Tool Beta
The Ancient World Behind the Text
Pick a passage anywhere in the New Testament. See the customs and ideas a first reader knew without being told.
James 1:19-27, Slow to anger, and the widows and orphans
James tells his readers to be quick to listen and slow to speak and to anger, to do the word and not merely hear it, and names the religion God accepts: care for orphans and widows in their distress and a life kept unstained by the world.
James 1:19-27, in every translation this tool compares.
James presses his readers to listen more than they talk and to keep their anger in check, because anger does not bring about what God wants. Hearing God's word without doing it, he says, is like glancing in a mirror and forgetting your own face. Real religion shows in a controlled tongue, in care for orphans and widows who have no one to protect them, and in a life kept clean of the world's ways. Whether James has revolutionary anger in view or ordinary quarrels is debated.
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/zeal\/","n":"Zeal for God and the law","s":"Zeal meant burning loyalty to God and his law, and its heroes, Phinehas, Elijah and the Maccabees, had used force against those who betrayed it. Saul the persecutor saw himself in that line.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/widows\/","n":"Widows","s":"A woman whose husband died usually lost her income with him and depended on a son, relatives or charity. A widow who stayed faithful to her husband's memory and did not remarry was honored.","r":""}
- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/ancient-world-ideas\/almsgiving\/","n":"Gifts to the poor","s":"Giving to the needy was one of the three pillars of Jewish piety, with prayer and fasting. Greeks and Romans had nothing quite like it.","r":""}
Quick to listen and slow to speak and to anger is among the commonest advice in Jewish wisdom from Proverbs on, and Keener and the cultural backgrounds notes read James as setting it against the revolutionary fervor in his land: Jewish nationalists thought that striking at the Romans and their aristocratic vassals would serve God's righteous anger. The ESV and CSB Study Bibles, Wright and Bird, and Carson, Moo and Morris read the letter's anger as quarrels within the churches, and Wright's commentary as any human anger that thinks it can help God's justice along; the readings are set out in the note on 3:1-4:10. No mirror gave an accurate image, and many people rarely saw themselves; Philo once compares the law to a mirror (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). Orphans and widows had no direct means of support and no dependable legal defender; Greek society looked after freeborn orphans only, while Jews valued providing for widows and the fatherless (Keener; the cultural backgrounds notes). The Zondervan dictionary adds that the law gave them the third-year tithe and gleanings (Deuteronomy 14:29; 26:12), and that, since inheritance passed through males, a widow without sons was in special distress.
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, introduction to James 1:19-27, and on James 1:19, 1:20, 1:23-24, 1:25, 1:26 and 1:27
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, notes on James 1:19, 1:20 and 1:27
- ESV Study Bible, study notes on James 3:1-4:12 and 4:1
- CSB Study Bible, Introduction to James (Message and Purpose)
- N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World, ch. 31, The Argument of James, section 6
- D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament, ch. 18, James, James in Recent Study
- J. D. Douglas and Merrill C. Tenney, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Dictionary, entries orphan and widow
- N. T. Wright, Early Christian Letters for Everyone, comment on James 1:19-27
