Two clipped question-and-answer pairs, four words apiece, with no connective between them and none joining them to v. 12. The form is the diatribe’s: pose a case, name the response, move on. James is not describing what happens in the assembly but assigning a practice to each of two conditions, and the pairing is deliberately asymmetrical — hardship gets prayer, good spirits get sung praise, and neither is offered as a remedy for the other.

Three decisions carry the verse. Κακοπαθεῖ is hardship endured, not illness — James has ἀσθενεῖ ready in the next verse and does not use it here, so v. 13 and v. 14 name two different situations and the standard collapsing of them into one anointing-of-the-sick pericope is a translational artifact. Εὐθυμεῖ names a settled good state, not merely a cheerful mood, and it is the exact counterweight to κακοπαθέω rather than to ἀσθενέω. Ψαλλέτω carries an instrumental root that had substantially faded by the first century but is not demonstrably dead; the rendering must keep a praise-word without either restoring a harp to the text or reducing the verb to plain singing.

The two third-person imperatives are also the hinge of the paragraph: they open a sequence (προσευχέσθω, προσευξάσθωσαν v. 14, εὔχεσθε v. 16, προσηύξατο vv. 17-18) that makes prayer the answer to the whole spread of conditions James has been treating since ch. 4.

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

Κακοπαθεῖ is a transparent compound of κακός + πάσχω, and the domain of both members is already fixed in this corpus: κακός is ‘evil / harmful’ and πάσχω is ‘suffer,’ with the instruction not to specify the mechanism. The compound names undergoing ill-treatment or hardship.

The NT evidence is narrow but consistent. The verb occurs at 2 Tim 2:9 (Paul in chains), 2 Tim 4:5 (‘share in hardship’ as a charge to a minister), and Jas 5:13; the compound συγκακοπαθέω stands at 2 Tim 1:8 and 2:3, both of shared affliction in the gospel’s service. The cognate noun κακοπαθία appears three verses earlier at Jas 5:10, of what the prophets endured — which is decisive: James has just used the noun of prophetic affliction, and the verb here picks it up.

What this excludes is the illness reading. Ancient medical prose does use κακοπαθέω of a body in distress, and the versional tradition drifted that way, but James has ἀσθενεῖ available and deploys it in v. 14. Rendering both ‘is sick’ or ‘is ill’ makes vv. 13-14 one situation with two prescriptions and generates a conflict where the Greek has a sequence.

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

Εὐθυμεῖ is εὖ + θυμός, where θυμός retains its older sense of spirit or drive rather than the ‘rage’ sense this corpus fixes for the noun in vice-catalogues (Gal 5:20). The English must therefore not suggest anger, and it must not suggest levity either.

The verb occurs three times in the NT, all in the intransitive sense of being in good spirits: Acts 27:22 and 27:25, where Paul tells a doomed ship’s company to be of good heart in the middle of a storm, and here. The adjective εὔθυμος at Acts 27:36 describes the crew’s state after his words. That context is worth weighing: εὐθυμέω is not incompatible with hardship. It names a settled inner condition, not the absence of trouble.

This matters for the shape of the verse. If εὐθυμεῖ meant simply ‘things are going well,’ the pair would be adversity/prosperity, and the ‘good spirits’ member would name a circumstance. It does not. Both verbs name conditions of the person, and the pairing is one of inner state under differing pressure.

Excluded from reading tiers: ‘is cheerful’ (modern English ‘cheerful’ is a mood-word verging on the trivial, and it cannot be said of Paul on a sinking grain ship), ‘is happy’ (relocates the state into circumstance-dependent feeling), ‘is in good spirits’ (acceptable but slightly colloquial in a maxim). Bono animo est in the Latin tradition is a better guide than most English versions. ‘Of good cheer’ is retained in declared liturgical register.

Ψαλλέτω is the crux. The root sense of ψάλλω is to pluck — a bowstring, a carpenter’s line, and characteristically the strings of a lyre or harp. In the LXX it is the standard equivalent of זָמַר and נָגַן, thick in the Psalter (Ps 7:18; 9:12; 17:50; 56:8; 97:5 LXX), regularly with an instrument named or implied, and the noun ψαλμός is the Psalter’s own title-word (ψαλμοί).

By the first century the verb had substantially broadened toward sung praise generally. The four other NT occurrences are Rom 15:9 (quoting Ps 17:50 LXX), 1 Cor 14:15 (twice, ψαλῶ τῷ πνεύματι), and Eph 5:19 (ψάλλοντες τῇ καρδίᾳ ὑμῶν τῷ κυρίῳ) — and in none of them is an instrument named. Eph 5:19’s τῇ καρδίᾳ is not evidence that instruments are excluded, but it does show that the verb could stand with a non-instrumental dative without strain.

Note also that the verb is absolute: no object, no addressee, no ‘to God.’ Later versions and some minuscule witnesses supply one. The reticence is James’s.

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

Προσευχέσθω takes the corpus gloss ‘pray,’ kept distinct from δέησις/δέομαι (petition arising from a specific want) and from εὔχομαι, which James himself uses at 5:16 (εὔχεσθε) and in the noun εὐχή at 5:15. The variation across the paragraph is real and should be visible in the parsing table rather than levelled in English: προσεύχομαι at 5:13, 14, 17, 18; εὔχομαι / εὐχή at 5:15, 16.

The verb is a middle deponent; the middle voice is lexical and carries no reflexive force, so ‘let him pray for himself’ would over-read it. No object is expressed and none may be supplied — the Greek does not say what he is to pray about, and the natural inference (relief from the hardship) is inference, not text. Compare Jas 1:5-6, where the asking is specified, and 4:2-3, where the asking is faulted for its destination.

Both προσευχέσθω and ψαλλέτω are third-person present imperatives, and standing corpus policy governs them: English lacks the form, so a ‘let’ periphrasis is unavoidable, but the third person must not be converted to a second-person exhortation. The shift matters here. James addresses the assembly directly in the interrogatives (ἐν ὑμῖν), then answers in the third person — an impersonal ruling assigned to whoever the case fits, not a command aimed at the room. Rendering ‘pray!’ and ‘sing praise!’ collapses the diagnostic structure into two exhortations.

The aspect is also load-bearing. Both imperatives are present, not aorist, and so durative: the response to hardship is a practice of praying, not a single act performed at the onset. This is consistent with the paragraph’s later futures and with the Elijah example (5:17-18), where the praying is emphatic and repeated.

One is middle (προσευχέσθω, deponent) and one active (ψαλλέτω); the voice difference is lexical, not semantic, and is recorded rather than rendered.

The verse consists of two condition-and-response pairs in complete asyndeton — no καί, δέ, or οὖν between the pairs, and none joining v. 13 to v. 12. Standing corpus policy on asyndeton applies: where Greek juxtaposes clauses without a connective, none is supplied in English, and the abruptness is the data (§10).

The construction is a recognized Hellenistic diatribe device: a question posing a case, answered by an imperative. It recurs immediately at v. 14 (ἀσθενεῖ τις ἐν ὑμῖν; προσκαλεσάσθω), which shows James working a pattern rather than varying his style.

Two formal notes. First, the interrogative punctuation is editorial. The earliest majuscules are unpunctuated, and the same words could in principle be read as conditional statements (‘Someone among you is suffering hardship — let him pray’). The indefinite τις rather than interrogative τίς is what makes the question-reading natural, but the question marks in the printed editions are judgment, not manuscript evidence, and must be reported as such.

Second, ἐν ὑμῖν stands with the first case only, not the second. That is likely economy rather than a claim that the good-hearted are found elsewhere; but it is not supplied in the second clause in the literal tier, and the asymmetry is recorded.

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 verse is stable in the tradition. The NA28 text is supported by the primary uncials without significant division.

Minor readings worth recording rather than adopting: some later witnesses add an object or addressee to ψαλλέτω (‘let him sing praise to God’), which is the expected direction of scribal completion of an absolute verb; and part of the tradition supplies a connective (καί) between the two pairs, smoothing the asyndeton. Both are the easier readings and both illustrate the direction the text was pulled — toward explicitness and toward coordination — which is a reason for keeping the harder bare text in English.

The Byzantine tradition’s occasional εὐθυμεῖ δέ τις is the same phenomenon. None of these bears on sense; all bear on how the English should be shaped.

The Greek commentators consistently read v. 13 as two distinct conditions rather than one, and consistently read the response as apportioned rather than interchangeable. The point they press is that James assigns to each state the practice proper to it: affliction is not to be answered by singing, and good spirits are not to be answered by lament. Prosperity has its own discipline.

This is worth registering because the later Western reception of Jas 5:13-18 pulled the whole paragraph toward the sacrament of anointing, which required reading v. 13 as an early stage of illness. The Greek tradition’s separation of κακοπαθέω from ἀσθενέω is the older reading, and it is the one the lexical evidence supports.

On ψάλλω, the patristic discussion of instrumental versus vocal praise is substantial but is reception rather than lexical evidence (§11): it may be named as a known point of tradition-interest and must not be used to settle the rendering.