somewhat of him" (2Ki 5:20). Tyre is the canonical city of accumulation: "And Tyre built herself a stronghold, and heaped up silver as the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets" (Zec 9:3).

The shepherds and rulers fare no better. Isaiah's sleeping watchmen are dogs of appetite: "Yes, the dogs are greedy of soul, they can never have enough; and these are shepherds who cannot understand: they have all turned to their own way, each one to his gain, from every quarter" (Isa 56:11). Micah completes the diagram of office for hire: "The heads of it judge for reward, and its priests teach for wages, and its prophets tell the future for silver: yet they lean on [the Speech of] Yahweh, and say, Is not Yahweh in the midst of us? No evil will come upon us" (Mic 3:11). The New Testament gallery includes Judas — "Now this he said, not because he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and having the bag took away what was put in it" (Jn 12:6) — and the Pharisees, "who were lovers of money, heard all these things; and they scoffed at him" (Lu 16:14). 2 Peter folds the type into a single backward-glancing line: "having forsaken the right way, they went astray, having followed the way of Balaam the [son] of Bosor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing" (2Pe 2:15).

The Vanity and Misery of the Hoard

Wisdom names the futility. The accumulated thing is never enough: "He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver; nor he who loves abundance, with increase: this also is vanity" (Ec 5:10). The accumulation can become the owner's own punishment: "There is a grievous evil which I have seen under the sun, [namely], riches kept by their owner to his hurt" (Ec 5:13). The covetousness that fills the house empties the soul: "We will find all precious substance; We will fill our houses with spoil… So are the ways of everyone who is greedy of gain; It takes away the soul of its owners" (Pr 1:13, 19). The greed is contrastively against the giver: "There is one who covets greedily all the day long; But the righteous gives and does not withhold" (Pr 21:26). Proverbs draws the household consequence flat: "He who is greedy of gain troubles his own house; But he who hates bribes will live" (Pr 15:27). Jeremiah supplies the figure of unjustly gotten wealth fleeing its owner: "As the partridge that sits on [eggs] which she has not laid, so is he who gets riches, and not by right; in the midst of his days they will leave him, and at his end he will be a fool" (Jer 17:11).

Sirach drives the misery deeper into the hoarder's interior. The hoarder afflicts himself: "There is one who makes himself rich by afflicting himself; And there is one who hides his wages" (Sir 11:18). The hoarder gathers for someone else: "He who withholds from his soul will gather for another; And a stranger will squander his good things" (Sir 14:4). The hoarder is, before anyone else, evil to himself: "He who is evil to his soul, to whom will he do good? And he will not meet with his good things" (Sir 14:5). The picture turns into the bitter table: "The eye of him with an evil eye pounces on his bread; And there is turmoil at his table" (Sir 14:10). And appropriating the neighbor's portion ruins one's own: "In the eye of him who stumbles, his portion is little; And he who takes the portion of his fellow man, wastes his own portion" (Sir 14:9). Sirach summarizes the sociology of gain in two lines: "Many have sinned for the sake of gain, And he who seeks to multiply [gains] turns away his eye" (Sir 27:1). And the standing diagnosis of the rich man: "The rich man labors in gathering wealth, And if he rests it is to gather luxuries… He who runs after gold will not be guiltless, And he who loves gain will go astray by it" (Sir 31:3, 5).

Withholding Yahweh's Portion: The Parsimonious Pole

Covetousness is not only the reaching out toward the neighbor's goods; in the sphere of worship it is the closing of the hand against Yahweh. Ahaz's regime "shut up the doors of the porch, and put out the lamps, and have not burned incense nor offered burnt-offerings in the holy place to the God of Israel" (2Ch 29:7). Nehemiah finds a parallel collapse on his return: "And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them; so that the Levites and the singers, who did the work, had fled every one to his field" (Ne 13:10). Isaiah voices Yahweh's own complaint over the meanness: "You have bought me no sweet cane with silver, neither have you filled me with the fat of your sacrifices; but you have burdened me with your sins, you have wearied me with your iniquities" (Isa 43:24). Malachi escalates the indictment to theft: "Will man rob God? Yet you⁺ rob me. But you⁺ say, In what have we robbed you? In tithes and offerings" (Mal 3:8). Withholding Yahweh's portion is treated as covetousness with a religious face.

The Love of Money

The apostolic letters consolidate the canon's verdict into a settled doctrine of the love of money. The overseer must be "no brawler, no striker; but gentle, not contentious, no lover of money" (1Ti 3:3). The class of would-be rich is described in language of trap and drowning: "But those who are minded to be rich fall into a temptation and a snare and many foolish and hurtful desires, such as drown men in ruin and destruction" (1Ti 6:9). Then the line that gathers the whole field: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil: which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows" (1Ti 6:10). Hebrews' standing exhortation is shaped against the same vice and grounded in the divine promise: "Be⁺ free from the love of money; content with such things as you⁺ have: for he himself has said, I will never fail you, neither will I ever forsake you" (Heb 13:5). James pronounces the eschatological verdict on hoards laid up against the day: "Your⁺ gold and your⁺ silver are corroded; and their corrosion will be for a testimony against you⁺, and will eat your⁺ flesh as fire. You⁺ have laid up your⁺ treasure in the last days" (Jas 5:3).