Verse 2 is the first of three hammer-blows (vv. 2-3) that follow the summons of v. 1. James does not warn the rich that their wealth may decay; he announces in the perfect tense that it has decayed. The verbs are the point.

Three things carry the weight:

1. The perfects. σέσηπεν and γέγονεν both state completed action with a standing result. The rot is not forecast — it is reported as accomplished fact, though the ταλαιπωρίαι of v. 1 are still ἐπερχόμεναι (coming on). This tension between an announced-as-done ruin and a still-arriving misery is the verse’s chief interpretive problem.
2. The three kinds of wealth. Verses 2-3 move through the standard ancient triad of stored assets — produce, garments, precious metal — each destroyed by the agent proper to it: rot, moths, corrosion. The catalogue is traditional (Job 13:28; Sir 29:10; Matt 6:19-20), and its traditional character is itself evidence that James is drawing on a settled prophetic-sapiential topos rather than describing a particular congregation’s warehouses.
3. The repeated ὑμῶν. Four times across vv. 2-3 the possessive is hammered home: your wealth, your garments, your gold, your flesh. What is owned is what is destroyed, and the final member of the series turns the possessive against the owner.

The rendering decisions that follow are mostly about refusing to soften. σήπω is putrefaction, not devaluation. σητόβρωτος names actual insect damage. And γέγονεν is not a copula: the garments did not merely happen to be moth-eaten; they have come into that condition.

Proposed — pending reviewRalph P. Martin, James, Word Biblical Commentary 48 (Waco: Word, 1988) · Martin Dibelius, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James, rev. Heinrich Greeven, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)

The standing corpus decision fixes πλοῦτος as ‘wealth / riches’, concrete quantity-noun, against ‘resources’ (modern managerial register) and ‘abundance’ (abstraction). That holds here, with one addition.

James writes the masculine ὁ πλοῦτος. Paul in the later letters consistently uses the Hellenistic neuter τὸ πλοῦτος (Eph 1:7; 2:7; 3:8, 16; Col 1:27; 2:2; Phil 4:19). The corpus policy already requires that the form be noted rather than normalized. Here the masculine simply confirms that James writes a more conservative Koine than the Paulines.

More substantively: what is the referent? A verb of putrefaction requires something that can putrefy. Three readings:

• Stored produce. Grain, oil, wine — the agricultural surplus that Jas 5:4 assumes (ἀμησάντων τὰς χώρας ὑμῶν, harvested fields). On this reading πλοῦτος is a general term whose specific content is supplied by σέσηπεν, and the three clauses of vv. 2-3 name three concrete asset-classes.
• Wealth as a whole, with the verb figurative. πλοῦτος is the summary term and vv. 2b-3a specify it; σέσηπεν is then a general verb of ruin, not literal rot.
• Hendiadys-like generality. The triad is a topos and no precise inventory is intended.

The rendering ‘wealth’ is compatible with all three and is retained. What is excluded is any rendering that names the content — ‘your stores of grain’, ‘your provisions’ — which adopts the first reading in the reading text.

Built onbdag

σέσηπεν is a NT hapax. The lemma σήπω is transitive in the active (‘cause to rot’), but the second perfect σέσηπα has intransitive force — ‘has become rotten, is putrefied’ — which is why no agent is expressed and none may be supplied.

The semantic core is organic putrefaction: flesh decaying, wood rotting, a wound suppurating. LXX usage is consistent — Job 33:21 of wasting flesh, Ps 37:6 LXX of festering wounds (προσώζεσαν καὶ ἐσάπησαν οἱ μώλωπές μου), Sir 14:19 of every work that decays and passes away. The medical writers use it of gangrene.

Rendering decisions:

• ‘Has rotted’ / ‘has rotted away’ is the base gloss. The organic decay must remain visible (§8).
• ‘Is corrupted’ — the Vulgate’s putrefactae sunt is actually closer than the English tradition it produced. Modern English ‘corrupted’ has drifted almost entirely toward moral and digital senses and is confined to declared liturgical register.
• Excluded: ‘has become worthless’, ‘has lost its value’, ‘has decayed’ as a euphemism for depreciation. Each substitutes an economic outcome for a physical process and destroys the parallel with the moths and the corrosion that follow.

The striking thing lexically is the collision between the verb and its subject. πλοῦτος does not rot; grain rots, flesh rots. Whether the collocation is a live catachresis (wealth spoken of as if it were a perishable good) or a transparent metonymy (the stores that constitute the wealth) is left open by the rendering.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

ἱμάτιον properly denotes the outer garment, the cloak thrown over the χιτών (Matt 5:40 sets the two in explicit contrast), but in the plural it regularly means clothing generally (Matt 27:35; Acts 9:39). The plural here is general: the wardrobe, not a set of cloaks.

The cultural point matters and must be carried in the note rather than the rendering (§9). In an economy without mass textile production, garments were capital. Cloth was a standard form of stored wealth and a standard component of tribute, dowry, plunder, and inheritance — Achan’s Babylonian cloak (Josh 7:21), Naaman’s changes of raiment (2 Kgs 5:5, 22), Samson’s thirty linen garments (Judg 14:12), Paul’s disclaimer at Acts 20:33 (ἀργυρίου ἢ χρυσίου ἢ ἱματισμοῦ). A moth-eaten wardrobe is not a domestic inconvenience; it is a destroyed asset, which is precisely why it sits between the rotted produce and the corroded metal.

Render ‘garments’ in literal and liturgical tiers, ‘clothes’ in modern registers. Avoid ‘robes’ (imports ceremonial dress) and ‘fine clothes’ (supplies an adjective the Greek withholds — contrast Jas 2:2, where James does supply ἐσθῆτι λαμπρᾷ when he wants it).

Built onbdag

σητόβρωτος is a NT hapax, a transparent verbal compound of σής (‘moth’) and the root of βιβρώσκω (‘eat’). The two-termination adjective takes the same form for masculine and feminine; the neuter plural here agrees with ἱμάτια.

The word is essentially biblical. Job 13:28 LXX has ὥσπερ ἱμάτιον σητόβρωτον — a garment moth-eaten — in a passage about a man wasting away like something rotten (ὃ παλαιοῦται ὥσπερ ἀσκὸς). That is almost certainly James’s source: the collocation of σητόβρωτος with ἱμάτιον and with language of rot in one context is too close to be coincidence. Sir 42:13 (ἀπὸ γὰρ ἱματίων ἐκπορεύεται σής) supplies the same imagery, as does Isa 51:8 (ὡς γὰρ ἱμάτιον βρωθήσεται ὑπὸ χρόνου, καὶ ὡς ἔρια βρωθήσεται ὑπὸ σητός).

The wider field is the moth as the proverbial silent destroyer of stored goods: Job 4:19; Hos 5:12 (ὡς σὴς τῷ Εφραιμ); Matt 6:19-20 / Luke 12:33, where σής and βρῶσις together define the vulnerability of earthly treasure.

Rendering: ‘moth-eaten’ preserves both morphemes and is the only natural English equivalent. Excluded are ‘ruined by moths’ (dissolves the compound into a clause and supplies an agent-phrase), ‘motheaten’ as a single word outside liturgical register, and any abstraction (‘have gone to ruin’), which discards an image the Job substrate depends on.

One note of realia: the destroyer is the larva, not the adult insect, and the damage is to wool. Ancient writers speak loosely of the σής eating cloth. The verse’s force does not depend on entomological precision, and no rendering should import it.

Built onbdag · muraoka-lxx

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

Both verbs are perfect indicative: σέσηπεν and γέγονεν. The Greek perfect states a completed action whose result stands at the moment of speaking. English present perfect tracks this exactly, and both must be rendered so.

What makes this hard is v. 1, where the ταλαιπωρίαι are ταῖς ἐπερχομέναις — present participle, coming on, not yet arrived. So the misery is future and the rot is past. Three ways of reading the tension:

The rendering ‘has rotted’ / ‘has become’ is compatible with all three and is retained precisely for that reason. Excluded from the reading text: ‘will rot’ (adopts the prophetic reading and changes the tense actually written), ‘is rotting’ (converts a perfect into a progressive present), and ‘is rotted’ (a stative adjective that severs the completed act from its result).

Two further syntactic notes. γέγονεν is not a copula. James had εἰσίν available and did not use it. Per the standing γίνομαι policy the verb marks entry into a state, so ‘have become moth-eaten’ is required and ‘are moth-eaten’ erases the point that these garments came into that condition. And the singular verb with the neuter plural subject (τὰ ἱμάτια … γέγονεν) is regular Greek concord requiring no comment beyond the parsing table; the plural γεγόνασιν in part of the tradition is scribal regularization.

Built onbdf · bdag

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

The genitive ὑμῶν stands twice in this verse and twice more in v. 3 (ὁ χρυσὸς ὑμῶν … τὰς σάρκας ὑμῶν). Greek could have carried one possessive across the coordinated clauses; James repeats it at every member.

Per the corpus anti-variation discipline already applied to repeated verbs (παρακαλῶ … παρακαλῶ, Phil 4:2), repeated pronouns (1 Pet 4:12), and repeated ἀλλήλων (Gal 5), the repetition is rhetorical data and must survive in English at every occurrence. Compression to ‘your wealth has rotted and clothes are moth-eaten’ discards it.

The structure it produces is worth seeing whole:

The fourth member is the turn: the same possessive that has marked what they own now marks what is consumed. The verse under examination supplies the second rung of that ladder, and the English must keep the rungs uniform in shape so the climb is visible.

Note also the asyndeton between v. 2 and v. 3. The three clauses are joined καί … [nothing] …, so that the metal-clause arrives without a connective. Per the standing asyndeton policy no conjunction is supplied in English, and the verse-division must not be allowed to become a full stop that hides the series.

Built onbdf

The verse is textually stable in NA28 and carries no entry in the UBS apparatus. Two minor items belong in the record:

• γέγονεν / γεγόνασιν. A scattering of later witnesses read the plural, regularizing the concord with the neuter plural subject. The singular is standard Greek and is the harder reading only in the trivial sense that scribes accustomed to Latin might correct it; it is not in doubt.
• Orthography of σητόβρωτα. No meaningful variation.

There is also nothing in the tradition that softens σέσηπεν, which is worth noting: where scribes and versions elsewhere in James smooth hard vocabulary (cf. the ἀκατάσχετον variant at 3:8), here they leave the putrefaction-verb alone. The Vulgate’s putrefactae sunt renders it at full strength.

Built onna28 · metzger-tc

Vulgate: Divitiae vestrae putrefactae sunt, et vestimenta vestra a tineis comesta sunt. Two observations. Jerome renders σέσηπεν with putrefacere, which keeps the putrefaction fully visible — better than most English descendants of the tradition, which arrived at ‘corrupted’ and then watched that word drift. But a tineis comesta sunt dissolves the compound σητόβρωτα into a passive verb plus an agent-phrase (‘eaten by moths’), supplying an explicit agent where the Greek has a single adjective. Latin has no compound to match, so the resolution is forced rather than interpretive; but the direction of the loss is worth marking, and the English ‘moth-eaten’ recovers what Latin could not hold.

The Latin plural divitiae also obscures the singular ὁ πλοῦτος. Again a language constraint rather than a reading.

Built onna28

The Greek commentators read vv. 2-3 as directed at hoarding rather than at possession, and consistently take the decay as evidence produced against the owner rather than as a description of loss.

The interpretive move they make repeatedly is this: the goods rotted because they were not used. Wealth that circulated — paid to the workers of v. 4, given to the destitute of 2:15-16 — would not have been left long enough to spoil. The rot is therefore self-inflicted and self-documenting, which is exactly the logic v. 3 makes explicit with εἰς μαρτύριον ὑμῖν.

That reading has real exegetical purchase. It explains why James chose destruction-agents that operate on stored goods specifically: rot, moths, and corrosion are all what happens to things kept rather than spent. And it fits the Synoptic parallel at Matt 6:19-20, where the point of σής and βρῶσις is precisely the futility of θησαυρίζειν — a verb James picks up at 5:3 (ἐθησαυρίσατε).

It should be recorded as reception rather than as lexical evidence (§11). Nothing in σήπω or σητόβρωτος names hoarding; the connection is supplied by the argument, and the rendering must not import it. But the argument is James’s own, three verses later.

Proposed — pending reviewChrysostom (attrib.) and the Greek catena fragments on James, in J. A. Cramer, Catenae Graecorum Patrum in Novum Testamentum, vol. 8 (Oxford, 1844) · Bede the Venerable, Commentary on the Seven Catholic Epistles, trans. David Hurst, Cistercian Studies 82 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985)

The verse is built out of LXX materials, and the reader should be able to see them through the English.

Job 13:28 LXX — ὃ παλαιοῦται ἴσα ἀσκῷ ἢ ὥσπερ ἱμάτιον σητόβρωτον. This supplies James’s exact adjective in collocation with his exact noun, and the surrounding verse is about a thing wearing out and rotting. It is the closest verbal parallel in the Greek Bible.

Isaiah 51:8 LXX — ὡς γὰρ ἱμάτιον βρωθήσεται ὑπὸ χρόνου, καὶ ὡς ἔρια βρωθήσεται ὑπὸ σητός. Same image, deployed against those who fear human reproach; the point is the impermanence of what threatens.

Sirach 29:10 — ἀπόλεσον ἀργύριον διʼ ἀδελφὸν καὶ φίλον, καὶ μὴ ῥυπωθήτω ὑπὸ τὸν λίθον εἰς ἀπώλειαν. Money hidden under a stone corrodes to no purpose; better spent on a brother. This is the closest thematic parallel to James’s argument, and it stands one chapter after Sir 28:10-12, which James has already drawn on for the fire-and-tongue imagery of 3:5-6.

Sirach 14:19 — πᾶν ἔργον σηπόμενον ἐκλείπει. The verb, in the participle, of everything made that decays and fails.

The cumulative point is that James is not inventing an image but deploying a fixed sapiential topos, and doing so in the prophetic register of the woe-oracle (Amos 6:1-7; Isa 5:8-10). Where a rendering must choose between reproducing the topos legibly and reading smoothly, the topos wins.

Built onmuraoka-lxx

Proposed — pending reviewJames B. Adamson, The Epistle of James, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976)

Pulling the decisions together:

• ὁ πλοῦτος ὑμῶν → ‘your wealth’. Concrete noun; referent left unspecified; masculine form noted, not rendered.
• σέσηπεν → ‘has rotted’ / ‘has rotted away’. Perfect kept as English present perfect; putrefaction kept visible; no agent supplied.
• τὰ ἱμάτια ὑμῶν → ‘your garments’ (literal) / ‘your clothes’ (modern). Second ὑμῶν retained.
• σητόβρωτα γέγονεν → ‘have become moth-eaten’. Compound kept as a compound; γίνομαι kept as a verb of becoming, not a copula.
• Punctuation. The verse ends with a comma in NA28 and the series runs on into v. 3 without a connective. The reading text closes on a dash rather than a period so the series is not broken at the verse division; the punctuation of the printed editions is editorial judgment, since the earliest majuscules are unpunctuated.

What the English must not do is make the verse a statement about depreciating assets. Every one of the three destruction-verbs in vv. 2-3 names a physical process operating on a physical thing, and the argument of v. 3b — that the corrosion will eat their flesh — only works if the reader has been allowed to see rot as rot.