Is it wrong to covet?

The English word ‘covet’ is doing two jobs. In 1611 it could simply mean to want something eagerly, and the King James translators used it for two different words. In Exodus 20:17 the Hebrew is chamad (Strong’s H2530), ‘to desire, take pleasure in’. What the commandment forbids is desiring what belongs to someone else: the neighbour’s house, his wife, his servants and his animals, “nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s”. The verb itself is not always bad. The trees of Eden were “pleasant to the sight” (Genesis 2:9), and God’s judgments are “More to be desired” than gold (Psalm 19:10), both forms of the same verb. The sin is in the object: craving what God has given to another.

In 1 Corinthians 12:31 and 14:39 the Greek is zēloō (G2206), ‘to be zealous for, to desire eagerly’. Modern versions make the sense plain: “But earnestly desire the best gifts” (WEB), and “be eager to prophesy” (BSB). The same Greek verb is used in a bad sense too, “charity envieth not” (13:4), so here as well the object decides. The gifts Paul has in mind are given by the Spirit “to profit withal” (12:7), for the good of the whole church, and he wants the Corinthians to seek those that build others up most (14:12). To want to serve others better takes nothing from a neighbour.

So the two commands do not clash. When Paul himself quotes the commandment, “Thou shalt not covet” (Romans 7:7; 13:9), he uses a different Greek word, epithumeō (G1937), the word the Greek Old Testament used in Exodus 20:17. The ‘covetousness’ that he calls idolatry in Colossians 3:5 is pleonexia (G4124), greed, the grasping desire for more. Haley summed it up in one sentence: in Corinthians the word means an earnest desire for what is rightly within reach, in Exodus an unlawful craving for what belongs to another.