James has just told the lowly brother to boast in his exaltation and the rich man in his humiliation (vv. 9-10), grounding the second half with a compressed simile: ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου παρελεύσεται — “like a flower of grass he will pass away.” Verse 11 unpacks that simile at length, in four short aorist clauses, and then turns it back on the man with οὕτως καί.

Three things carry the verse.

It is Isaiah 40:6-8 in miniature. Nearly every content word — ἐξήρανεν, χόρτος, ἄνθος, ἐξέπεσεν — stands in the LXX of that passage. James does not quote it with a formula; he writes in its vocabulary. The reader who knows Isaiah hears the withering of all flesh under the breath of YHWH behind a sentence about Palestinian heat.

The tenses do real work. Four aorists describe what the sun always does; then one future — μαρανθήσεται — describes what will happen to the rich man. The move from a general truth to a particular verdict is the whole rhetorical shape of the verse, and flattening the aorists into English pasts (“the sun rose … and dried up”) reads as a story rather than a law of nature.

The last clause is the sting. ἐν ταῖς πορείαις αὐτοῦ — in the middle of his going about, his travels, his business — is where the withering happens. Not after retirement, not at the end of a long life: mid-journey. And μαρανθήσεται is a passive whose agent James does not name.

Who “the rich man” is remains genuinely open: a wealthy believer told to glory in being brought low, or an outsider whose downfall is simply announced. The verse itself does not settle it, and the rendering must not either.

Proposed — pending reviewRichard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, New Testament Readings (London: Routledge, 1999)

Isaiah 40:6-8 LXX reads in part: πᾶσα σὰρξ χόρτος, καὶ πᾶσα δόξα ἀνθρώπου ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου· ἐξηράνθη ὁ χόρτος, καὶ τὸ ἄνθος ἐξέπεσεν — “all flesh is grass, and all human glory like a flower of grass; the grass withered and the flower fell off.”

James 1:10-11 has ἄνθος χόρτου, ἐξήρανεν τὸν χόρτον, τὸ ἄνθος … ἐξέπεσεν. The overlap is not thematic but verbal, and it includes the distinctive ἐκπίπτω, where one might expect πίπτω. Two differences are worth noting:

• James makes ἐξήρανεν active with ὁ ἥλιος as subject, where LXX Isaiah has the passive ἐξηράνθη (the Hebrew has the breath of YHWH as the agent, Isa 40:7 MT). James supplies a natural cause where Isaiah names a divine one; whether that is a softening or simply a shift of register is a fair question, and the divine passive at the end of James’s own verse (μαρανθήσεται) suggests the theological agency has been relocated rather than removed.
• James substitutes εὐπρέπεια τοῦ προσώπου for Isaiah’s δόξα ἀνθρώπου. The Isaian δόξα is exactly the word for what the rich man’s wealth confers, and James’s choice of a different, more ornamental noun keeps the flower in view rather than jumping to the interpretation.

1 Peter 1:24-25 cites the same Isaiah passage explicitly and at length. The two letters are drawing on a shared stock of Isaian imagery about the transience of human standing; there is no need to posit literary dependence in either direction.

Built onmuraoka-lxx · bdag

Proposed — pending reviewDale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle of James, ICC (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013)

καύσων (from καίω, ‘burn’) is genuinely two-sided in Hellenistic Greek, and the two senses point in different directions here.

1. Burning heat, especially the sun’s — Matt 20:12 (τὸν καύσωνα τῆς ἡμέρας, the day’s scorching heat borne by the laborers), Luke 12:55 (καύσων ἔσται, of hot weather). On this reading σὺν τῷ καύσωνι describes the sun rising with its own heat, and the σύν phrase is nearly attributive: the sun came up scorching.

2. The sirocco, the hot east wind off the desert. This is the standing LXX equivalent of Hebrew קָדִים in prophetic texts (Hos 12:2; 13:15; Jonah 4:8; Ezek 17:10; 19:12), where the wind is an instrument of judgment that blasts vegetation. On this reading the sun and the wind are two agents, and σύν is genuinely comitative.

The LXX weight favors the wind; the immediate Greek context — a single verb ἀνέτειλεν with ὁ ἥλιος alone as subject — favors the heat, since a wind does not rise with the sun as a matter of course.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

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

χόρτος is not lawn grass. In LXX and NT usage it is the low wild herbage of the field — fodder, what animals graze (Ps 103:14 LXX; Matt 6:30, where the χόρτος of the field is thrown into the oven). In Palestine it springs up green after the winter rains and is burned brown within weeks. The image assumes a reader who has watched that happen annually.

ἄνθος is the flower borne by that same herbage — the scarlet anemones and poppies that appear briefly among the spring grass. The genitive in v. 10 (ἄνθος χόρτου) is possessive: the flower belongs to the grass, is part of the same short-lived growth, and goes the way of the grass.

The two together are a fixed pair in the biblical transience-topos (Isa 40:6-8; Ps 102:15-16 LXX; Job 14:2). Rendering ἄνθος “blossom” is acceptable; rendering it “bloom” drifts toward the abstract. The English must keep both nouns concrete, since the whole verse is one sustained picture (§8, live metaphor).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

εὐπρέπεια is a NT hapax: εὖ + πρέπω, ‘what is fitting, becoming’ — hence seemliness, comeliness, splendid appearance. In the LXX it is a high-register word, used of the beauty of Zion (Ps 49:2 LXX), of royal majesty (Ps 92:1 LXX: εὐπρέπειαν ἐνεδύσατο, ‘he clothed himself with majesty’), and of the adornment of the sanctuary.

That register matters. James could have written κάλλος (‘beauty’) or ὡραιότης; he chose the word the Psalter uses for the splendor of a king and of God’s own dwelling, and applied it to a wildflower that lasts a morning. The irony is precise, and it prepares the way for the application: what the rich man’s money buys him is exactly this — a splendid appearance, briefly.

Rendering: ‘comeliness’ in the literal tier preserves the fitting/becoming root; ‘beauty’ in smooth registers. Avoid ‘grace’ (imports χάρις), ‘glory’ (that is δόξα, and Isaiah’s word, which James pointedly did not use here), and ‘loveliness’ (register too light for the LXX background).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

πρόσωπον is the face, and by extension the outward aspect a thing presents. Of a flower it means simply its look, its face turned to the viewer — Greek uses the word freely of the surface or appearance of anything (πρόσωπον τῆς γῆς, ‘the face of the earth’, Luke 21:35; Acts 17:26).

The phrase ἡ εὐπρέπεια τοῦ προσώπου αὐτοῦ is therefore not tautologous: the εὐπρέπεια is the splendor, the πρόσωπον is the aspect in which it is displayed. ‘The comeliness of its face’ is wooden but transparent; ‘the beauty of its appearance’ is the smooth equivalent.

The possessive αὐτοῦ here is neuter, agreeing with ἄνθος by proximity, where the αὐτοῦ four words earlier was masculine and referred to χόρτος. English cannot show the shift, and the parsing table carries it.

A further resonance is worth naming and not overpressing: James returns to πρόσωπον at 1:23, where the hearer-only stares at τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως αὐτοῦ in a mirror and forgets what he looked like. Both passages concern a face that does not last. Whether the echo is deliberate is beyond demonstration.

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ἀνέτειλεν … ἐξήρανεν … ἐξέπεσεν … ἀπώλετο: four aorist indicatives in a row, describing what happens whenever the sun comes up hot. These are almost certainly gnomic aorists — the aorist used for what is characteristically or universally the case, a construction well attested in Koine and especially at home in proverbs and similes (BDF §333). Compare 1 Pet 1:24 (ἐξηράνθη ὁ χόρτος καὶ τὸ ἄνθος ἐξέπεσεν), where the same Isaian aorists carry the same timeless force.

The alternative is that James is narrating a scene — “the sun rose, and it dried up the grass” — as a vivid illustration told as though it had just happened. The distinction is real: on the gnomic reading the verse states a law; on the narrative reading it paints a picture. English cannot easily mark the difference, and the two shade into each other.

The corpus already fixes the treatment of the gnomic future (Gal 6:5, 7) as a plain English future whose openness is preserved. The same discipline applies here: a plain English past keeps both readings available, whereas an English present (“the sun rises and withers the grass”) commits to the gnomic and a pluperfect commits to the narrative.

ἀπώλετο is second aorist middle of ἀπόλλυμι. The middle of this verb is regularly intransitive — ‘perish, be lost’ — and carries no reflexive force. Render ‘perished’; ‘was destroyed’ is acceptable in smooth registers, though it implies an agent the middle leaves out.

Built onbdf · bdag

οὕτως καί turns the whole picture on its object. Per the corpus policy, οὕτως is directionally neutral in Greek and is rendered ‘in this way’; the adjunctive καί is rendered separately as ‘also’ and is never absorbed, since it is the particle that adds the rich man to the flower rather than merely joining clauses.

The pivot is marked in the Greek by a raised point (·) in NA28 — an editorial judgment, since the manuscripts are unpunctuated. The colon or dash in English reproduces the same editorial judgment and should be understood as such.

Note what the comparison does not say. James does not write ‘so also the rich man’s wealth will perish.’ He writes that the rich man himself will be withered. The subject of μαρανθήσεται is ὁ πλούσιος, not ὁ πλοῦτος, and every rendering that softens this to ‘his riches will fade’ has changed the subject of the sentence.

πορεία occurs twice in the NT: Luke 13:22 (πορείαν ποιούμενος εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα, ‘making his journey to Jerusalem’) and here in the plural. The root sense is a going, a journey, and by natural extension one’s course of life or way of conducting oneself (LXX Prov 2:7; Sir 1:5 v.l.).

Three construals are live:

1. Business journeys. The plural, and the trading voyages James describes at 4:13 (‘today or tomorrow we will go to such a city and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’), give this strong contextual support. The rich man is withered mid-venture.
2. Ways, courses of conduct — the LXX ‘walk’ idiom, close to ὁδοί, which James uses at 1:8 (ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ὁδοῖς αὐτοῦ). On this reading it means simply ‘in all his doings’.
3. Pursuits, undertakings generally, splitting the difference.

Rendering ‘in the midst of his pursuits’ in smooth registers is hospitable to all three and preserves the crucial temporal point: the withering happens during, not after. ‘In his ways’ is the literal-tier equivalent and keeps the LXX walk-idiom audible. Avoid ‘in his business affairs’ (adopts reading 1) and ‘in the course of his life’ (drains the plural of its concreteness).

One small argument for the journey sense: James wrote ὁδοί three verses earlier and switched words here. Per the corpus discipline on lexical switches (στοιχέω against περιπατέω), the change is a choice and should be recorded rather than levelled.

Built onbdag

μαραίνω is the only occurrence of this verb in the NT. Its domain is the wasting away of what was once vigorous: plants wilting, fire dying down, strength ebbing, and in the medical writers the wasting of a body under disease. The English ‘marasmus’ preserves the cognate. In Wis 2:8 the wicked say ‘let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither’ (πρὶν ἢ μαρανθῆναι), which is close to James’s picture and register.

Two features must survive into English.

The horticultural image. The verb keeps the flower in view. ‘Fade away’ is acceptable and idiomatic; ‘wither’ is stronger and closer to the plant sense. ‘Perish’ and ‘be destroyed’ discard the image (§8) and duplicate ἀπώλετο, which stands earlier in the same verse.

The passive. μαρανθήσεται is future passive with no expressed agent. Compare the other verbs in the verse: the sun acts (ἀνέτειλεν, ἐξήρανεν), the flower perishes (ἀπώλετο, middle-intransitive), and the rich man is withered. James has chosen the one form that implies a hand.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

The referent of ὁ πλούσιος governs how the whole of vv. 9-11 reads, and it is not decided by this verse.

Reading A: a rich brother. Verse 9 has ὁ ἀδελφὸς ὁ ταπεινός, and v. 10 continues with ὁ δὲ πλούσιος under the same verb καυχάσθω, with no repetition of ἀδελφός. On the most natural grammatical continuation, ὁ ἀδελφός governs both members: the lowly brother boasts in his exaltation, the rich brother in his humiliation. Verse 11 then explains why the rich brother should glory in being brought low — because the standing he is losing was never durable in the first place.

Reading B: the rich as outsiders. James elsewhere speaks of οἱ πλούσιοι as oppressors outside the community (2:6-7, dragging you into court and blaspheming the name; 5:1-6, an unqualified woe). On this reading v. 10 is bitter irony — let him boast, if he likes, in his coming humiliation — and v. 11 is not pastoral counsel but announced ruin.

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

The verse is textually stable in its substance. NA28 prints no variant significant enough to affect the sense, and the passage is not treated in Metzger’s commentary.

Minor known variation in the tradition, none of it text-critically weighty:

• αὐτοῦ after ἄνθος and after προσώπου is occasionally omitted or transposed in individual minuscules — the ordinary instability of unemphatic possessive pronouns.
• The spelling ἐξήρανεν / ἐξήρανε (movable nu) varies by witness and by editorial convention; no semantic weight.
• Some witnesses read αὐτῆς for the second αὐτοῦ, harmonizing the pronoun’s gender. This is a scribal tidying of the antecedent shift (masculine χόρτος → neuter ἄνθος) and confirms that the shift in the critical text is the harder reading.

The punctuation before οὕτως is editorial in every printed edition; the majuscules supply none.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

This is wisdom material with a prophetic edge, not epistolary argument, and the register should show it. The sentence is built from short paratactic clauses joined by καί — five of them before the pivot — which is the rhythm of the Hebrew wisdom tradition rather than of Pauline periodic syntax. English should keep the clauses short and the connectives explicit rather than subordinating them into a single complex sentence.

The corpus policy on connectives (§10) applies: every καί is rendered. Modern English editorial taste would prune them; pruning reproduces a smoothed text rather than this one.

The last clause, by contrast, is a single unbroken future — οὕτως καὶ ὁ πλούσιος ἐν ταῖς πορείαις αὐτοῦ μαρανθήσεται — and lands with the verb at the end, as Greek word order permits and English cannot easily reproduce. Ending the English clause on ‘wither away’ or on the πορείαι phrase are both defensible; the smooth rendering places the withering before the pursuits so that the sentence closes on the man’s activity, which is where James’s irony sits.

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

The Greek commentary tradition on James is thin before the catenae, but the imagery had a settled reception.

Chrysostom, preaching on the Isaian topos generally, presses the sheer speed of the loss: what is at issue is not that wealth is evil but that it is momentary, and the man who reckons by it has miscounted the length of his own life. That is the note the aorists sound.

The catena fragments attributed to Cyril and to Didymus on James read ἐν ταῖς πορείαις αὐτοῦ of the rich man’s comings and goings on business — supporting the journey sense over the general ‘ways’ sense — and take μαρανθήσεται of death overtaking him unfinished.

Worth noting for §11 purposes: none of this is lexical evidence. It shows how the verse was heard by readers whose Greek was native, which is real information about the plausible range, and it should be weighed as that and not more.

Proposed — pending reviewGerald Bray, ed., James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament XI (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000)