“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
⛓ Read Exodus 20 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Quotation1
A formal citation — high verbal volume, often introduced by a saying-formula.
Direct verbatim citation: 'You shall not covet' (7:7) quotes the tenth commandment of the Decalogue, the LXX 'ouk epithymeseis,' which Paul makes the test case for the law's relation to sin.
High confidenceAllusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
'You shall not covet your neighbor's wife' — the interiorizing of adultery into lustful looking draws directly on the coveting commandment.
High confidence"Covetousness, which is idolatry" presupposes the Decalogue's prohibition of coveting, the climactic command that exposes disordered desire. The identification of greed with idolatry draws on Israel's covenant logic where craving what is not one's own is functionally false worship; coherent with Second-Temple Jewish moralizing of pleonexia.
Medium confidenceEcho2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
The tenth commandment against coveting grounds the identification of greed as idolatry. Parallel to Deuteronomy 5:21; recurrence of the covet/idol pairing across the Decalogue tradition supports the link.
Medium confidence'You lust and do not have; you kill, covet, and cannot obtain' traces the chain of conflict to covetous desire, the disorder the tenth commandment forbids. The volume is thematic but coheres with James's diagnosis of war from within.
Medium confidence