Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to James · About this commentary
Blessing and Cursing from One Mouth
James 3:9-12
9 With it we bless our God and Father, and with it we curse men who are made in the image of God. · WEB
The specific fault is finally named, and it is the letter's own diagnosis of division applied to speech.
Verse 9 states the offense in one sentence. With the tongue we bless God, and with the same tongue we curse men who are made in the likeness of God Genesis 1:26–27.
The reasoning is compact and unanswerable. The blessing and the cursing are aimed at the same likeness. A person praising God and then abusing a neighbor has directed reverence and contempt at one image, and the letter does not have to say more than that.
It is also the chapter's link back to chapter 2. The congregation that seated a poor man at the footstool James 2:3 was doing this with furniture; here it does it with words.
Verse 10 delivers the verdict in the mildest phrase in the letter — my brothers, these things ought not to be so — and the mildness is effective after the fire and the poison.
Verses 11 and 12 then argue from nature in three quick questions. A spring does not pour fresh and bitter from one opening. A fig tree does not bear olives, or a vine figs. Salt water does not yield fresh.
Every example describes a source producing according to what it is. That is what makes the passage more than a complaint about inconsistency: the letter is saying that a mouth doing both things is reporting something about the spring. It is the two-souled man James 1:8 heard rather than observed, and the same division the whole letter exists to name.
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