Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to James · About this commentary
Stumbling at One Point
James 2:10-11
10 For whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all. · WEB
The law is treated as a single thing rather than a list, and the reason given is not the law's structure but its author.
Verse 10 states a principle that sounds harsh until its ground is given: whoever keeps the whole law and stumbles at one point has become guilty of all.
Read as arithmetic it is unjust — a man who breaks one command has not committed every crime. But the letter is not counting. It is describing what a single breach does to a relationship, and verse 11 supplies the reasoning.
He who said do not commit adultery also said do not murder. The argument is about a person, not a code. The commandments are not independent regulations that happen to be collected together; they are the expressed will of one lawgiver, whom the letter will name in exactly those terms two chapters on James 4:12. To set one aside is to decide that his word binds where one agrees with it, which is not obedience under any description.
The two examples are chosen with care. Adultery and murder are the offenses a respectable congregation would be confident of avoiding — which is precisely why they are named to people whose actual offense was a seating arrangement.
That is the argument's whole force. The readers would not dispute that murder is sin. The letter has just called their partiality sin in the same breath James 2:9, and this verse removes the shelf on which the smaller sin was going to be placed.
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