James has just cut off one escape route: no one under trial may say Ἀπὸ θεοῦ πειράζομαι (v. 13). God is neither temptable by evils nor himself the tempter of anyone. Verse 14 supplies the alternative account, and it does so with three moves that carry the whole weight of the paragraph.

First, the subject narrows. Verse 13’s μηδείς (‘let no one say’) becomes ἕκαστος — each individual, one at a time. The move from a general prohibition to a distributive singular is the point: nobody gets to speak about temptation in the third person.

Second, the agency is relocated but not softened. James keeps the same verb (πειράζεται) and even keeps the passive, so the sufferer’s experience of being acted upon is not denied. What changes is the ὑπό phrase: the agent is ἡ ἰδία ἐπιθυμία, one’s own craving. The adjective ἴδιος is doing real work — this is not desire in general, and certainly not something imported from outside.

Third, two participles supply the mechanism, and both come from the hunting field: ἐξελκόμενος (dragged out of cover) and δελεαζόμενος (lured with bait). The sequence is precise — the quarry is drawn from safety and then taken with something it wants. The metaphor is live, not spent, and the following verse switches fields entirely (conception, birth, death), which is why v. 14’s imagery must be kept visible rather than abstracted into ‘drawn away and enticed by desire.’

The text is stable; the difficulties here are lexical and syntactic, not text-critical.

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

The postpositive δέ is the hinge between vv. 13 and 14. It is not a neutral connective: v. 13 ends with an emphatic denial (πειράζει δὲ αὐτὸς οὐδένα, ‘and he himself tempts no one’), and v. 14 opens by naming who does. Per §10, the particle is rendered, not dropped; ‘but’ carries the contrast without overloading it.

Note how carefully James constructs the parallel so that the substitution is visible:

• v. 13: οὐδένα … God tempts no one
• v. 14: ἕκαστος … each one is tempted

The two indefinite pronouns are set against each other, and the verb is identical. James is not saying that what happens in v. 14 is a different phenomenon from what is denied in v. 13; he is saying it has a different agent.

The two participles are best taken as attendant-circumstance or modal, describing how the testing operates rather than adding two further events. Whether they are strictly temporal (dragged out first, then baited) is discussed below.

The verb spans a range that no single English word covers: to test in order to prove (Gen 22:1 LXX, of God and Abraham), to try in order to trip up (Mark 8:11, of the Pharisees), and to entice toward evil (Jas 1:13-14). The corpus policy already fixed for the noun πειρασμός applies: the base gloss is testing, and the enticement sense is flagged where context forces it, because modern English ‘temptation’ has narrowed almost entirely to the second and would flatten James’s argument.

Here the difficulty is acute, because James is running one verb across two senses within three verses. In v. 2 (πειρασμοῖς … ποικίλοις) and v. 12 (ὑπομένει πειρασμόν) the trials are external and God-permitted, and joy is the appropriate response. In vv. 13-14 the same root names solicitation to evil, and God is emphatically excluded from it. The Greek word does not change; the situation does.

The present tense is durative and gnomic: this is what characteristically happens, not a report on an episode.

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ὑπό + genitive after a passive marks the personal agent, and the corpus keeps it strictly distinct from διά + gen (intermediate means), ἀπό + gen (source), and ἐν + dat (sphere). James’s choice is deliberate and pointed: three words earlier, in v. 13, the excuse-maker had said ἀπὸ θεοῦ πειράζομαι — using the source preposition. James answers with the agency preposition and a different noun.

The effect is to personify the craving. Greek can use ὑπό with impersonal forces (fever, wind), so this is not grammatically anomalous, but in a sentence that continues with two verbs of hunting the agential force is unmistakable: the ἐπιθυμία stalks, hauls, and baits.

ἴδιος is stronger than the enclitic possessive αὐτοῦ would have been. Per the standing glossary entry, it marks what belongs peculiarly to one as against what is common or another’s. James could have written τῆς ἐπιθυμίας αὐτοῦ. He did not. The adjective closes the last door: the craving is not the devil’s, not the world’s, not Adam’s — it is the individual’s own, and there is nobody left to name as agent.

The rendering must therefore keep ‘his own’ and must not weaken it to a bare possessive.

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The stem is morally neutral and the charge comes from the object or qualifier — the standing corpus policy, fixed against ‘lust’ as a base gloss because modern English has narrowed that word irrecoverably to sexual appetite. Luke 22:15 has Christ as subject (ἐπιθυμίᾳ ἐπεθύμησα); the LXX uses the family of legitimate longing as freely as of the forbidden coveting of Deut 5:21.

Here the qualifier ἰδίας plus the trajectory of v. 15 (conception, sin, death) marks it decisively negative, so ‘craving’ is the right English — the appetite-word marked as disordered without the sexual narrowing.

Note the number: singular and anarthrous-in-force despite the article, which is possessive rather than anaphoric. James names the appetite as such, not a set of desires. Do not pluralize.

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

NT hapax. The compound is transparent: ἐκ + ἕλκω, ‘drag out.’ ἕλκω itself is a verb of forcible hauling — dragging a net full of fish (John 21:6, 11), dragging men into court (Acts 16:19; Jas 2:6), drawing a sword (John 18:10). It is never gentle.

The prefix is doing the work: not merely dragging, but dragging out — from cover, from a den, from safety. That is what makes the hunting reading natural and what pairs it with the bait of the second participle.

The passive is genuine: the man is acted upon. But the agent is his own craving, which is why the passive does not exculpate.

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

From δέλεαρ, ‘bait.’ Three NT occurrences, all in the same moral field: here, and twice in 2 Peter of false teachers who δελεάζουσιν the unstable (2 Pet 2:14, 18). The word has no attested neutral use in the NT and its concrete origin is not spent — the noun δέλεαρ was still ordinary Greek for what you put on a hook or in a trap.

That is why the metaphor is treated as live per §8. Two things make the bait-image argumentatively load-bearing here:

1. Bait works by offering something the animal actually wants. This is the whole reason James’s account is not exculpatory. The craving does not overpower from outside; it presents to the person something he is already disposed to take. Rendering ‘enticed’ preserves the attraction but loses the trap; rendering ‘tempted’ duplicates πειράζω and erases the switch of vocabulary.
2. Bait conceals a hook. The image already contains the outcome that v. 15 spells out. The lure is not the danger; what the lure is attached to is.

Renderings to avoid: ‘seduced’ (narrows to the sexual and imports a second agent), ‘allured’ (archaic), ‘baited’ alone in modern English (has drifted toward provocation in speech). ‘Lured with bait’ in the reading text; ‘lured’ where flow requires compression, with the compression noted.

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Proposed — pending reviewLuke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, Anchor Bible 37A (New York: Doubleday, 1995) · Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989)

The distributive singular is the rhetorical engine of the verse. James has been writing to a plural audience since v. 2 (ἀδελφοί μου), and in v. 13 he issues a plural-scope prohibition through μηδείς. Here he narrows to ἕκαστος and holds the singular through both participles and on into v. 15.

The corpus policy on ἕκαστος (‘each one / each of you’) notes that the distributive individuates a plural addressee and that the individuating force is Paul’s emphasis on individual liability. The same holds here with greater force, because the whole point of vv. 13-15 is that liability cannot be transferred — not to God, not to the community, not to circumstance.

The pairing with ἴδιος doubles this. Each one; his own. Two words, both individuating, in a five-word clause.

Per §3 the masculine forms are the ordinary Greek for a referentially inclusive statement and stand as written; the referent is certainly mixed (the addressees of v. 2), and this is noted rather than neutralized in the reading text. The literal tier retains the masculine participles.

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The two present passive participles are nominative, agreeing with ἕκαστος, and depend on πειράζεται. Greek adverbial participles carry no marker of their relation to the main verb, and the corpus policy is to keep the bare participle in the literal tier rather than importing a conjunction.

Three construals are grammatically available:

• Modal — they describe how the testing happens: he is tested by being dragged out and baited. This is the most natural reading of two participles of manner following a passive of the same semantic field.
• Temporal — he is tested when he is dragged out and baited. This tips toward reading vv. 14-15 as a strict sequence.
• Causal — he is tested because he is dragged out and baited. This is weakest, since it would make the participles the ground rather than the content of the testing.

The reading text uses a dash and bare participles, which reproduces the Greek’s own reticence. Supplying ‘when he is drawn away’ (the traditional English) silently adopts the temporal reading and additionally makes the participles a condition rather than a description — as though the testing were one thing and the dragging another.

The present tense of both participles is durative and matches the gnomic present of the main verb: this is how it works, repeatedly.

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Proposed — pending reviewJ. 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. NA28 prints ἕκαστος δὲ πειράζεται ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας ἐπιθυμίας ἐξελκόμενος καὶ δελεαζόμενος without a marked variation unit, and it is not treated in the standard textual commentary — an absence that is itself the report.

Minor items worth recording for completeness:

• Some later witnesses show the expected orthographic wobble in the hapax ἐξελκόμενος; the form is secure and the variation is spelling, not text.
• The punctuation after δελεαζόμενος is editorial. NA28 prints a high point (·), joining v. 14 closely to v. 15 as one movement. A full stop is defensible but weakens the chain ἐπιθυμία → ἁμαρτία → θάνατος that v. 15 completes. The reading text follows NA28’s lighter punctuation.

The stability is worth noting substantively: this is a verse that assigns responsibility in a way scribes might well have found uncomfortable, and no witness softens it. What the text says about the origin of temptation is what it has always said.

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The patristic use of this verse is remarkably consistent, and it converges on one point: James removes every external defendant.

The Greek commentators press the ἴδιος. The craving is called one’s own precisely so that the hearer cannot arraign God (v. 13), and — a point they make repeatedly — cannot arraign the devil either. James does not mention the διάβολος until 4:7, and he does not mention him here. The tempter of v. 14 is internal.

The hunting imagery was not lost on them. The bait-and-trap language of δελεάζω is regularly picked up in patristic moral exhortation with the hook made explicit: what is offered is genuinely attractive, and that is the danger. This reading is exegetically sound and should govern the English — the bait must remain something wanted, not something imposed.

Two backgrounds are worth naming, and they must be kept apart.

Sirach 15:11-20 is the closest thematic parallel in the Greek Bible: ‘Do not say, It is because of the Lord that I fell away … He himself made humanity from the beginning and left him in the hand of his own deliberation (διαβούλιον).’ The structure of the argument matches James’s exactly — a quoted excuse, a denial that God is the source, and a relocation of the agency into the person. This parallel is strong at the level of argument, weaker at the level of vocabulary: Sirach says διαβούλιον, James says ἐπιθυμία.

Genesis 3 is often invoked, since the serpent’s approach is a lure and the woman’s seeing that the tree was desirable (ἐπιθυμία vocabulary in the LXX at Gen 3:6, ὡραῖόν ἐστιν τοῦ κατανοῆσαι) has the same structure of attraction preceding act. James does not cite it, and the language of v. 15 (conception, birth) may or may not glance at Gen 3-4. This should be recorded as resonance, not as citation.

What is not present is any appeal to an external tempter. Both LXX backgrounds have one available — the serpent, the devil of Wis 2:24 — and James uses neither.

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

Three decisions govern the tiers.

The metaphor stays. Per §8, live metaphors are rendered with the image intact even where the target language finds it slightly unusual. ‘Drawn away and enticed’ — the familiar English — is a pair of faded abstractions that discards a hunting scene James wrote in two words. The reading text keeps ‘dragged out’ and ‘lured with bait.’

The passive stays passive. Both participles and the main verb are passive, and the agent is a single ὑπό phrase. Converting to an active (‘his own craving drags him out and baits him’) reads well and is exactly what the Greek avoided: James keeps the sufferer in the position of one acted upon, which is how temptation is actually experienced, and locates the agency in something that is nonetheless his own. That tension is the verse. Do not resolve it.

Nothing is softened. §6 forbids shading a hard rendering toward comfort. The verse is an assignment of responsibility with no remainder, and the English must land the same way.