James 3:6

And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity The last words are in apposition with the subject, not the predicate, of the sentence. The tongue is described as emphatically that world we should perhaps say, that microcosm of unrighteousness. As uttering all evil thoughts and desires, no element of unrighteousness was absent from it, and that which includes all the elements of anything well deserves the name of being its Cosmos.

so is the tongue among our members The particle of comparison is not found in the best MSS., but is clearly implied, and is therefore legitimately inserted in the translation, as it is in some later MSS. The sentence strictly runs, The tongue is set in our members, referring of course not to a Divine appointment, but to its actual position. It is, as a fact, that which "defiles", better perhaps spots or stains, the whole body. Every evil word is thought of as leaving its impress, it may be an indelible impress, as a blot upon the whole character.

and setteth on fire the course of nature The last words have no parallel in any Greek author, and are therefore naturally somewhat difficult. Literally, we might render, the wheel of nature or of birth, just as in ch. James 1:23 we found "the face of nature," for the "natural face," that with which we are born. The best interpretation seems to be that which sees in the phrase a figure for "the whole of life from birth;" the wheel which then begins to roll on its course, and continues rolling until death. The comparison of life to a race, or course of some kind, has been familiar to the poetry of all ages, and in a Latin poet, Silius Italicus (vi. 120), we have a phrase almost identical with St James's,

"Talis lege Deûm clivoso tramite vitæ

Per varios præceps casus rotavolvitur ævi."

"So by the law of God, through chance and change,

The wheel of liferolls down the steep descent."

What is meant, if we adopt this view, is that from the beginning of life to its close, the tongue is an ever-present inflammatory element of evil.

As an alternative explanation it is possible that there may be a reference to the potter's wheel, as in Jeremiah 18:3, and Sir 38:29, in the latter of which the same word for "wheel" is used. On this view the tongue would be represented as the flame that by its untempered heat mars the vessel in the hands of the potter. The frequent parallelisms between St James and the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, are, as far as they go, in favour of this view, but the former seems to me, on the whole, preferable. A third view, that the words have the same kind of meaning as orbis terrarum, and mean, as in the English Version, the whole order or course of nature, i.e. of human history in the world at large, has, it is believed, less to recommend it.

and it is set on fire of hell The Greek participle is in the present. The tongue that speaks evil is ever being set on fire of Gehenna. St James does not shrink from tracing sins of speech to their source. The fire of man's wrath is kindled from beneath, as the fire that cleanses is kindled from above. Bearing in our minds the wonder of the day of Pentecost, it is hardly too bold to say that we have to choose whether our tongue shall be purified by the fire of the Holy Spirit or defiled by that of Gehenna. The latter word is that employed in the Gospels, as here, for "Hell", wherever that word means, not simply the place of the dead, which is expressed in the Greek by Hades, the unseen world, but the place of torment. Primarily, the word is a Hebrew one, signifying the Valley of Hinnom. As that valley had been in the days of the idolatries of Judah the scene of the fires of Moloch worship (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:31; Jeremiah 19:5-6), and had in later times become the cloacawhere the filth and offal of the city were consumed in fires kept continually burning (so it is commonly said, but the fact is not quite certain), it came to be among the later Rabbis what Tartarus was to the Greeks, the symbol of the dread penalties of evil. Comp. Matthew 5:22; Mark 9:43.