Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wages You Kept Back
James 5:4-6
4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of those who reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies. · WEB
The specific charge is unpaid wages, and the letter says the money itself is shouting.
Verse 4 names the crime and it is precise: wages of laborers who mowed the fields, kept back by fraud. Not stolen goods, not violence — withheld pay, held by someone entitled to hold it who chose to.
The law had legislated exactly this, requiring a hired man's wages the same day because he is poor and counting on them Deuteronomy 24:14–15, and warning that he will cry out and it will be sin. The letter is not inventing a standard.
Then the striking image: the withheld wages cry out. The money has a voice, and the cries of the harvesters have entered into the ears of the Lord of Armies. The title is chosen with care — the God of armies is being told about unpaid farmhands.
Verse 5 describes the other side of the same ledger. Living in luxury and self-indulgence on the earth; hearts nourished in a day of slaughter. The final phrase is deliberately ambiguous and the letter leaves it so: a feast day, or the day of butchering, with the fattened animals unaware which one they are in.
Verse 6 is the last charge and the hardest. You condemned and murdered the righteous one, and the closing clause has no verdict attached: he does not resist you.
That non-resistance is the passage's final note. It offers no threat from the victim's side, and it does not need to — the crying wages have already reached the only ears that matter.
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