Verse 5 opened a door: anyone lacking wisdom may ask, and God gives without reserve and without reproach. Verse 6 immediately fits a condition to that door — and the condition is not about the amount of faith but about the singleness of the asker.

Three moves in one sentence:

1. The command repeated. αἰτείτω δέ picks up αἰτείτω from v. 5 word for word. James is not adding a new instruction; he is qualifying the one just given.
2. The fault named, twice. μηδὲν διακρινόμενος, then ὁ γὰρ διακρινόμενος — the same participle, negated in the command and substantivized in the ground. That repetition is why the verse feels heavy in Greek, and English should not vary the wording either.
3. The picture. A swell on open water, worked on by wind from two directions. Both participles are passive, and neither has the water as its agent. The point is not that the man is unsettled but that he is being unsettled — he has no stability of his own to bring to the asking.

The sentence then runs on into v. 7-8 without a break, where the figure gets its name: ἀνὴρ δίψυχος, a two-souled man. Verse 6 supplies the diagnosis, v. 8 the label.

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 verb is δια- + κρίνω, ‘judge through, judge between.’ In the active it means to distinguish, discriminate, evaluate (1 Cor 11:29; 14:29; Matt 16:3 of reading the sky). In the middle it takes on a range that runs from dispute with (Acts 11:2; Jude 9) to the sense at issue here, which appears mainly in early Christian usage: to be at odds within oneself, to judge in two directions at once.

The traditional English “doubt” (Vulgate nihil haesitans) is not wrong so much as too narrow. Modern English ‘doubt’ names an epistemic state — uncertainty about whether a proposition is true. That is not quite what the morphology gives, and it is not what the context supplies. Note what James does not say: he does not say the man is unsure whether God gives, or unsure whether God exists. He says the man is divided, and then in v. 8 that he is two-souled and unsettled in all his ways — a whole-life description, not a cognitive one.

So the rendering here is “divided”, which keeps the κρίνω root’s sense of a judgment being made (in two directions) and keeps the fault located in the person rather than in his confidence level.

Three considerations support this:

• The κρίνω family. James uses κρίνω vocabulary elsewhere (2:4 διακρίσεων in some witnesses; 4:11-12 of judging a brother). Keeping a judging-word in English preserves the family.
• The negation is respectival. μηδέν is an accusative of respect — ‘in nothing’, ‘in no respect’ — not a direct object. So James is not saying ‘doubting nothing’ (i.e. having no doubts about anything) but ‘divided in no respect’, which is a claim about the wholeness of the asker.
• The parallel at Rom 4:20. οὐ διεκρίθη τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ of Abraham, who was not divided by unbelief — and Paul immediately unpacks it as being strengthened, which is stability-language, not certainty-language.

Built onbdag · bdf

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

Anarthrous and unqualified: not ‘in the faith’ (a body of belief) and not ‘with faith’ as an accompanying ingredient. Three readings of ἐν + dative are live, as always with this construction:

• spherical — asking that takes place within faith as its domain
• modal/manner — asking faithfully, i.e. in a trusting manner
• instrumental — asking by means of faith

English “in faith” is hospitable to the first two and does not exclude the third, so it is retained. ‘With faith’ tips modal and quietly turns πίστις into a quantity the asker brings; ‘by faith’ tips instrumental and makes faith the mechanism that secures the answer, which is a heavier claim than the preposition carries.

Note that James does not say ‘in great faith’ or ‘without doubting at all.’ The following participial phrase does not measure the faith; it describes the asker. This matters pastorally and the rendering should not obscure it (§6: do not shade toward comfort, but equally do not manufacture a demand the text does not make).

Built onbdf · bdag

A defective perfect with present force, construed with the dative. It occurs in the NT only here and at Jas 1:23 — both times introducing a comparison that indicts.

The ordinary Koine way of saying ‘is like’ is ὅμοιός ἐστιν (Matt 13:31, 33, 44 etc.). ἔοικα is the more literary option, and its restriction to James is one of the small pieces of evidence for the letter’s cultivated Greek. It is worth noting in the parsing table for that reason.

The perfect carries no past reference: render ‘resembles’, never ‘has become like.’

Built onbdag · bdf

Not a breaking wave (κῦμα) but the heaving swell — the rise and fall of open water. NT only here and Luke 8:24, where Jesus rebukes ὁ κλύδων τοῦ ὕδατος on the lake; the LXX uses it of the storm that threatened Jonah’s ship (Jonah 1:4, 11, 12 use the related field) and of the sea’s tumult generally.

The distinction from κῦμα is worth preserving because a κῦμα breaks and is finished, whereas a κλύδων keeps moving without ever arriving. That is exactly the figure James wants: not violence but perpetual displacement. “Surge” or “swell” carries this; a flat ‘wave’ does not.

The genitive θαλάσσης is anarthrous and qualitative — sea-swell as a kind of thing, not the swell of a particular sea. English idiom supplies the article.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Two NT hapax legomena in a row, both present passive participles, both attributive to κλύδωνι. James is spending vocabulary here.

ἀνεμίζω is a denominative of ἄνεμος (‘wind’) and is otherwise very rare — the ordinary Greek verb would be ἀνεμόω. The sense is transparent: to be driven or agitated by wind. Render “wind-driven” so the ἄνεμος morpheme stays audible in English; a bare ‘blown’ loses it.

ῥιπίζω derives from ῥιπίς, the bellows or fan used to work up a fire, and its primary attested sense is to fan a flame or winnow grain. Applied to water it means to be fanned up, whipped this way and that. Philo uses the verb of the mind agitated by passions, and the medical writers of fanning fever. The image is of something light being flicked about by a moving current of air.

The pair is not tautologous. ἀνεμίζω names the force (wind), ῥιπίζω names the effect (being flicked back and forth), and the two participles joined by καί give a swell caught between contrary gusts. Rendering both with one English word — ‘tossed about by the wind’ — collapses a deliberate doubling.

Built onbdag

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

μηδέν is an accusative of respect governed by the participle, not a direct object: ‘in nothing’, ‘in no respect’. The literal tier should show this (‘in nothing being divided’) rather than resolving to ‘doubting nothing’, which makes the neuter pronoun into the content of the doubt.

μή-form rather than οὐ is grammatically obligatory here: the participle depends on an imperative and carries volitive force (BDF §430). Per the standing corpus policy, no independent emphasis may be read out of the negative’s form.

The participle is attendant circumstance to αἰτείτω — describing the manner in which the asking is to be done — rather than a separate command. Rendering it as a coordinate imperative (‘and do not doubt’) gives it standing the syntax withholds. English participial phrasing (‘divided in nothing’) or a prepositional phrase (‘with no division in him’) preserves the dependence.

The present aspect is durative: a state of division obtaining throughout the asking, not a momentary lapse.

Built onbdf · bdag

γάρ grounds the prohibition: the reason not to ask while divided is that the divided man is what the following image describes. Per §10 the particle is always rendered; ‘for’ preserves the grounding relation.

More importantly, the sentence does not stop at the end of v. 6. NA28 punctuates with a raised dot, and vv. 7-8 continue the same movement: μὴ γὰρ οἰέσθω ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖνος … ἀνὴρ δίψυχος. The articular participle ὁ διακρινόμενος in v. 6 is the antecedent of ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖνος in v. 7 and of ἀνὴρ δίψυχος in v. 8. The three designations are one figure viewed three times, and any English rendering that makes v. 6 a self-contained aphorism obscures the chain.

The substantivizing article on the second διακρινόμενος names a class, generalized from the individual asker of v. 5. This is the same move James makes throughout the chapter (v. 12 ἀνὴρ ὅς; v. 23 εἴ τις; v. 25 ὁ δὲ παρακύψας).

The verse is textually quiet. NA28 prints αἰτείτω δὲ ἐν πίστει, μηδὲν διακρινόμενος with no bracketed material and no significant variation recorded in the hand-editions.

Two minor points worth recording rather than resolving:

• The spelling ῥιπιζομένῳ appears in some witnesses as ῥιπτιζομένῳ, by assimilation to the far commoner ῥίπτω (‘throw’). This is a phonetic-orthographic confusion, not a variant reading, and it pulls the sense from ‘fanned’ toward ‘thrown about’ — which is precisely the flattening the rendering should avoid.
• The punctuation after διακρινόμενος and at the end of the verse is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated here, and whether v. 6 ends a sentence or runs into v. 7 is a judgment about discourse structure, not a text-critical decision. This should be stated as such (§4).

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The early reading of the verse is consistently not about intellectual certainty.

Chrysostom, on the parallel logic of prayer answered and unanswered, locates the failure in the petitioner’s own instability rather than in a deficiency of persuasion — the man who asks while pulled two ways has not really made the request his own.

The Shepherd of Hermas is the most valuable witness here, because it uses James’s vocabulary independently and at length. Hermas repeatedly warns against διψυχία (Mandates 9 is devoted to it) and describes the δίψυχος as one who prays and then does not expect, and who is therefore not one person but two. Crucially, Hermas treats διψυχία as a moral fault to be repented of, not a cognitive weakness to be corrected by argument. That is strong first- or early-second-century evidence for how the James vocabulary was heard.

Didymus the Blind, in the catena fragments on James, connects the divided asker to the sea-image by noting that the wave has no motion of its own — its every movement is borrowed from something outside it. That is a good reading of the double passive.

The Vulgate’s nihil haesitans (‘hesitating in nothing’) and fluctui maris (‘to a billow of the sea’) set the Latin and thence the English tradition toward the doubt-reading. It is a defensible rendering, but it is reception rather than evidence (§11), and haesitans narrows διακρινόμενος in exactly the direction modern English ‘doubt’ does.

Proposed — pending reviewShepherd of Hermas, Mandates 9, in The Apostolic Fathers, ed. and trans. Bart D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 25 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)

The verse is frequently pressed into service as a rule about the psychology of prayer: sufficient confidence secures an answer, insufficient confidence forfeits it. Several features of the Greek resist that.

• The condition is not quantitative. James does not write ‘much faith’ or ‘without any doubt whatever.’ μηδὲν διακρινόμενος describes an undivided asker, and the answering label in v. 8 is δίψυχος — two-souled, not weak-souled.
• The object of the asking, back in v. 5, is wisdom — specifically wisdom for standing in trials (vv. 2-4). The verse is not a general warrant, and reading it as one detaches it from its paragraph.
• The characterization of God in v. 5 (giving ἁπλῶς, without reserve, and not reproaching) and the characterization of the asker in v. 6 (divided) are set against each other by their vocabulary. God is single; the asker is to be single too. The problem is not that God requires a certain psychological state before he will give but that a man at odds with himself is not in a position to receive what is being offered.