Twelve words, and almost every one of them is doing structural work.

The verse is not a free-standing command. Grammatically it hangs on Ταπεινώθητε in v. 6 — an aorist participle attached to an aorist imperative — which means the flinging of anxiety is not a second, separate spiritual exercise but part of what being humbled under God’s hand is. That is the single most consequential decision in the verse, and it is the one most English renderings quietly obscure by punctuating v. 7 as its own sentence with its own imperative.

Three further points carry weight:

• ἐπιρίψαντες is a violent verb. It is used in the LXX of throwing garments onto a colt (2 Kgdms 20:12; Luke 19:35) and of hurling. The image is not gentle deposit but a heave.
• The clause is a near-quotation of Ps 54:23 LXX (Ps 55:22 MT), ἐπίρριψον ἐπὶ κύριον τὴν μέριμνάν σου. Peter converts the psalm’s imperative into a participle and its second-person singular into plural — a psalm of the betrayed righteous man applied to a persecuted diaspora.
• αὐτῷ μέλει περὶ ὑμῶν is a Greek impersonal construction, not a statement about God’s feelings. It says the addressees are a matter of concern to him — that they figure in his reckoning. English ‘he cares for you’ is right in substance but flattens a construction that is closer to ‘you matter to him.’

The two halves are joined by causal ὅτι: the throw is warranted not by the thrower’s confidence but by the recipient’s disposition.

ἐπιρίψαντες is a nominative masculine plural aorist active participle with no finite verb of its own in v. 7. Its only available governing verb is Ταπεινώθητε (aor. pass. impv. 2pl) in v. 6, from which it is separated by an intervening ἵνα clause. NA28 punctuates with a comma at the end of v. 6, keeping the syntactic chain intact.

Three construals are on the table.

1. Modal/epexegetical: the throwing specifies how the humbling is done. This is the reading the word order most naturally supports and the one the corpus’s treatment of 1 Peter’s participial style favors.
2. Coincident/attendant circumstance: the throwing accompanies the humbling as a simultaneous act. Aorist participles need not be antecedent (cf. the corpus entry on coincident aorist participles), so ‘casting’ rather than ‘having cast’ is defensible.
3. Imperatival: an independent participle with commanding force, of which 1 Peter has the NT’s densest concentration (1:14; 2:18; 3:1, 7, 9; 4:8, 10).

The third is the reading that produces the familiar English devotional imperative ‘Cast all your care on him.’ It is not impossible — this author does use imperatival participles — but here a finite imperative stands two clauses back and is available, which is precisely the condition under which the corpus policy says to keep the participle dependent and flag the alternative rather than promote it.

Proposed — pending reviewPaul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, Hermeneia, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.

Compound of ἐπί + ῥίπτω, ‘hurl, throw.’ Only two NT occurrences: here and Luke 19:35, where the disciples ἐπέρριψαν their garments onto the colt. The base verb ῥίπτω is used of throwing down bodies (Matt 15:30), casting into the sea (Luke 17:2), and hurling stones.

The LXX distribution confirms the register. Beyond Ps 54:23, the verb is used of casting a corpse (2 Kgdms 20:12), of throwing dust and of hurling generally. There is no evidence for a faded sense ‘entrust’ or ‘hand over carefully.’ The physical throw is live, and per the idiom protocol it stays in the English.

‘Cast’ is the traditional rendering and is not wrong, but modern English ‘cast’ has drifted toward the genteel (casting a vote, casting a glance) and no longer carries the heave. ‘Fling’ is adopted in the reading text to keep the force. ‘Throw’ is acceptable; ‘lay’ and ‘place’ and ‘give over’ are excluded — each converts a heave into a deposit.

The object of the throw is not expressed with a pronoun in Greek after the participle; πᾶσαν τὴν μέριμναν is its direct object, positioned before it. English must therefore front the object too, which is convenient, since the fronting is emphatic in Greek as well.

Proposed — pending reviewHenry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Noun to μεριμνάω, already fixed in this corpus as object-determined: ‘be concerned about / care for’ where the object is another person or church (Phil 2:20), ‘be anxious’ where the object is one’s own security (Phil 4:6).

The noun follows the same rule, and here the object is unambiguous: it is ὑμῶν — the addressees’ own care, in a letter about hostile neighbors (4:4), reproach (4:14), and criminal accusation (4:15-16). This is not pastoral solicitude for others; it is the pressure of a threatened community’s own fears. So the negative pole is in force: anxiety.

The etymological association with μερίζω (‘divide’) is old and attractive — care as what pulls the mind in pieces — but it is a folk connection of uncertain standing and, in any case, not felt in the first century. It may be named as background; it is not evidence for the rendering.

Elsewhere the noun is the choking care of Mark 4:19 and Luke 8:14, the ‘cares of this life’ of Luke 21:34, and Paul’s own μέριμνα τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν at 2 Cor 11:28 — where the object is the churches and ‘concern’ is the right English. One Greek word, two English words, split by object, flagged at each occurrence.

πᾶς with an articular singular abstract noun. The corpus already distinguishes three constructions: anarthrous singular with a concrete noun is distributive (‘every knee,’ Phil 2:10); articular plural is collective (οἱ πάντες); πᾶς with an articular singular abstract noun is decided per context and flagged (Phil 1:3-4).

Here the holistic reading governs: the whole of your anxiety, taken as a single mass, not ‘each individual worry’ item by item. The article is possessive-anaphoric, pointed by ὑμῶν — the anxiety you actually have, not anxiety in the abstract.

Peter’s source text has the anarthrous τὴν μέριμνάν σου in the singular as well (Ps 54:23 LXX), and the addition of πᾶσαν is Peter’s own. It is the one word he adds to the psalm, and it is not decorative: it forecloses the partial deposit. Retain ‘all’ in the object slot of the English clause, before the noun, where the Greek has it.

The pronoun ὑμῶν stands in the unmarked post-nominal slot. Contrast the marked order τῆς ὑμῶν δεήσεως (Phil 1:19), where the possessive is stressed by insertion between article and noun. Nothing emphatic is being claimed about whose anxiety; the emphasis is carried by πᾶσαν.

Proposed — pending reviewKaren H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.

μέλω in the NT is used only impersonally in the third singular: μέλει τινί περί τινος, ‘it is a matter of concern to X about Y.’ There is no expressed subject. The construction is standard Greek and appears at Matt 22:16 (οὐ … μέλει σοι), Mark 4:38 (οὐ μέλει σοι ὅτι ἀπολλύμεθα;), Luke 10:40, John 10:13 (the hireling, ᾧ οὐ μέλει περὶ τῶν προβάτων), Acts 18:17, and 1 Cor 7:21; 9:9.

Three things follow for translation.

First, the dative αὐτῷ is the person to whom the matter matters, and its clause-initial position is emphatic — to him it matters. Preserve that placement where English permits.

Second, the construction says nothing directly about affection. It says the addressees register with him, are on his docket, figure in his concern. English ‘he cares about you’ is the natural idiom and is adopted, but the note should record that the Greek is closer to ‘you matter to him.’ The alternative ‘it is his concern about you’ is more transparent and belongs in the study tier.

Third — and this is the pastoral point of the impersonal construction — the John 10:13 parallel is nearly exact in form and opposite in content: the hireling flees ᾧ οὐ μέλει περὶ τῶν προβάτων. The same idiom, negated, describes the shepherd who is not invested. Peter has just called the elders to shepherd the flock (5:2) and named Christ ἀρχιποίμην (5:4). The verse is placing God on the right side of that same distinction.

Avoid ‘he is concerned for you’ (drifts toward worry as a divine state) and avoid ‘he will take care of you’ (converts a present disposition into a promised action, importing an outcome the verb does not name).

Proposed — pending reviewJ. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 49, Waco: Word, 1988.

ἐπʼ αὐτόν is directional: the anxiety is thrown onto him. This is distinct from the ἐπί + dative constructions the corpus has already fixed (temporal-occasional and causal-basis, Phil 1:3; 4:10) and from the ἐπί + accusative of a blessing descending (Gal 6:16).

The elision ἐπʼ before the rough breathing of αὐτόν is orthographic and carries no weight; NA28 prints ἐπʼ, some witnesses ἐπί.

The corpus rule holds: ‘upon’ or ‘onto’ rather than ‘to,’ since a dative of advantage would drop the trajectory. The throw has a landing place, and that is the whole image.

ὅτι here is causal, not recitative and not complementizing. It grounds the participle in a fact about the recipient: the reason for flinging is not that anxiety is unpleasant, nor that the thrower has achieved calm, but that the one thrown at is disposed to receive.

This matches the pattern of the surrounding argument. v. 5 grounds the command with ὅτι plus a scriptural citation; v. 7 grounds its participle with ὅτι plus a statement about God. In both cases the imperative rests on something outside the person commanded.

Render ‘because’ rather than ‘for’ where English syntax permits, per the standing γάρ/ὅτι distinction — this is not a loose epistolary connective but a stated ground.

The clause is a reworking, not a formal citation. There is no γέγραπται and no λέγει ἡ γραφή, in contrast to v. 5, where the Prov 3:34 material is introduced with ὅτι and functions as a quotation.

Ps 54:23 LXX: ἐπίρριψον ἐπὶ κύριον τὴν μέριμνάν σου, καὶ αὐτός σε διαθρέψει. (MT Ps 55:22: הַשְׁלֵךְ עַל־יְהוָה יְהָבְךָ וְהוּא יְכַלְכְּלֶךָ.)

Peter’s alterations are all significant:

The last change is the most striking. The psalm promises an action (‘he will sustain you’); Peter states a standing fact (‘you matter to him’). The ground of the throwing shifts from what God will do to what God is like — which suits a letter addressed to people whose immediate circumstances are not going to improve (4:12-19).

The Hebrew יְהָב is a hapax of uncertain sense, plausibly ‘lot, burden, what is given to you.’ The LXX’s μέριμνα is an interpretation, and it is the LXX that Peter is working from. Per §1 the underlying יְהוָה of the psalm is noted here rather than imported: Peter wrote αὐτόν, and before that τοῦ θεοῦ, and the Greek stands as written.

Compare also Ps 36:5 LXX (ἀποκάλυψον πρὸς κύριον τὴν ὁδόν σου) and Matt 6:25-34, where μεριμνάω is the governing verb of the whole passage and the ground offered is likewise the Father’s knowledge of what is needed.

The verse is textually stable in substance. The variation is orthographic and morphological.

ἐπιρίψαντες / ἐπιρρίψαντες. NA28 prints the single-rho form. The doubled ῥρ after a prefix is the classical spelling and appears widely in the manuscript tradition and in the Byzantine text. This is a matter of Koine orthographic convention, not of text, and has no bearing on meaning; it is recorded because a reader consulting an older edition will find the other spelling.

ἐπʼ / ἐπί. Elision before the smooth or rough breathing is variable in the witnesses. No semantic consequence.

Some later witnesses read περὶ ὑμῶν with variation in pronoun order, and a few harmonize toward the psalm’s future διαθρέψει-type language; these are secondary and show the expected direction of assimilation to the LXX source. The critical text’s αὐτῷ μέλει περὶ ὑμῶν is the harder and better-attested reading.

The patristic tradition consistently reads v. 7 with v. 6 rather than as a detached maxim, and consistently treats the humbling and the unburdening as one act.

The emphasis falls on πᾶσαν: the whole point of the participle, on this reading, is that a partial transfer is no transfer, because anxiety retained is confidence retained. Chrysostom’s characteristic move with the μέριμνα texts — in his homilies on Matt 6 and on the Philippians μεριμνᾶτε — is to argue that anxiety is a covert claim of self-sufficiency, and that its discharge is therefore an act of humility rather than of relief-seeking. That is precisely the logic 1 Pet 5:6-7 exhibits grammatically.

The Latin tradition renders omnem sollicitudinem vestram proicientes in eum, quoniam ipsi cura est de vobis — proicientes keeps the throwing verb, and cura est keeps the impersonal construction with a dative of the interested party. Both are better guides here than the softened English tradition, which has settled on ‘cast … care’ and lost both the heave and the impersonal.

The Peshitta likewise keeps the participle subordinate. The devotional reading of the verse as a self-standing imperative is a later development, and while it is not exegetically illegitimate, it should be recognized as reception rather than as the plain sense of the syntax.

Proposed — pending reviewRobert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds., Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 5th ed., Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.

‘having flung all your anxiety onto him, because he cares about you.’

• having flung — participle kept participial, dependent on v. 6’s imperative, with the imperatival reading flagged rather than adopted. ‘Flung’ over ‘cast’ because modern English ‘cast’ has lost the force of ἐπιρίπτω.
• all your anxiety — πᾶσαν retained in its emphatic pre-nominal slot; μέριμνα rendered at the negative pole per the object-determined rule, since the object is the readers’ own situation.
• onto him — directional ἐπί + accusative; the throw lands.
• because — causal ὅτι, stating the ground.
• he cares about you — the natural English for the impersonal αὐτῷ μέλει περὶ ὑμῶν. The literal and study tiers keep ‘to him it matters, concerning you,’ which is what the Greek construction actually says; the reading text uses idiomatic English with the construction recorded here rather than in the text.

Nothing has been softened, and nothing has been hardened. The verse offers no promise that the circumstances will change — the psalm’s διαθρέψει is precisely what Peter did not carry over — and the English should not supply one.