James turns from the summons of vv. 7-10 to a single congregational practice, and treats it as a case of the arrogance just condemned. The argument moves in three steps, each marked in the Greek.

First, a prohibition with a vocative: Μὴ καταλαλεῖτε ἀλλήλων, ἀδελφοί. The present imperative addresses something already going on, and the address ‘brothers’ is the argument’s fulcrum, since the noun ἀδελφός then occurs twice more in the same sentence. The offense is not slander as such but slander of kin.

Second, a generalizing verdict: the one who does this καταλαλεῖ νόμου καὶ κρίνει νόμον — speaks against law and judges law. James does not spell out the middle term, but he has supplied it two chapters earlier: the νόμος βασιλικός is Lev 19:18 (Jas 2:8), and Lev 19:16 forbids exactly this practice. To disregard a command is disobedience; to disregard it while pronouncing on a brother is to set oneself above the command as its assessor.

Third, the argument narrows to a single hearer (εἰ δὲ νόμον κρίνεις, second singular) and lands on two nouns: not ποιητὴς νόμου but κριτής. That antithesis reaches back to Jas 1:22-25, where the whole letter’s programme was set as being a doer and not merely a hearer. The judge is a third and worse category — not a failed hearer but a self-appointed assessor of the standard.

The sentence’s difficulty is not lexical but syntactic and referential: the article shift between ἀδελφοῦ and τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ, the four anarthrous occurrences of νόμος, the unstated identity of the law, and the bare κριτής with no genitive. Each is treated below.

καταλαλέω is κατά (hostile, downward) + λαλέω, taking the genitive of the person spoken against. In the NT it occurs only here (twice, plus the participle) and at 1 Pet 2:12, with the cognate noun καταλαλιά at 2 Cor 12:20 and 1 Pet 2:1, and the agent-noun κατάλαλος at Rom 1:30.

The LXX distribution is where the register is fixed. It is the wilderness verb: the people κατελάλησαν against God and against Moses (Num 21:5, 7), the spies’ report is a καταλαλιά of the land (Num 14:36), and the Psalter uses it of secret speech against a brother — Ps 100:5 LXX, τὸν καταλαλοῦντα λάθρᾳ τοῦ πλησίον αὐτοῦ, τοῦτον ἐξεδίωκον, which is close enough to Jas 4:11-12 (where πλησίον arrives in v. 12) to be worth registering. Hos 7:13 and Mal 3:13 keep the same colouring.

The verb names speech directed against a person, not necessarily false speech. That distinction matters for the verse’s force: James does not say the reports are untrue, and the alternative he offers is not accuracy but ceasing. Compare the corpus decision on γογγυσμός (Phil 2:14), where the LXX murmuring-field was similarly decisive.

What the word does not mean must be blocked in English. ‘Slander’ implies falsehood, which the Greek does not supply; ‘criticize’ is far too cool for a wilderness-rebellion verb; ‘backbite’ (the older English, following the Vulgate’s detrahere) is now archaic and in modern ears comic. ‘Speak against’ is preferred at every occurrence: it keeps the κατά- prefix audible, it does not adjudicate truth-value, and it can serve for both the finite verb and the participle, which is required here since the lexeme occurs three times in one sentence.

James has spent three chapters on the tongue (1:19, 26; 3:1-12; 4:11-12), and the reader should be able to see this verb as the final specimen of that argument rather than as a fresh topic.

κρίνω is fixed in this corpus with the full forensic sense — to try a case and pronounce sentence — on the LXX model for שָׁפַט (Gen 18:25; Ps 95:13 LXX). That is required here rather than the weaker ‘be critical of’.

Three things follow. First, κρίνω is the same verb James uses of God at 2:12 (μέλλοντες κρίνεσθαι) and of the νομοθέτης καὶ κριτής at 4:12, so the offense is precisely encroachment on a bench that is occupied. Second, the verb takes an accusative of the person tried (τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ) and then, without change of construction, an accusative of the law (νόμον) — the same act of judicial assessment, redirected. Third, the agent-noun κριτής in the final clause is the same root, so the English must keep one root across κρίνω and κριτής or the sentence’s logic (you judge, therefore you are a judge) becomes a non-sequitur in translation.

Renderings such as ‘condemn’ (κατακρίνω, Jas 5:6) or ‘find fault with’ import a verdict or a moralizing tone the lexeme does not need. The corpus already keeps κρίνω, κρίμα (the verdict, 1 Pet 4:17), κρίσις (the process), κριτήριον (the court, Jas 2:6), and καταδικάζω (Jas 5:6) lexically distinct, and all five belong to one field James works throughout.

The noun stands four times in this verse and is anarthrous in all four (νόμου, νόμον, νόμον, νόμου). The corpus policy is to withhold the English article where Greek withholds it, since the anarthrous form presents law as a regime or standard rather than as a named document (cf. ἐκ νόμου, ὑπὸ νόμον, ἐν νόμῳ, οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος). Applied here: ‘speaks against law and judges law’, not ‘the law’.

This reads stiffly, and it should be said plainly why the stiffness is preserved. James can write the article when he wants it: ὁ νόμος ὁ βασιλικός (2:8), τὸν νόμον (2:9, 10), νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας (1:25), νόμου ἐλευθερίας (2:12, anarthrous). The alternation across the letter is not random, and supplying ‘the’ everywhere converts a categorical claim about law-as-standard into a series of statements about the Mosaic corpus, which is the very narrowing the anarthrous form resists.

What law, then? James supplies no identification here, and the candidates are live:

These are not mutually exclusive, and the rendering must not choose. Per §9 the Pauline polemical sense of νόμος (Gal 3-4; Rom 3-4) may not be imported: James’s νόμος is βασιλικός and ἐλευθερίας, a standard that convicts and liberates, and there is no antithesis here between law and grace to be signalled in English.

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

μή + present imperative. Per the standing corpus entry, the present imperative under μή addresses a state or practice already in force and calls for its cessation, over against the prohibitive aorist subjunctive, which forbids an act not yet begun. The durative force is marked in the literal and study tiers (‘do not go on speaking against’); the reading text keeps the plain prohibition and the aspect is carried in the note.

One caution. The present/aorist distinction in prohibitions is a tendency in Koine, not an absolute rule, and it must not be pressed to yield a historical conclusion about the Jacobean congregations. That the practice was in fact going on is established by the letter’s whole argument (3:1-12; 4:1-2), not by the tense.

μή is the grammatically required negative with an imperative and carries no independent weight — note the contrast with οὐκ εἶ in the final clause, where οὐ negates an indicative as asserted fact. The alternation is syntactic, not emphatic.

The genitive ἀλλήλων is the regular complement of καταλαλέω, not a partitive genitive (‘some of you against others’). Compare 1 Pet 2:12, καταλαλοῦσιν ὑμῶν.

The reciprocal pronoun is structurally important in James as it is in Paul. It occurs at Jas 4:11 and 5:9 (μὴ στενάζετε κατʼ ἀλλήλων), and 5:16 twice (ἐξομολογεῖσθε ἀλλήλοις … εὔχεσθε ὑπὲρ ἀλλήλων), where the same reciprocity is turned to a constructive use. Per the standing anti-variation rule the identical English words are used at every occurrence: ‘one another’, never varied to ‘each other’ or ‘among yourselves’ for style. The repetition is the argument that the assembly’s problem is internal and mutual.

ἀδελφοί vocative, plus ἀδελφοῦ and τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ in the following clause: the noun stands three times in one verse, and that concentration is the verse’s rhetorical engine. James addresses them as brothers, and then describes the offense with the same word twice, so that the designation of the addressee and the designation of the victim are one.

Per §3 and the standing entry, the masculine plural is rendered as written and not expanded. The mixed referent is not in doubt — James writes ἀδελφὴ explicitly at 2:15, which shows he marked the feminine when he chose to — but the note carries that, not the text.

One further datum: this is the plain ἀδελφοί rather than James’s intensified ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί (1:16, 19; 2:5) or ἀδελφοί μου (1:2; 2:1, 14; 3:1, 10, 12; 5:12, 19). The possessive is absent here, uniquely among the vocatives of the letter apart from 5:7, 9, 10. Whether that is significant is not decidable, but it should be recorded rather than smoothed by supplying ‘my’.

ὁ καταλαλῶν … ἢ κρίνων has one article governing two coordinated participles. Per the standing corpus entry, a single article over a coordinated participial series marks a single composite referent, not two classes of offender. The participles are retained as participles in the literal and study tiers rather than converted to finite verbs.

The disjunctive ἤ is therefore not offering a genuine alternative. It joins two descriptions of the same person: the one who speaks against a brother — that is, who judges him. James is glossing his own verb, and this is the point at which καταλαλέω is redefined as a judicial act rather than merely an unkind one. Rendering with a dash or with a parenthetical comma keeps that available; rendering ‘whoever speaks against a brother, or whoever judges his brother’ manufactures two parties.

A parallel: at Jas 1:25 the same construction (ὁ δὲ παρακύψας … καὶ παραμείνας … οὐκ ἀκροατὴς … ἀλλὰ ποιητής) runs a coordinated participial series under one article to a ποιητής/ἀκροατής antithesis — the same shape and the same closing noun as here.

The first ἀδελφοῦ is anarthrous and without a possessive; the second is articular with αὐτοῦ. Two Greek phrases, deliberately different, and the difference should be visible in English rather than levelled to ‘a brother … his brother’ as though both were the same.

The anarthrous first occurrence is qualitative: a brother, anyone answering to that description. The articular second, with the possessive, individuates: his brother, this particular kinsman of the speaker. The movement is from category to instance, and it tightens the charge — the abstract ‘a brother’ becomes a specific person to whom the offender stands in a named relation.

On αὐτοῦ: Hellenistic Greek regularly uses the simple pronoun where classical would use ἑαυτοῦ, so the reflexive sense is contextual rather than morphological (the same policy as at Jas 1:26). Reading tiers may render ‘his own brother’ where the reflexivity is the point; the literal tier keeps the plain ‘his’ and the parsing table records that the form is not the reflexive.