Verse 3 closes a two-step diagnosis that began at the end of v. 2. James has just said the community does not have because it does not ask. Now he forecloses the obvious retort — but we do ask — by conceding the asking and relocating the fault: αἰτεῖτε καὶ οὐ λαμβάνετε, and the reason is not divine reluctance but the character of the request.

Four features carry the weight:

1. The voice-switch. The same verb stands active (αἰτεῖτε) and then middle (αἰτεῖσθε) within nine words. Whether that is significant or stylistic variation is the verse’s central contested question, and English cannot mark it without a note.
2. κακῶς — an adverb of manner, not of content. James does not say they ask for wrong things; he says they ask badly. The ἵνα clause then supplies what makes it bad.
3. The ἵνα clause names the terminus of the request, and it is a budget: δαπανήσητε is expenditure vocabulary. The petition is a line item in a spending plan.
4. ἡδοναῖς is anaphoric. These are the same pleasures that were campaigning in the members at v. 1. The chapter’s whole argument is one loop: appetite → conflict → prayer conscripted into the service of appetite.

The verse is not a general caution about prayer motives. It is the final turn of a specific indictment, and its severity should not be softened.

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

αἰτεῖτε (active) … αἰτεῖσθε (middle) — one lemma, two voices, nine words apart. James does the same alternation at 1:5-6 (αἰτείτω … αἰτείτω) but there without contrast; here the switch is inside a single sentence.

Three positions are seriously held:

The corpus policy is not to resolve a live voice question in the reading text. Rendering both occurrences ‘ask’ — as English must — preserves the ambiguity by accident rather than by design, so the study tier carries a bracketed gloss and this note carries the argument.

Against all three: αἰτέω must stay lexically distinct from ἐρωτάω, δέομαι, and παρακαλέω (all fixed elsewhere in this corpus), and it must be rendered with the same English word at 1:5, 1:6, 4:2, and 4:3, since James is running one thread. ‘Pray for’ is excluded — that would import προσεύχομαι, which James reserves for 5:13-18.

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

Adverb of the already-fixed κακός (‘evil / harmful’). Here it modifies the manner of asking, not the object asked for. Greek had ready ways to say ‘you ask for bad things’ — an accusative object, or κακά — and James wrote none of them.

The adverb’s attested NT range is threefold: physically ill (κακῶς ἔχειν, Mark 1:32), improperly or wrongly (John 18:23, of speaking), and with hostile intent (Acts 23:5, quoting Exod 22:27). The second governs here.

‘Wrongly’ is the reading-text rendering. Excluded: ‘with wrong motives’ (supplies a psychology-noun the adverb lacks and pre-empts the ἵνα clause, which is James’s own explanation), ‘for the wrong things’ (converts manner into object), and ‘selfishly’ (adopts the middle-voice reading of αἰτεῖσθε and imports it into the adverb). ‘Amiss’ is retained in declared liturgical register only — it is now archaic outside that setting.

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διότι is the strengthened causal conjunction (διά + ὅτι), already fixed in this corpus as ‘because’ and kept distinct from complementizing ὅτι. Its force here is to supply the ground for the whole preceding statement, not merely the second clause: it explains why asking and not-receiving stand together.

James is stacking causal clauses across two verses — διὰ τὸ μὴ αἰτεῖσθαι ὑμᾶς (v. 2, articular infinitive), then διότι (v. 3), then ἵνα (v. 3). Per §10 every one of these is rendered; the argument structure is the theology. Note also that v. 2’s causal construction already uses the middle infinitive αἰτεῖσθαι, which is one of the stronger arguments against pressing a voice-contrast in v. 3 (there the middle carries no reproach at all).

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ἵνα … δαπανήσητε with the aorist subjunctive.

English ‘so that’ is ambiguous between the two in exactly the way the Greek is, and per corpus policy it is retained rather than closed with ‘in order that’ (purpose) or ‘with the result that’ (result). The modern rendering uses ‘so as to’, which leans purposive while staying hospitable.

The aorist is complexive: the spending taken as a single completed act, not an ongoing habit of spending.

Built onbdf · bdag

δαπανάω is expenditure vocabulary — money laid out, resources used up. The NT range runs from ordinary outlay (Mark 5:26, the woman spending everything on physicians; Luke 15:14, the prodigal spending his whole portion; Acts 21:24, Paul paying expenses) to the affectionate self-expenditure of 2 Cor 12:15 (δαπανήσω καὶ ἐκδαπανηθήσομαι). The cognates δαπάνη (Luke 14:28, the tower-builder’s cost) and the compound ἐκδαπανάω keep the accounting register audible.

This matters because the corpus has already established that Philippians sustains a ledger metaphor from 1:21 through 4:18, and that λόγος in commercial contexts is ‘account’. James is drawing on the same domain. The petition is being submitted as a requisition against a budget already allocated to ἡδοναί.

ἐν + dative with δαπανάω names what the outlay is spent on. Not locative (‘among your pleasures’) and not instrumental. ‘On’ is the natural English.

The object of δαπανήσητε is unexpressed in Greek. James does not say what would be spent — money, the answered request, the thing asked for. English syntax requires something, so the literal tier brackets ‘[it]’ and reading tiers supply an unbracketed ‘it’. What must not happen is the supplying of a noun: ‘spend it on your passions’ is acceptable, ‘squander the money on your pleasures’ is not.

‘Squander’ is excluded from the reading text: it imports a verdict of waste that belongs to the prodigal’s ἀσώτως (Luke 15:13) — and ἀσωτία is already fixed elsewhere in this corpus as ‘reckless excess’. James’s verb is neutral about the amount; the fault is the destination.

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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)

ταῖς ἡδοναῖς ὑμῶν — the article is anaphoric, pointing back to v. 1 (ἐκ τῶν ἡδονῶν ὑμῶν τῶν στρατευομένων ἐν τοῖς μέλεσιν ὑμῶν). These are the same pleasures, and the repetition closes the loop: appetite generates the war, and appetite then colonizes the prayer.

The noun is not intrinsically pejorative in Greek — Epicurean and Stoic ethics both use it as a technical term, and the LXX has it for legitimate delight (Prov 17:1; Wis 7:2). But all five NT occurrences are negative (Luke 8:14, choking the word; Titus 3:3, enslaved to it; 2 Pet 2:13; Jas 4:1, 3), and the negative charge here comes from the collocation, not the lexeme.

‘Pleasures’ is retained. Excluded: ‘passions’ (that is πάθος/πάθημα, and πάθημα is already fixed as ‘sufferings’ in this corpus — the collision would be serious), ‘desires’ (that is ἐπιθυμία, which James uses two verses earlier at 4:2 with ἐπιθυμεῖτε, and the two must stay distinguishable), ‘lusts’ (irrecoverably narrowed in modern English, already excluded as a base gloss for ἐπιθυμία), and ‘self-indulgence’ (converts a noun for the object of enjoyment into a verdict on the enjoyer).

Retain the plural: these are discrete gratifications, itemized, matching the ledger imagery of δαπανάω.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

The verse opens with no connective. James 4:1-3 is built of short paratactic clauses joined by bare καί or by nothing at all — πόθεν … πόθεν; ἐπιθυμεῖτε, καὶ οὐκ ἔχετε· φονεύετε καὶ ζηλοῦτε … μάχεσθε καὶ πολεμεῖτε. The abruptness is the rhetoric and no connective is supplied in English (§10, and the corpus asyndeton policy fixed at Phil 3:2 and Gal 5:4).

The καί in αἰτεῖτε καὶ οὐ λαμβάνετε is adversative in effect — the second clause frustrates the first — but James wrote plain coordination and English must too. Rendering ‘you ask, but do not receive’ manufactures a contrast the particle withholds and makes the sentence read as a complaint about unanswered prayer rather than as a flat report that becomes an indictment.

Both main verbs are present indicative, durative: a standing pattern of asking and a standing pattern of not receiving, not a single refused petition.

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The plain verb of receiving, already fixed in this corpus and kept lexically distinct from κομίζομαι (‘receive for oneself / collect what is due’), δέχομαι (‘receive, welcome’), παραλαμβάνω (‘receive as handed on’), and ἀπολαμβάνω (‘receive back’).

The choice matters for concordance within James: the same verb is negated of the δίψυχος at 1:7 (μὴ γὰρ οἰέσθω ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖνος ὅτι λήμψεταί τι) and affirmed of the enduring man at 1:12 (λήμψεται τὸν στέφανον τῆς ζωῆς). James 4:3 is the second panel of 1:5-8: there the obstacle to receiving was dividedness, here it is a divided destination for what is asked. One English word at all three points, or the connection is invisible.

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NA28 prints αἰτεῖτε καὶ οὐ λαμβάνετε, διότι κακῶς αἰτεῖσθε without brackets and with no significant division among the primary witnesses.

Two points of variation are worth recording:

• Part of the tradition reads ὅτι for διότι. This is levelling toward the commoner conjunction and is secondary; the stronger compound is the harder reading. No semantic consequence.
• A few witnesses normalize the voice of the second verb to the active (αἰτεῖτε), removing the alternation. This is precisely the direction of smoothing to be avoided: a scribe who felt the switch as awkward would level it, whereas no scribe would introduce it. The variant is itself evidence that the alternation was noticed in antiquity — which weighs mildly against the ‘purely stylistic’ reading of the voice-switch, though not decisively, since scribes level for euphony as readily as for sense.

The punctuation — a comma before διότι, a comma before ἵνα — is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, and nothing exegetical turns on it here.

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The patristic tradition on this verse is remarkably uniform in one respect and divided in another.

Uniformly, the Greek and Latin commentators take the fault to lie in the terminus of the request rather than in any failure of technique. The verse is read as a defense of God’s answering: the petition is not denied but disqualified, because what is asked for would be spent where it cannot be given. Augustine’s formulation of the principle — that God withholds what would harm, and that a request aimed at gratification is one he is merciful not to grant — became the standard Western reading, and it is a fair reading of ἵνα … δαπανήσητε.

Divided, however, on whether James is describing conscious intent or diagnosing a condition the askers do not recognize in themselves. The first reading pairs with the telic ἵνα; the second with the ecbatic. Both are available in the ancient discussion, and neither can be settled from the Greek.

What the Fathers do not do is generalize the verse into a rule about unanswered prayer as such. They keep it attached to the μοιχαλίδες of v. 4 and the ἡδοναί of v. 1 — that is, to a community whose desires have already produced πόλεμοι and μάχαι. That restraint is worth imitating: the verse diagnoses a particular disorder, not the ordinary experience of prayers that seem to go unheard.

Proposed — pending reviewDale C. Allison Jr., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle of James, International Critical Commentary (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013)

The pastoral temptation with James 4:3 runs in two opposite directions and both are excluded by §6.

Softening: rendering ἡδοναῖς as ‘personal wants’, or δαπανήσητε as ‘use’, or κακῶς as ‘not quite rightly’. The verse is part of an address that calls its hearers μοιχαλίδες in the next breath. It is hard, and the translation should be hard.

Hardening: rendering δαπανήσητε as ‘squander’, ἡδοναῖς as ‘lusts’, or supplying ‘sinful’ before ‘pleasures’. James’s Greek is unadorned. The verbs are ordinary — ask, receive, spend — and the force comes from where the line lands, not from loaded vocabulary. Amplifying the diction makes the indictment easier to deflect onto someone worse.

Equally, the verse must not be turned into a rule that any request with a personal benefit attached is disqualified. James commands asking at 1:5, and the thing asked for there (wisdom) is unambiguously for the asker’s own good. What is condemned is not benefit but a budget already committed elsewhere.