One clause with no verb of its own, hanging off v. 9. James has written a two-member correlation — ὁ ἀδελφὸς ὁ ταπεινός … ὁ δὲ πλούσιος — and supplied καυχάσθω (‘let him boast’) only once, at the head of the pair. Everything difficult about the verse follows from that single economy.

The skeleton is exact:

The lowly brother boasts in his height; the rich one, in his being brought low. Each is told to glory in precisely what his social position denies him. Then ὅτι supplies a ground, and the ground is a simile lifted almost verbatim from Isaiah 40 — grass, flower, withering — which James proceeds to unpack at length in v. 11.

The verse is therefore doing three things at once: completing a rhetorical inversion, quoting a prophet, and setting up an illustration. The exegetical pressure point is whether the rich one is inside the community (a ἀδελφός to whom a command is addressed) or outside it (a figure whose end is announced). The Greek does not say, and this apparatus does not settle it.

Proposed — pending reviewPeter H. Davids, The Epistle of James: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982)

δέ is postpositive and here contrastive — a μέν-less correlation of the kind Koine uses freely, where the first member is unmarked and the second carries the particle (BDF §447). Per §10 it is rendered, not dropped.

The real question is what verb the reader carries over. Greek routinely elides a shared verb across a coordinated pair, and the nearest candidate is the third-person imperative καυχάσθω of v. 9. But an imperative and an indicative are both grammatically supplyable, and the choice changes the verse:

• Imperative carried over (‘let the rich one boast in his humiliation’): the rich man is addressed alongside the brother, and both receive a command. This is the reading the parallelism most naturally yields, since nothing in the syntax marks a break.
• Indicative supplied (‘but the rich one boasts in his humiliation’ — i.e. his boasting is his humiliation, or, with heavier irony, ‘the rich one [glories] — in what is in fact his abasement’): this reading takes the rich man as an outsider, of a piece with the wealthy oppressors of Jas 2:6-7 and 5:1-6.

Per the corpus policy on elided verbs in a parallel second limb: no verb is supplied in the literal tier, the reading text uses a dash, and the supplement appears bracketed in the study tier only.

Built onbdf · na28

Proposed — pending reviewRalph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary 48 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1988)

Substantival adjective, ‘a rich person, one who has wealth.’ The word itself is descriptive and carries no verdict; Abraham and Job are πλούσιοι in the LXX without censure, and Hellenistic usage runs the full range from neutral inventory to invective.

What gives it an edge in James is distribution, not lexicography. The letter uses it three times, and the other two are hostile: the rich who drag believers into court and blaspheme the Name (2:6-7), and the rich whose gold is corroded and whose wages are unpaid (5:1-6). Add the cognate πλοῦτος at 5:2 and the picture is consistent.

That pattern is evidence about James’s world; it is not licence to build a verdict into the gloss here. The rendering stays ‘the rich one’ — the same word for the same referent-class throughout — and the letter’s polemical distribution is recorded rather than translated. Note also that James withholds ἀδελφός from this member of the pair, having supplied it explicitly for the other; whether the omission is significant or merely economical is exactly the question the apparatus must leave open.

Built onbdag

Proposed — pending reviewLuke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 37A (New York: Doubleday, 1995)

ταπείνωσις is the nominal member of the ταπειν- family, already fixed in this corpus as ‘humiliation / low estate.’ It names the state of having been brought low, not a quality of character and not a disposition — that is ταπεινοφροσύνη (‘humility of mind’), a word James does not use here.

The LXX distribution is decisive: Hagar’s affliction (Gen 16:11), Hannah’s degradation (1 Kgdms 1:11), the Servant’s humiliation in judgment (Isa 53:8), Mary’s low estate (Luke 1:48). In every case it is a condition imposed or suffered, visible from outside.

This matters for the verse’s balance. The counterpart in v. 9 is ὕψος, ‘height’ — a position, not an attitude. If ταπείνωσις were rendered ‘humility,’ the pair would become lopsided: a position on one side, a virtue on the other, and the reversal would collapse. So:

• ‘humiliation’ where the imposed character of the state must be audible
• ‘low estate’ where English needs the positional sense foregrounded against ὕψος
• not ‘humility’ — that would import a disposition and quietly resolve the verse toward the comfortable reading, contra §6

What the humiliation consists in is left unstated. Candidates: loss of property, loss of standing on entering the assembly, the levelling implied by the coming judgment, or simply mortality itself as v. 10b names it. James specifies none, and the rendering must not.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

ἐν + dative here matches ἐν τῷ ὕψει αὐτοῦ in v. 9 exactly, and both are governed (on the majority reading) by καυχάομαι. Per the corpus entry on ἐν with καυχάομαι — fixed on the Jeremiah pattern (Jer 9:23 LXX ἐν τούτῳ καυχάσθω) and Paul’s uniform usage — the preposition marks the sphere or ground of the boasting, not its instrument or its cause. So ‘in,’ not ‘because of’ and not ‘by.’

The article τῇ is possessive-anaphoric with αὐτοῦ: not humiliation in the abstract but the particular low state that belongs to this man. Retain both the article and the pronoun; ‘in humiliation’ would generalize what the Greek individuates.

One further observation on word order. The two prepositional phrases occupy identical slots in their respective clauses, and the possessive pronoun closes each. This is not incidental — the symmetry is the argument, and English should preserve the parallel placement rather than smoothing either phrase toward the verb.

Built onbdf

ὅτι is causal, grounding what precedes. Two questions attach to it.

First, what does it ground? Grammatically it can attach to the immediately preceding clause (the rich one’s humiliation) or reach back over the whole pair (both members of the reversal). The proximity of ὁ δὲ πλούσιος and the singular verb παρελεύσεται argue for the narrower scope: this is the rich man’s reason, and v. 11 then expands it with ὁ πλούσιος named again at the end. That is adopted here.

Second, is the ground consolatory or minatory? If the rich one is a believer told to boast in his abasement, ὅτι explains why abasement is not loss: what he is losing was perishable anyway. If he is an outsider, ὅτι announces his end. The conjunction itself is neutral between the two, and the corpus policy on causal ὅτι (‘because,’ supplying objective warrant, kept distinct from complementizing and recitative ὅτι) does not adjudicate the tone.

Rendered ‘because’ rather than ‘for,’ per §10 and the standing entry: the clause supplies an objective warrant, not a loose connective.

The simile is Isaiah 40:6-8, and James is close to the LXX without quoting it verbatim:

πᾶσα σὰρξ χόρτος, καὶ πᾶσα δόξα ἀνθρώπου ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου· ἐξηράνθη ὁ χόρτος, καὶ τὸ ἄνθος ἐξέπεσεν (Isa 40:6-7 LXX)

The underlying Hebrew has חָצִיר (‘grass, hay’) and צִיץ (‘blossom’). LXX renders these χόρτος and ἄνθος, and James takes over the phrase ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου unchanged. In v. 11 he continues with ἐξήρανεν τὸν χόρτον and τὸ ἄνθος … ἐξέπεσεν, which are the LXX’s own verbs (ἐξηράνθη, ἐξέπεσεν) redeployed. This is allusion by re-use of vocabulary rather than formal citation: there is no γέγραπται, no λέγει ἡ γραφή, and no attempt at exact reproduction.

What James does with the source is worth marking. Isaiah 40 contrasts the transience of all flesh with the permanence of the word of God (Isa 40:8, ‘the word of our God abides for ever’). James narrows the subject from all humanity to the rich man specifically, and in the process the passage becomes a statement about wealth rather than about mortality as such. Cf. also Ps 102:15-16 LXX (ἄνθρωπος ὡσεὶ χόρτος αἱ ἡμέραι αὐτοῦ) and Job 14:2, which give the same image its wisdom-literature form.

Note too that 1 Pet 1:24-25 quotes Isa 40:6-8 formally and at length, retaining the contrast with the abiding word. The two letters draw on the same text to different ends — Peter for the permanence of the gospel, James for the impermanence of money — which is itself a useful datum about how the passage circulated in early Christian paraenesis.

On the botany: the referent is the wildflower of the Levantine spring — anemone, poppy, cyclamen — which appears with the rains and is gone within weeks, and the χόρτος is the wild grass of open country, not fodder or lawn. The word is rendered ‘grass’ throughout; ‘hay’ would import the harvested product, and ‘vegetation’ would abstract the image away (§8).

Built onmuraoka-lxx · bdag

Proposed — pending reviewMartin Dibelius, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)

ἄνθος — ‘flower, blossom.’ Only three NT occurrences, all in this Isaiah-derived cluster (Jas 1:10, 11; 1 Pet 1:24). Retain the concrete noun; the whole force of the comparison is that a specific fragile thing is named. ‘Bloom’ is available but reads abstractly in modern English.

χόρτου — genitive, either partitive (the flower that grows among the grass) or possessive-characterizing (the grass’s own flower). The distinction has no consequence for the sense and the LXX phrase is fixed enough to be treated as a unit. Keep the bare genitive: ‘grassy flower’ converts it to an adjective, and ‘a wildflower’ — accurate to the referent — drops the χόρτος, which James needs in v. 11 as the thing the sun withers.

The collocation is best treated as a set phrase carried over from Isa 40:6 LXX. Render ‘flower of the grass’ in literal and study tiers; ‘wildflower of the grass’ is permitted in modern registers to make the referent visible, provided both nouns survive.

παρελεύσεται — future middle indicative, third singular. The middle is deponent (no reflexive force to be read out of it), and the sense is intransitive: to go by, pass along, pass away.

Range in the NT:

• physical passing by (Mark 6:48; Luke 18:37)
• of time elapsing (Acts 27:9; 1 Pet 4:3)
• of things ceasing to exist: heaven and earth (Matt 5:18; 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33; 2 Pet 3:10), the old order (2 Cor 5:17)

The third sense governs here, and the Synoptic collocation is instructive: ὁ οὐρανὸς καὶ ἡ γῆ παρελεύσονται, οἱ δὲ λόγοι μου οὐ μὴ παρέλθωσιν (Matt 24:35). James’s verb belongs to that field — the passing of what is constitutionally impermanent.

Who or what passes? Grammatically the subject can be:

• ὁ πλούσιος — the man himself will pass away. This is favored by the resumption in v. 11, ὁ πλούσιος … μαρανθήσεται, where the rich man is unambiguously the one who withers.
• τὸ ἄνθος implied from the simile — the flower passes away, and the rich man is like it. On this reading the verb belongs formally to the comparison.

The first is the natural construal: ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου is a comparative phrase, not a clause with its own subject, and the finite verb wants ὁ πλούσιος as its subject. Render accordingly: ‘he will pass away.’

The future is genuinely future — not gnomic. Compare v. 11, where James switches to aorists (ἀνέτειλεν, ἐξήρανεν, ἐξέπεσεν, ἀπώλετο) to narrate the flower’s fate as a completed scene, then returns to the future (μαρανθήσεται) for the rich man. The tense pattern is deliberate: the flower’s death is an observed fact, the rich man’s is coming.

‘Pass away’ is retained over ‘perish’ (that is ἀπόλλυμι, which James uses in v. 11 of the flower’s εὐπρέπεια) and over ‘disappear’ (too colorless, and drops the motion in the verb).

Built onbdag

The patristic reading of Jas 1:10 divides along the same seam as the modern one, which is itself worth knowing.

The dominant ancient line takes the rich man as addressed and the humiliation as spiritual — a call to voluntary self-lowering. On this construal ‘let him boast in his humiliation’ means: let him glory not in his wealth but in the abasement he accepts in Christ, counting his riches as nothing. This reading is at home in the ascetic tradition and is reinforced by the way the Latin in humilitate sua shifts the noun toward humility as a virtue rather than a state — a lexical drift the Greek ταπείνωσις does not support (see the lexical section above).

Against that, Greek commentators alert to the letter’s other passages on wealth noted the tension with Jas 2:6-7 and 5:1-6 and read the ὅτι clause as an announcement of the rich man’s end rather than a consolation.

Proposed — pending reviewJoseph B. Mayor, The Epistle of St. James: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes and Comments, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1913)

The verse is textually stable in NA28 and carries no variant of consequence in the critical apparatus. There is no bracketed material and no marked division in the editorial text.

Two points worth noting for the reader:

1. Punctuation is editorial. NA28 prints a comma after αὐτοῦ, marking the end of the elliptical clause and the beginning of the ὅτι ground. The manuscripts are unpunctuated, so the comma — and with it the decision that the ὅτι clause is subordinate to v. 10 rather than starting a fresh sentence — is a modern editorial judgment reported as such, not manuscript evidence.
2. Verse division is editorial. The chapter- and verse-numbering cuts between v. 9 and v. 10 in the middle of a single syntactic unit. The verse as printed has no finite verb of its own precisely because the division falls where it does. Readers working from the numbered text should treat vv. 9-10a as one sentence.

Both points matter for the ellipsis question discussed above: nothing in the transmitted text marks a break between the two members of the pair, and the appearance of a break is an artefact of modern typography.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc