מיכה 2:2

The indictment — 'they covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance' — applies the tenth commandment's prohibition of coveting to the specific economic violence of land seizure in eighth-century Israel. The movement from covet (chamad) to seize (gazal) tracks the social mechanism: the internal disposition of acquisitive desire generates the external act of violent dispossession, precisely the pattern the Decalogue's final prohibition is designed to interrupt. The 'inheritance' (nachalah) language carries theological weight: ancestral land in Israel was not merely property but the family's share in the covenant gift of the land, making its seizure a violation of covenant theology as much as property law. The verse represents the prophetic tradition's most concrete economic application of covenant ethics: the tenth commandment prohibits not a private sentiment but the social violence it enables.