James has just told the assembly to be long-suffering until the Lord’s arrival (5:7), pointed to the farmer who waits out both rains (5:7b), repeated the command with an added one about steadying the heart (5:8), and forbidden the groaning against one another that impatience produces (5:9). Now he supplies the exhibit. λάβετε is his third imperative in four verses, and the word order puts the exhibit first: a pattern — take it.

Three things carry the weight of the verse.

First, the syntax is a double accusative. ὑπόδειγμα stands in emphatic first position and τοὺς προφήτας arrives last, after two intervening genitives; the prophets are the object taken, the pattern is what they are taken as. English must not level this into a simple transitive verb.

Second, the two genitives are each given their own article. τῆς κακοπαθίας and τῆς μακροθυμίας are two items, not one fused idea. The first is a NT hapax naming hardship undergone; the second is the letter’s own word for patience under provocation, now sounding for the third time in four verses. Together they say that the prophets both took the blows and held out under them.

Third, the relative clause is not decorative. οἳ ἐλάλησαν ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου identifies the prophets by the one act that got them into trouble. The reason they are a usable model for a harassed assembly is not that they were patient in general but that their suffering came from speaking with divine authorization. That is the same logic as the beatitude of Matt 5:11-12, and James is standing in the same tradition.

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

From ὑποδείκνυμι, ‘show by pointing out.’ A ὑπόδειγμα is a specimen exhibited so that something else may be shaped by it or warned by it. Six NT occurrences, and the range is instructive: the tabernacle as a copy of the heavenly (Heb 8:5; 9:23), the footwashing as a model to reproduce (John 13:15), Israel’s fall as a specimen not to imitate (Heb 4:11), and Sodom as a specimen of judgment (2 Pet 2:6). The noun is therefore neutral as to whether the specimen is to be copied or avoided; the governing verb decides, and here λάβετε with a following relative clause of commendation decides for imitation.

Rendering: pattern. This keeps the noun a noun and keeps the shaping-force. ‘Example’ is admissible but has weakened in modern English toward mere illustration, and it also blurs the distinction from the corpus-fixed τύπος (‘pattern, impression, mold,’ Phil 3:17) and μιμητής / συμμιμητής (‘imitator, fellow imitator’). Note that James did not write τύπος or μίμησις, and the reader should be able to see which word stands here. ‘Model’ is acceptable in modern registers.

The noun is anarthrous and qualitative — a pattern of this kind — and it must not be definitized (‘the example’).

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The construction is a double accusative of object and predicate: λάβετε governs τοὺς προφήτας as its object and ὑπόδειγμα as the predicate accusative naming what they are taken to be. The corpus has already fixed a policy for this construction with ἡγέομαι (Phil 2:6) and ἔχω (Phil 2:29): both accusatives stay visible, with any supplied copula bracketed.

What is distinctive here is the word order. Greek would normally put the object first; James fronts the predicate, so that the sentence opens on the exhibit and defers the identity of the exhibit past the vocative and past both genitives. The suspension is rhetorical — the same technique as the withheld appositive at Phil 3:18 and the deferred head noun at 1 Pet 4:14. The literal tier reproduces the order woodenly (‘A pattern take, brothers, of the … the prophets’); smooth registers may reunite the phrase, and the displacement is recorded here rather than compensated for with added emphasis words.

The aorist imperative is complexive: a single decisive act of taking up the model, not the durative ‘keep taking’ of a present. This matches the aorist στηρίξατε of v. 8 and μακροθυμήσατε of vv. 7 and 8, all of which the letter treats as decisions rather than practices.

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NT hapax (the cognate verb κακοπαθέω stands three verses later at 5:13, and again at 2 Tim 2:3, 9; 4:5; the compound συγκακοπαθέω at 2 Tim 1:8; 2:3). Transparent compound of κακόν + πάσχω: the undergoing of what is bad. Its LXX home is the same — the sufferings of a people or a righteous man (cf. 2 Macc 2:26-27; Mal 1:13 for the cognate adjective).

Two features must survive in English. The compound is passive in force: it names hardship undergone, not hardship endured well. And the πάσχω morpheme ties it to the corpus-fixed πάσχω / πάθημα family (‘suffer / sufferings’), so the English rendering must stay in that domain.

Rendering: suffering of hardship in the literal tier (both morphemes audible), suffering hardship in reading tiers. Excluded: ‘affliction’ (that is θλῖψις, already fixed, and it drops the πάσχω root), ‘patience in suffering’ and ‘endurance of hardship’ (both smuggle the second noun’s content into the first and make the pair tautologous), ‘trouble’ (register too light), ‘misfortune’ (imports chance).

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The corpus has already fixed this family: long-suffering / patience, target persons who provoke rather than circumstances that press (which is ὑπομονή). The compound μακρός + θυμός is still transparent in the first century, and its primary biblical home is the Exod 34:6 divine-attribute formula rendered by LXX as μακρόθυμος (Num 14:18; Ps 85:15 LXX; Joel 2:13; Nah 1:3).

James is deliberate about the distribution. The μακροθυμ- root sounds four times in four verses: the command at 5:7, the farmer’s μακροθυμῶν at 5:7b, the repeated command at 5:8, and this noun at 5:10. Then at 5:11 he switches to ὑπομονή twice, of Job. The switch is not carelessness. The prophets suffered at the hands of people who provoked them; Job suffered under circumstances. James supplies a different exhibit for each word, and English must keep the two words distinct or the structure of vv. 10-11 disappears.

Rendering: long-suffering where the compound must be visible and where the pairing with κακοπαθία needs both nouns weighted; patience in modern registers. Excluded per standing policy: ‘forbearance’ (reserved for ἐπιείκεια), ‘endurance’ and ‘perseverance’ (reserved for the ὑπομονή family, which stands one verse away), ‘tolerance’ (modern attitudinal register).

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τῆς κακοπαθίας καὶ τῆς μακροθυμίας. Two questions.

Article repetition. The second article is present, which normally marks a distinct referent (the corpus has already fixed this policy for τῇ προσευχῇ καὶ τῇ δεήσει at Phil 4:6 and for the coordinated datives at Gal 5:24). So the default reading is two items: hardship received, and long-suffering exercised. A hendiadys rendering (‘patient suffering’) is what the Greek’s doubled article resists.

Function of the genitives. Both genitives depend on ὑπόδειγμα, but the relation is open. Two readings are live and neither can be resolved from the syntax alone:

Either way the English ‘of’ is hospitable to both, and it is retained. What is excluded is any rendering that supplies a verb and thereby chooses — ‘as an example of how to suffer patiently’ adopts the second and also fuses the pair.

The articles are best taken as generic-abstract (‘hardship as such,’ ‘long-suffering as such’), not possessive; supplying ‘their’ would name a possessor the Greek withholds until τοὺς προφήτας arrives.

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Proposed — pending reviewSophie Laws, A Commentary on the Epistle of James, Black's New Testament Commentaries (London: A. & C. Black, 1980)

Per standing corpus policy the masculine plural stands as written (‘brothers’), the mixed referent is footnoted rather than expanded, and the address is rendered identically at every occurrence so the reader can trace it. James supplies his own internal evidence for the inclusive scope at 2:15 (ἀδελφὸς ἢ ἀδελφή), which shows he marked the feminine when he wanted it.

The vocative here is unaccompanied by μου, unlike 5:12 (ἀδελφοί μου) and 5:19. The distribution across the chapter is worth recording: 5:7 ἀδελφοί, 5:9 ἀδελφοί, 5:10 ἀδελφοί, 5:12 ἀδελφοί μου, 5:19 ἀδελφοί μου. Whether the added possessive at 5:12 and 5:19 marks intensification (as with the ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί of 1:16, 19; 2:5) or is stylistic is not decidable, but the difference is preserved in English rather than levelled.

Position: the vocative interrupts between the fronted predicate accusative and its genitives, which is part of the suspension noted above. Do not relocate it to the head of the sentence for smoothness.

οἳ ἐλάλησαν — a relative clause that is doing argumentative work, not adding biographical color.

The verb is λαλέω, the corpus-fixed ‘speak’ (the act of speaking, as against λέγω, which foregrounds content). James treats speech as a domain of conduct throughout (1:19, 26; 2:12; 3:1-12; 4:11), so choosing the speech-verb here is of a piece with the letter. The aorist is complexive: the whole prophetic career taken as one act, not a series of episodes.

The force of the clause is the point. It supplies the reason the prophets are a usable pattern for this congregation: their κακοπαθία was incurred in the course of authorized speech. This is the standard Jewish and early-Christian understanding of the prophets — persecuted precisely as prophets (2 Chr 36:15-16; Neh 9:26; Jer 20:7-10; Matt 5:12; 23:34-37; Acts 7:52; Heb 11:32-38). James’s own community, forbidden to groan against one another (5:9) and told to hold out under provocation, is being placed in that line.

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The corpus has fixed ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι + gen as ‘at the name of’ where the sense is response to a name’s proclamation (Phil 2:10) and noted that ‘in the name of’ remains valid on the OT analogy of בְּשֵׁם יהוה. Here the OT analogy is not merely available; it is the whole construction. The LXX phrase λαλεῖν / προφητεύειν ἐν (τῷ) ὀνόματι κυρίου renders dibbēr bĕšēm YHWH and is the standing formula for authorized prophetic speech (Deut 18:19-22; Jer 20:9; 26:9, 16, 20; Dan 9:6; Zech 13:3). The preposition marks the authority under which one speaks, not the words used.

Rendering: in the name of the Lord, invariable at every occurrence.

On κυρίου: anarthrous but definite by Apollonius’ canon (a genitive dependent on an articular noun regularly drops its own article), so English supplies ‘the.’ Per §1, the Greek κύριος is rendered ‘Lord’ and is not converted to YHWH, even though the LXX substrate behind this exact formula is the Tetragrammaton. The NT author’s own lexical choice is data to preserve. That said, this chapter is unusually rich in the question: 5:4 has Κυρίου Σαβαώθ (a transliterated Hebraism for YHWH ṣĕbāʾôt), 5:7-8 have ἡ παρουσία τοῦ κυρίου (which most read of Christ), 5:10-11 have κύριος in plainly OT-shaped formulae, and 5:14-15 have ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ κυρίου of the anointing. James does not distinguish typographically and neither does this translation; the referent is recorded per occurrence and not resolved by capitalization or by substituting the divine name.

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Three points, none doctrinally consequential.

κακοπαθίας / κακοπαθείας. The spelling with -ει- appears in part of the tradition. This is orthographic, reflecting the Koine merger of ι and ει, and carries no semantic weight; NA28 prints κακοπαθίας.

κυρίου / τοῦ κυρίου. A body of later witnesses supplies the article before κυρίου. The anarthrous form is the harder reading and matches the LXX formula (ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου, without article, is standard); the added article is scribal normalization, plausibly toward the articular τοῦ κυρίου of vv. 7, 8, 11, and 14. Definiteness is unaffected either way.

Word order of the genitives. Some minuscules transpose so that τοὺς προφήτας stands earlier, easing the suspension between ὑπόδειγμα and its object. The transposition is the direction of smoothing and confirms that the received order was felt as awkward — which is grounds for keeping it.

No variant here appears in the standard critical apparatuses as text-critically significant; the passage is not among those Metzger’s committee found it necessary to discuss.

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The patristic reading of Jas 5:10-11 is uniformly hortatory and takes the two exhibits as distinct. The Greek catena tradition on James notes the pairing of the prophets with Job and treats the prophets as illustrating suffering incurred through obedient speech — the phrase οἳ ἐλάλησαν is regularly picked up as supplying the cause of the κακοπαθία, not as an ornament.

Bede’s commentary on the Catholic Epistles (the fullest early Latin treatment) reads the verse as addressing an assembly under pressure and directs attention to the relative clause: the prophets suffered because they spoke, and the hearers who bear the name of Christ should expect the same order of events. He also keeps the two nouns distinct in his exposition, treating the prophets as showing both what they bore and how.

What the Fathers do not do is what much later English does: fuse the pair into a single virtue of ‘patience in suffering.’ The Vulgate itself preserves the doubling (exemplum accipite, fratres, laboris et patientiae, prophetas), though laboris pulls κακοπαθία toward toil rather than suffering and is a weaker guide than the Greek.

This is reception, not lexical evidence (§11), and is recorded as such.

Proposed — pending reviewBede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985) · Biblia Patristica / Catenae Graecae in Epistolas Catholicas, ed. J. A. Cramer, Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum, vol. 8 (Oxford, 1844)

Verses 7-11 are paraenesis with a wisdom-and-prophetic cast: imperatives, a presentative ἰδού three times (vv. 7, 9, 11), agricultural and forensic imagery, and named exemplars. James is closest here to the consolation-and-exhortation form of Hellenistic-Jewish paraenesis (compare the exemplar-lists of 4 Maccabees and Sirach 44-50), and the rhetoric depends on brevity and accumulation.

The rendering therefore keeps the clauses short and does not subordinate. Where English would prefer to smooth the fronted ὑπόδειγμα into a normal object position, the reading tier accepts a mild strain in exchange for keeping the exhibit first. The three ἰδού markers in the paragraph are rendered identically (‘look’), and the vocatives are rendered identically, so the reader can see the paragraph’s architecture in English.

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