The Small Tongue Can Set the Whole Life Burning

Jesus had warned against the same appetite: “be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master” (Matthew 23:8), where “Master” is the same Greek word, didaskalos. “Condemnation” is krima, judgment, a neutral word that becomes heavier with “greater”: the verdict on a teacher is weighed more strictly.

Sirach had said it before: “Blessed is the man that hath not slipped with his mouth” (14:1), and “who is he that hath not offended with his tongue?” (19:16). “A perfect man” is teleios aner, the maturity 1:4 aimed at. The bridle returns from 1:26, where an unbridled tongue made religion vain.

Psalm 32:9 uses the same gear: “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle.” Where the King James has “Behold”, the oldest manuscripts read “Now if we put bits”, the two Greek words differing in the spelling of a single vowel.

Ancient ships were steered by a large oar at the stern, the pedalion, the “rudder” whose bands the sailors loosed in Paul’s shipwreck (Acts 27:40). “Listeth” means wishes; the Greek word is horme, impulse, so the ship goes wherever the steersman’s urge takes it.

“Boasteth great things” is one verb, megalaucheo, found only here. “Matter” translates hyle, which in ordinary Greek means wood or a forest: “how great a forest a little fire kindleth”. The Greek uses the same word, helikos, for both sizes, a neat trick: “how small a fire, how large a wood”.

“The course of nature” is literally “the wheel of birth”, trochos tes geneseos, a phrase from Greek religious writing about the cycle of existence, used here for the whole round of a life. “Hell” is Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom below Jerusalem where children had been burned to Molech (Jeremiah 7:31). This is the only time Gehenna is named outside the Gospels.

The four classes of creature, beasts, birds, creeping things and sea creatures, are the ones Genesis 1:26 and 9:2 put under human dominion. “Is tamed, and hath been tamed” covers present and past: taming is still going on and has long been done. “Mankind” is literally “human nature”, physis anthropine.

Some manuscripts read “uncontrollable”, akataschetos, where others have “unruly”. “Deadly poison” is ios thanatephoros, death-bearing venom, the snake again after the serpents of verse 7. Psalm 140:3 said “adders’ poison is under their lips”, and Paul strings that line into his indictment in Romans 3:13.

“Similitude” is homoiosis, the “likeness” of Genesis 1:26 in its Greek form, and this is its only appearance in the New Testament. The oldest manuscripts read “the Lord and Father”. Devout Jews blessed God many times a day; each of the Eighteen Benedictions ends “Blessed art thou, O Lord”.

“Ought not” is chre, a word used nowhere else in the New Testament, the language of what is fitting. Proverbs 18:21 had put the matter starkly: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” The same mouth here produces both.

“Place” is ope, a cleft or opening in rock, the mouth of a spring. The land knew brackish springs near the Dead Sea, and Israel’s first stop after the sea crossing was Marah, where the water was bitter until it was made sweet (Exodus 15:23–25). “Bitter” prepares for the “bitter envying” of verse 14.

“Olive berries” is 1611 English for olives. Fig, olive and vine are the three staple trees of the land, the three that refuse the crown in Jotham’s parable (Judges 9:8–13). Jesus asked the same kind of question: “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” (Matthew 7:16).

“Wise” and “endued with knowledge” are the pair Moses used in the Greek of Deuteronomy 1:13 when he told the tribes to choose “wise men, and understanding” as their leaders. James is still thinking of those who would teach. “Shew” is the demand of 2:18 again, now made of wisdom.

“Envying” is zelos, a word that can mean good zeal as easily as jealousy; “bitter” decides which. “Strife” is eritheia, selfish ambition, a word Aristotle used of politicians canvassing for office. “Glory not” is the triumphant boasting of 2:13, here forbidden.

“From above” sends the reader back to 1:17, where every good gift “is from above”. The three adjectives descend: earthly, then of the soul alone, then “devilish”, daimoniodes, demon-like, found only here in the New Testament. The devils who believed and trembled in 2:19 reappear as the source of a kind of wisdom.

“Confusion” is akatastasia, disorder, the noun of the adjective used for the double-minded man in 1:8. Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians 14:33: “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.” “Evil work” is phaulon pragma, a worthless or base practice, a meaner word than wicked.

The list is built for the ear, several of its Greek words beginning with the same sounds and the last two rhyming, adiakritos and anypokritos. “Without partiality” is adiakritos, built on the same verb as “wavering” in 1:6 and “partial” in 2:4: wisdom from above is undivided.

“The work of righteousness shall be peace” (Isaiah 32:17) stands close behind the verse, and “them that make peace” recalls “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). Peace is both the soil and the method: the crop righteousness yields is sown in it, by people who make it.