James closes the tongue-paragraph (3:1-12) with a third rhetorical question and a fourth, ragged clause that trails off the end of it. The logic of vv. 11-12 is a single argument from nature: a spring does not deliver two kinds of water from one opening (v. 11), a tree does not bear another tree’s fruit, and salt water does not turn sweet. Each is impossible, and the impossibility is the point. What comes out corresponds to what the source is.

Three things drive the exegesis here.

First, the question is framed with μή, which in Greek presupposes the answer ‘no.’ James is not inquiring; he is extracting an admission. The English must keep it a question and must keep the expectation audible.

Second, the verse is built on ellipsis. The Greek states the verb once and the infinitive once in the first clause, then drops both for ‘or a vine, figs,’ and drops the subject entirely in the last clause. The compression is deliberate and accelerating — the sentence gets terser as it goes — and English must not repair it by supplying full clauses.

Third, the closing clause is the hardest sentence in the chapter. οὔτε normally answers a preceding οὔτε, and here it has none; ἁλυκόν is formally ambiguous between nominative and accusative; and the syntactic subject is unstated. The manuscript tradition shows scribes wrestling with exactly this, and the smoothed Byzantine reading (οὕτως οὐδεμία πηγή, ‘so no spring…’) is the fingerprint of that wrestling. The critical text preserves the rough reading, and the roughness is data.

The pastoral force is uncomfortable and should stay so. James has just said that blessing and cursing come from the same mouth (v. 10) and that this ought not to be. Now he supplies the reason: in nature it cannot be. The reader is left to draw the inference himself, and James does not draw it for him.

μή with a finite indicative in an independent clause marks a question expecting the answer ‘no’ — the standing counterpart to οὐ, which expects ‘yes’ (BDF §427). James 2 ran a chain of οὐ-questions (2:5, 6, 7, 21, 25) extracting agreement; James 3:11-12 switches to μήτι and μή, extracting denial. The switch is deliberate and the two must remain distinguishable in English.

English has no particle equivalent, so the expectation is carried by a negative tag question: “A fig tree cannot produce olives, can it?” A bare positive question (“Can a fig tree produce olives?”) loses the presupposition; a flat declarative (“A fig tree cannot produce olives”) supplies the answer James is making the reader give.

The verb δύναται is singular and agrees with the nearer subject συκῆ, then serves ἄμπελος by carry-over — regular Greek concord that English must render with a plural or a repeated verb.

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The vocative is wedged between the verb and its subject — μὴ δύναται, ἀδελφοί μου, συκῆ. This is James’s habit: the address recurs eleven times in the letter and consistently marks the seams of the argument (1:2, 16, 19; 2:1, 5, 14; 3:1, 10, 12; 4:11; 5:7, 19). Here it appears twice within three verses (3:10, 12), bracketing the closing illustrations and signalling that the paragraph is winding up.

Per the standing policy, all three elements are rendered at every occurrence: the possessive μου, which places the writer inside the family he is correcting; the masculine plural, rendered as written; and no expansion. That the referent is mixed is settled internally by ἀδελφή at 2:15, where James marks the feminine when he chooses to.

The interposition should be preserved in English word order where the sentence will bear it, since it is what gives the rebuke its conversational, almost gentle staging — the harshest natural argument in the chapter is delivered with a term of affection embedded in it.

συκῆ (fig tree), ἐλαία (olive tree, here by metonymy its fruit, ἐλαίας), and ἄμπελος (vine) are the three staple cultivars of Palestinian agriculture and appear together as a fixed triad throughout the Hebrew Bible and its Greek: Deut 8:8 (wheat, barley, vine, fig, pomegranate, olive), Hab 3:17, Joel 1:12, Hag 2:19, Zech 3:10. To name fig, olive, and vine is to name the whole agricultural economy in shorthand.

That matters for translation. These are not randomly chosen plants; they are the three things everyone grew, and their fruits are wholly unlike each other. James is not making a subtle botanical point but an obvious one, and the English should feel obvious.

All three nouns are anarthrous and qualitative — any fig tree, a vine — so the indefinite article is retained in English rather than the definite (‘the fig tree’), which reads as a specific tree and pulls toward the cursed fig tree of Mark 11:12-14, a text James is not invoking.

Note the fronting of ἐλαίας before its infinitive. The wrong fruit stands first in the clause, which is where the absurdity lies.

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ποιῆσαι here is the LXX idiom for a plant bearing fruit, established at the creation account: ξύλον κάρπιμον ποιοῦν καρπόν (Gen 1:11-12 LXX), and carried into the NT at Matt 3:10; 7:17-19; 13:26; Luke 3:9; 6:43; 8:8; Rev 22:2. It is not a Semitism forced onto Greek but a natural extension of ποιέω’s productive sense, reinforced by Hebrew עָשָׂה used the same way (Gen 1:11; Hos 8:7).

The corpus fixes ποιέω as ‘do’ and keeps it distinct from πράσσω (‘practice’), ἐργάζομαι (‘work’), and ποίησις (‘doing’). Here the productive sense governs, and ‘produce’ or ‘bear’ is the right English — but the same English word must serve both occurrences in this verse, since James repeats ποιῆσαι verbatim in the closing clause, and the repetition is what binds the two halves of the argument into one.

Avoid ‘yield’ (drifts agricultural-technical) except in liturgical register, and avoid ‘grow’ (intransitive in modern English, and would obscure the transitive construction). The aorist infinitive is complexive — the act of bearing considered as a whole, not a process.

The verse accelerates by dropping words:

1. μὴ δύναται … συκῆ ἐλαίας ποιῆσαι — full: verb, subject, object, infinitive.
2. ἢ ἄμπελος σῦκα — subject and object only; δύναται and ποιῆσαι both carried over.
3. οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ — the infinitive returns but the finite verb is gone and the subject is contested.

Per the standing ellipsis policies, the compression is preserved rather than repaired: no verb is supplied unbracketed in the literal tier, and smooth registers carry the sense by parallelism (“or a vine, figs?”). Supplying full clauses — “or can a vine produce figs?” — flattens a sentence that is doing something with its terseness. James is not padding out three examples; he is running out of patience with the question.

That the Byzantine tradition and the Latin versions both fill in the third member (see the textual note) shows how strong the pull toward repair is, and how consistently scribes and translators have yielded to it.

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

This is the crux. Three difficulties compound.

(a) οὔτε with no answering οὔτε. The correlative normally comes in pairs (‘neither … nor’), and here the first member is a μή-question, not a οὔτε-clause. Koine does permit a single οὔτε continuing a preceding negation loosely (BDF; cf. the classical use of οὔτε for οὐδέ), and NA28 prints it as the harder reading. But it is rough.

(b) ἁλυκόν is formally ambiguous. As a neuter singular adjective it is identical in the nominative and accusative. It may therefore be the subject (‘salt [water] cannot make sweet [water]’) or an attributive with ὕδωρ read as object.

(c) The subject is unstated. Nothing in the clause names what cannot do the producing.

Manuscript evidence. The critical text (𝔓⁷⁴ ℵ A B C and the Coptic tradition) reads οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ. The Byzantine majority reads οὕτως οὐδεμία πηγὴ ἁλυκὸν καὶ γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι ὕδωρ (‘so no spring can produce salt water and sweet’), which supplies both the missing subject and a smoother connective. That is transparently a scribal repair of exactly the three difficulties listed above — it is the easier reading in every respect, and its origin is fully explicable while the reverse change is not. Other witnesses vary further (οὕτως οὐδέ, οὔτε ἁλυκὸν γλυκὺ ποιῆσαι), which is itself the signature of a hard text.

Metzger’s committee treats the shorter, harder reading as original on precisely these grounds, and the variety of secondary readings as evidence of independent attempts to mend the same seam.

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Proposed — pending reviewDibelius, Martin. James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James. Rev. Heinrich Greeven. Hermeneia. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976.

NT hapax. From ἅλς (salt), the ordinary Greek adjective for saline water, standing over against γλυκύς (sweet, fresh) in the settled Greek pair for undrinkable versus drinkable water. The LXX has the cognate noun ἅλμη and uses ἁλυκή for salt-flats and the Salt Sea (Gen 14:3 ἡ φάραγξ ἡ ἁλυκή; Num 34:12; Deut 3:17; Josh 3:16).

That LXX usage is not decorative. James’s readers knew a landscape with a Salt Sea in it, fed by a sweet river, and with brackish springs along the Jordan rift where the two do not mix — the Dead Sea’s shoreline springs are the standing local example of water that comes out of the ground undrinkable. Elisha’s healing of the spring at Jericho (2 Kgs 2:19-22, LXX 4 Kgdms) is the one narrative in Israel’s Scripture where salt water is made sweet, and it is presented there as a miracle precisely because nature does not do it.

Render ‘salt’ rather than ‘salty’ (colloquial, and in modern English suggests taste rather than composition) or ‘bitter’ (that is πικρός, which James used at v. 11 and again at v. 14 — the two must stay distinguishable). ‘Brackish’ is accurate but too technical for the register.

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James stacks three natural impossibilities and lets them do the work:

• v. 11 — one opening, two kinds of water. Impossible.
• v. 12a-b — a tree bearing another species’ fruit. Impossible.
• v. 12c — salt water yielding sweet. Impossible.

The third returns to water and closes the inclusio with v. 11. Whether that return is intended to identify the subject of v. 12c as πηγή (see the textual section) is contested, but the structural symmetry is not in doubt.

What James does not do is supply the application. He has stated the problem at v. 10 — “out of the same mouth comes blessing and cursing; this ought not to be so” — and here he supplies three analogies that establish it cannot be so in nature. He then stops and turns to wisdom (v. 13). The inference is left to the hearer, and any translation that supplies it (“so neither can your mouth produce both”) writes into the text what the author deliberately withheld.

There is a genuine logical tension the reader should be allowed to feel: v. 10 says this does happen, and v. 12 says it cannot. James does not resolve it. Whether the argument is that the double-tongued speaker’s blessing is therefore counterfeit, or that the condition is monstrous and unnatural rather than impossible, is precisely what the paragraph refuses to spell out — and it connects to the δίψυχος of 1:8, the self at odds with itself.

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

The Vulgate renders: numquid potest, fratres mei, ficus uvas facere aut vitis ficus? sic neque salsa dulcem potest facere aquam. Two things are notable. Jerome has uvas (‘grapes’) where the Greek has ἐλαίας (‘olives’), matching a small Greek and Old Latin tradition and probably an assimilation to the more obvious fig/grape pairing of Matt 7:16 and Luke 6:44. And he supplies sic (‘so’) and a finite potest, repairing the οὔτε clause in the same direction as the Byzantine text. Both are reception, not evidence.

The Peshitta likewise fills out the final clause with an explicit subject, again the direction of smoothing.

Chrysostom and the Greek commentators treat the sequence as proof that speech reveals nature — the mouth is a spring and the words are what it produces, so contradictory speech indicts the source. Bede, commenting on the Catholic Epistles, reads the salt/sweet contrast morally: the bitter water is cursing, the sweet is blessing, and the impossibility of both from one source is a call to examine which one is genuine. Neither Father resolves the logical tension with v. 10; both let it stand as an indictment.

The patristic reading is a useful check on a modern tendency to soften the verse into general advice about consistency. For the Fathers the argument was diagnostic, not hortatory: it tells you what your speech reveals about you.

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Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable. Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles. Trans. David Hurst. Cistercian Studies 82. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985. · Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Ed. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.