Coveting your neighbor’s wife
On the topic of the Ten Commandments, commandment number 10 (or number 9 and 10, depending on how your favorite sect numbers them) says:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
That short phrase says so very much about the status of women in the Bible. Let’s see…
- “Your neighbor’s wife.” That is, the wife that belongs to your neighbor. The wife he bought fair and square. In the time when this was written, women were indeed little more than property; property of their fathers, until the father sold her to a man of his choosing, for a sheep or two.
- Women are listed right between “house” and “donkey”. What a lofty status wives hold in God’s eyes! Not only are they property, they aren’t even first in the list. Women are a dime a dozen after all, but a good farm is priceless. Good to know my wife should rank right up there with my oxen though.
- The phrase should more accurately be “your neighbor’s wives” given rampant polygamy in the primitive tribal society that spawned this lovely moral teaching. And maybe it should include concubines and female slaves, if we really want to get into specifics.
- This short phrase makes it clear that the Ten Commandments are God talking to MEN, and men only. There’s nothing about coveting your neighbor’s husband, is there? (Well, to be fair, God may also be talking to lesbians here.) But of course, this makes sense in a society where women have no sexual identity other than to crank out babies and keep their mouths shut. Surely women don’t covet anything anyways; their brains aren’t developed enough.
Yes, the Ten Commandments are the foundation of our laws, aren’t they? What glorious moral lessons we can learn from them. Given that women couldn’t vote in the US until 1920, I think in this case it may just be accurate to say that for a long time our laws were indeed based on the same archaic bigotry and sexism that is clearly evident in the Ten Commandments. Until we all grew brains and learned better, and decided this stupid book was WRONG.
(Bonus: “Manservant” is a very loose translation. It could rightly be translated “slave“. This commandment was used by many to justify slavery in the US.)
My last comment to be sure.
The word covet means to want something that isn’t your’s. You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife because she isn’t your’s. Now this one verse doesn’t mean the ten commandments are only talking to men. It’s just that writers were men, and so wrote with male pronouns.
Also, one book before in Genesis, it talks about the relationship between husband and wife. Two shall become as one flesh. This can be taken to mean the physical relationship, and it can also be taken to mean you are like one person, you are joined in such a way that there is no real sense of ownership but a sense of self.
Also, as previously stated elsewhere, if you want to get into ownership, Husband and wife belong to each other. It is mutual ownership.
Taking one verse and running with it, without examining it in context, and without using any other support within the same document, is just poor writing.
The point of the covet verse is simply not to say hey, don’t lust after things that aren’t your’s.
And on polygamy, yes, there was a bunch of it. But God did eventually say, hey enough of this, this is wrong, from now on, only one husband and one wife shall be together.
A little research would be good. I suggest BibleGateway.com. It’s got a Bible search engine with tons of different translations. And don’t use King James, no one knows what it’s translated from and when compared to things like the dead sea scrolls and the silver amulets it’s got over 400 errors.
She isn’t anyone’s. People don’t belong to people. Mutual ownership is a metaphor. The passage I quoted wasn’t talking about a metaphorical ownership. Men flat-out owned women. Women were the property of their fathers, then their husbands, in just about the same way as a sheep or goat was.
The writers were men because men were the only ones who were allowed to be educated, men were the only ones with rights, and men were the only ones that mattered.
I’ve never heard the “better late than never” argument used with respect to God. I don’t think it’s valid.
I’m familiar with the site, and I’ve done plenty of research in college regarding the history of the region and the Bible as literature. An objective look at the history of the region including extra-Biblical sources can help you put these verses into context much better than a modern-day reading of the Bible with modern-day ethics painted over it, as you seem to be doing.