James 5:3

James 5:3. Your gold and your silver: the other treasures in which their riches consisted.

is cankered: corroded, eaten through with rust. Literally, gold and silver do not contract rust, and hence various explanations have been given, as, for example, vessels plated with gold; but such explanations are childish: the expression may well be employed to denote the perishable nature of money.

and the rust of them shall be a witness against you: literally, ‘shall be a testimony to you.' Some render this: the rust which you have allowed to accumulate on them from want of use shall testify against you in the judgment as an evidence of your parsimony and sinful hoarding. Thus Neander: ‘As their unused treasures of gold and silver are devoured by rust, so this will be a witness against them, their guilt being apparent from this, that what they should have used for the advantage of others, they have suffered by want of use to be corrupted.' But such a meaning is contrary to the context: it is of the destruction of the rich that St. James here speaks, not of the evidence of their crime. Hence, then, the meaning is: the rust of them shall be a testimony to your destruction; the like destruction shall befall you which befalls your gold and silver.

and shall eat your flesh: the reference being not to the destruction of the body by care, to the corroding nature of riches, but to the infliction of the Divine judgment.

as it were fire: fire being the emblem of judgment: like fire shall the rust eat your flesh. So also we speak of the devouring fire. ‘The Lord shall swallow them up in His wrath, and the fire shall devour them' (Psalms 21:9).

Ye have heaped treasure together. Some render this: ‘Ye have accumulated treasures of wrath for the day of judgment,' similar to the words of St. Paul: ‘Thou treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath' (Romans 2:5). But for this meaning the words ‘of wrath' have to be supplied. It is best to render it: Ye have heaped together treasure for destruction; treasure which shall perish.

for, or in, the last days: not in the last days of your life; but either in the days that shall precede the coming of Christ, or in the last days of the Jewish nation, when those awful judgments threatened by the prophets and predicted by Jesus Christ will be poured out upon the unbelieving and ungodly Jews. We must not forget that it is to Jews that St. James writes; and ‘the last days' is a Jewish expression for the age of the Messiah, and hence is fitly employed by the sacred writers to denote the end of the Jewish economy. The zealots during the Jewish war regarded it as a crime to be rich, and their insatiable avarice induced them to search into the houses of the rich, and to murder their inmates.