Verse 10 has just laid down the verdict: οὐ χρή — blessing and cursing out of one mouth ought not to happen. Verse 11 does not argue the verdict; it makes the hearer pronounce it himself. James turns to the natural world and asks a question that answers itself: no spring gushes fresh and brackish water from the same opening.

Three features carry the weight.

1. μήτι is not a neutral interrogative. It frames the question so that the only available answer is no. The hearer supplies the verdict James has just stated, and thereby convicts himself.
2. ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς ὀπῆς repeats ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ στόματος from v. 10 with near-verbal exactness. The ὀπή is the mouth of the spring; the argument runs on the correspondence of two mouths.
3. τὸ γλυκύ / τὸ πικρόν are substantival neuters — ‘the sweet [thing]’, ‘the bitter [thing]’ — with the noun (ὕδωρ) deliberately withheld until v. 12. And πικρός is not left in the world of taste: it reappears four verses later as ζῆλον πικρόν (3:14), which is where the analogy was aimed all along.

The rendering problem is that the verse’s force is entirely carried by particle and word order, both of which English handles badly. A flat declarative (‘a spring cannot produce both’) supplies the answer that the Greek extracts.

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

μήτι is μή strengthened by the indefinite τι, functioning as an interrogative particle. Like simple μή in questions, it presupposes a negative answer; the added τι sharpens rather than softens (BDF §427; BDAG s.v.).

The NT distribution is instructive. It marks questions the speaker expects to be denied and often finds it awkward to ask: Matt 26:22, 25 (μήτι ἐγώ εἰμι, κύριε; — ‘it isn’t me, is it?’), John 4:29 (the Samaritan woman’s guarded ‘this couldn’t be the Christ, could it?’), 2 Cor 12:18. James uses it once, here, and uses plain μή at 3:12 and 2:14.

English has no particle equivalent, so the expectation has to be carried by construction:

• ‘Surely the spring does not …?’ — carries the expectation, slightly formal.
• ‘… does it?’ (negative tag question) — the closest colloquial equivalent, already fixed in the corpus for μή at Jas 2:14.

What is excluded in the reading text is the declarative (‘a spring does not send forth …’), which asserts what the Greek asks, and the bare positive question (‘can a spring send forth …?’), which loses the particle. Since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, the question mark itself is editorial judgment — grounded here on μήτι, not on the manuscripts.

Built onbdag · bdf

πηγή is the water-source: the spring or fountainhead where water rises, as against φρέαρ, the dug well or cistern. John 4:6-14 sets the two side by side within one conversation (Jacob’s φρέαρ against the πηγὴ ὕδατος ἁλλομένου), which fixes the distinction as live in the first century.

In the LXX πηγή renders מַעְיָן, and the noun carries an established metaphorical range for a source of life, wisdom, or ruin (Prov 10:11, στόμα δικαίου πηγὴ ζωῆς — ‘the mouth of the righteous is a spring of life’, where the mouth/spring pairing is already made). Jas 3:11 stands in that stream.

Render spring. ‘Fountain’ is retained only in declared liturgical register: modern English ‘fountain’ suggests a constructed ornamental jet, which is precisely the wrong image for a natural source with a single ὀπή. ‘Well’ is excluded — that is φρέαρ, and it would make the verse a claim about a hole in the ground rather than about a source.

The article is generic (‘the spring’ = springs as such), and English may render either ‘the spring’ or ‘a spring’; the generic force is what makes this a maxim rather than a report about one Palestinian water source.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

ὀπή is a hole or opening, NT only here and Heb 11:38 (ἐν σπηλαίοις καὶ ἐν ταῖς ὀπαῖς τῆς γῆς — caves and holes of the earth). In the LXX it appears of a rock-cleft (Exod 33:22, where Moses is placed in the ὀπὴ τῆς πέτρας) and of window openings and apertures in construction contexts. The word is plain and physical: an aperture, not a mechanism.

That plainness is the point. James chose the humblest available noun for the place where the water comes out, and the choice is what makes the analogy with a mouth work. He does not say ‘from the same source’ (which would be πηγή restated) but ‘from the same opening’ — the orifice.

Render opening. ‘Hole’ is available and is closer to the register of Heb 11:38, but risks bathos in English here. Excluded: ‘source’ (duplicates πηγή and dissolves the aperture), ‘outlet’ (modern plumbing register), and ‘place’ (deletes the noun).

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

βρύω is a NT hapax. Elsewhere in Greek the verb is characteristically intransitive: to be full to bursting, to teem, to swell — used of buds swelling and of vegetation bursting out, and derivatively of water welling up. The related noun-family (βρύον, moss; and the LXX’s ἀναβρύω / ἀναβλύζω of springing water) sits in the same field.

What is unusual at Jas 3:11 is that the verb takes a direct object (τὸ γλυκὺ καὶ τὸ πικρόν). This is the point of pressure:

Render with a gushing/pouring verb that keeps the swelling force audible: gush in modern registers, pour out where flow rather than pressure is wanted, send forth in declared liturgical register (where the English tradition has fixed it, though it is colorless). Excluded: ‘produce’ and ‘yield’ (abstract the water away, contra §8), ‘give’ (drains the verb entirely).

Built onbdag · bdf

Proposed — pending reviewSophie Laws, A Commentary on the Epistle of James, Black's New Testament Commentaries (London: A. & C. Black, 1980) · Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. Henry Stuart Jones, 9th ed. with revised supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

Article + αὐτός in attributive position is the identity-adjective — ‘the same’, asserting identity rather than similarity. This is already fixed across the corpus (τὸ αὐτὸ φρονεῖν, Phil 4:2; τὸν αὐτὸν ἀγῶνα, Phil 1:30; τὰ αὐτά, Jas 5:9 field).

What matters here is that v. 10 has just used the identical construction: ἐκ τοῦ αὐτοῦ στόματος. James repeats preposition, article, αὐτός, and a body-orifice noun. The two clauses are built to be heard as one shape:

Two consequences for rendering. First, ἐκ must receive the same English preposition in both verses (‘out of’), or the parallel is lost — this is the standing anti-variation rule for repeated prepositions within one argument. Second, ‘the same’ must not be weakened to ‘one and the same’ (over-formalizes) or ‘a single’ (converts identity into number).

The fronting of ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς ὀπῆς before the verb is also deliberate: Greek word order puts the sameness of the aperture in front of the reader before the two waters arrive. English should keep the phrase early where flow permits, or at minimum not bury it after the objects.

Built onbdf

Both are substantival neuter adjectives with the noun unexpressed: ‘the sweet [thing]’, ‘the bitter [thing]’. James supplies ὕδωρ only in v. 12 (ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ), so the literal tier must bracket the supplied noun and leave the referent formally open until then.

γλυκύς is the ordinary word for sweet or fresh water, used of potable water against salt (LXX Exod 15:25 of the waters of Marah made sweet; Rev 10:9-10 of taste). Render sweet; ‘fresh’ is permitted in modern registers, where English ‘sweet water’ has faded, but the note must record that the compression loses the taste-word that v. 12’s γλυκύ then reuses.

πικρός is bitter — of taste, and by a live extension of bitterness in persons and speech. This is where the verse’s aim becomes visible:

• 3:11 τὸ πικρόν — bitter water
• 3:14 ζῆλον πικρόν — bitter zeal, in the heart

James is not offering a nature-observation for its own sake. The adjective he applies to water in v. 11 is the adjective he applies to the disposition in v. 14, and the concordance link must survive in English: use bitter at both points without variation. Rendering v. 11 ‘brackish’ or ‘salty’ in the reading text severs it, and also anticipates ἁλυκόν (v. 12), which is the word James actually chose for salt.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

Verses 11-12 are two rhetorical questions in a chain, and they are not identically constructed:

• v. 11 μήτι … βρύει …; — one question, one subject (a spring)
• v. 12 μὴ δύναται … συκῆ ἐλαίας ποιῆσαι ἢ ἄμπελος σῦκα; — a second question with two subjects (fig, vine), then a verbless coda returning to water (οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ)

The sequence is water → plants → water, so v. 11 is not a stray illustration but the opening of a bracket that closes at the end of v. 12. Translators who begin a new paragraph at v. 11 break a unit; the standing corpus policy on editorial paragraphing applies — printed paragraph divisions are judgment, not evidence.

The register is sapiential. The pattern of appealing to fixed natural regularities to expose an incongruity in human conduct is at home in Israel’s wisdom tradition (Prov 27:21 of the crucible; Sir 27:6 of the tree and its fruit) and in the prophets (Jer 13:23). It also has Greco-Roman parallels in the moralists, but the closest formal analogue is Jesus’ own tree-and-fruit argument (Matt 7:16-18; Luke 6:43-45), which likewise moves from natural impossibility to the mouth (ἐκ γὰρ περισσεύματος καρδίας λαλεῖ τὸ στόμα). James is working the same seam.

One further note on force. Verse 10 says blessing and cursing out of one mouth ought not to be (οὐ χρή) — a moral judgment. Verse 11 says a spring does not do the analogous thing — a statement of fact. The argument therefore turns on a slight asymmetry: nature cannot, humans should not and evidently do. Rendering v. 11 with ‘cannot’ (‘a spring cannot pour out…’) flattens that asymmetry by importing δύναμαι, which James withholds until v. 12.

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

NA28 prints μήτι ἡ πηγὴ ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς ὀπῆς βρύει τὸ γλυκὺ καὶ τὸ πικρόν; with no variant noted in the hand-edition apparatus of the main clause. The verse is textually quiet, and the UBS committee did not treat it in the Textual Commentary.

Two minor points worth recording rather than adjudicating:

• The interrogative punctuation is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, so the question mark rests on the particle μήτι, not on the manuscripts. The grammatical grounds are decisive, but the reader should know which is which — the same discipline the corpus applies to accentual and punctuational decisions elsewhere.
• The rarity of βρύει and ὀπῆς did not, so far as the tradition shows, provoke substitution. Where scribes met these words they copied them, which is itself modest evidence that both were intelligible.

The versions are of interest chiefly for how they handled the hapax verb: the Vulgate’s numquid fons de eodem foramine emanat dulcem et amaram aquam? supplies aquam — the noun James withholds until v. 12 — and thereby resolves the substantival neuters in the reading text. That supplement is reception, not evidence (§11), and is not followed here.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

The Greek commentators take v. 11 as an argument from the fixity of created natures, and read it forward into vv. 14-18 rather than backward into a general theory of speech. The point they press is that a single source has a single character, so a divided output convicts the source of not being what it professes.

Bede, working on the Latin, connects the spring directly to the heart: the mouth’s output discloses what the interior is, so a mouth producing both blessing and cursing shows a heart not yet single. That reading is not a discovery about the lexemes but an accurate reading of the argument’s direction — James himself locates the trouble ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ ὑμῶν at 3:14.

What the patristic reading is useful for here is negative: none of it takes the verse as a claim that the tongue is incapable of good, and none of it reads the two waters as two independent faculties. The verse indicts an incongruity; it does not resolve the anthropology behind it. Any rendering that hardens it into a general impossibility for human speech goes beyond both the Greek and the earliest readers.

Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1985)