James Chapter 5 verse 1 Holy Bible
Come now, ye rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you.
read chapter 5 in ASV
Come now, you men of wealth, give yourselves to weeping and crying because of the bitter troubles which are coming to you.
read chapter 5 in BBE
Go to now, ye rich, weep, howling over your miseries that [are] coming upon [you].
read chapter 5 in DARBY
Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
read chapter 5 in KJV
read chapter 5 in WBT
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming on you.
read chapter 5 in WEB
Go, now, ye rich! weep, howling over your miseries that are coming upon `you';
read chapter 5 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerses 1-6. - DENUNCIATION OF THE RICH FOR (1) GRINDING DOWN THE POOR AND KEEPING BACK THEIR WAGES; (2) LUXURY; (3) MURDER. . . .
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(1) Go to now, ye rich.--As in James 4:3, it was "Woe to you, worldly," so now "Woe to ye rich: weep, bewailing"--literally, howling for your miseries coming upon you. Comp. Isaiah 13:6; Isaiah 14:31; Isaiah 15:3, where (in the LXX.) the same term is used;--a picture word, imitating the cry of anguish,--peculiar to this place in the New Testament. Observe the immediate future of the misery; it is already coming. Doubtless by this was meant primarily the pillage and destruction of Jerusalem, but under that first intention many others secondary and similar are included: for all "riches certainly make themselves wings" and fly away (Proverbs 23:5). Calvin and others of his school fail to see in this passage an exhortation of the rich to penitence, but only a denunciation of woe upon them; in the sense, however, that all prophecy, whether evil or good, is conditional, there is sufficient room to believe that no irrevocable doom was pronounced by "a Christian Jeremiah."
