What Does James 5:13 Mean?
Is anyone among you enduring harm? Let him pray. Is anyone glad-hearted? Let him pluck the strings.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms.THE KEY
In the Greek, gladness does not stay an inward mood: the verb for singing still carries the image of plucking a string.
THE MEANING
When hardship is present, the verse gives it prayer as its voice; when gladness is present, it gives it song. Neither experience has to be erased to make room for the other: each can be expressed before God now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that distress belongs in prayer while joy is too ordinary or self-contained to become praise.
THE ROOT
ψαλλέτω
psalletō
GROWS FROM
ψάλλω
psallō
To pluck a string; by extension, to play or sing praise.
“pluck the strings” in this verse is psalletō. The verb’s older concrete sense is plucking a string; from that action it names playing and singing praise. Gladness here becomes audible, not just felt.
ALSO GROWS
psalmos: A psalm or song of praise.
ψαλμός
The noun names the song that grows from the same family as the string-plucking verb.
psaltērion: A stringed instrument, or psaltery.
ψαλτήριον
This branch preserves the instrument image carried inside the verb translated “sing psalms.”
εὐθυμεῖ
euthymei
GROWS FROM
θυμός
thymos
Inner force, passion, heat; in some contexts, anger.
“glad-hearted” in this verse is euthymei. The word translated “merry” belongs to a family whose noun θυμός (thymos) can mean anger, heat, or passion; the source word here means to be in good cheer. The verse places this inner force on the side of gladness, then lets it become song.
ALSO GROWS
thymos: Anger, heat, or passionate force.
θυμός
This related word names the intensity also present in the family behind “merry.”
euthymia: Good cheer or courage.
εὐθυμία
This noun uses the same word family for a state of good cheer, showing that “merry” can name an inward stance, not only a passing mood.
euthymos: Cheerful, in good spirits.
εὔθυμος
This related adjective shows the same family describing a person marked by good cheer.
κακοπαθεῖ
kakopathei
GROWS FROM
πάσχω
paschō
To undergo, experience, or suffer; in κακοπαθέω, to undergo hardship.
“enduring harm” in this verse is kakopathei. The Greek verb names the experience of undergoing hardship, not simply a label someone wears. James meets that present experience with prayer; the same root family can also name suffering shared with another.
ALSO GROWS
pathēma: A suffering, or something undergone.
πάθημα
This noun keeps the focus on what is being experienced, the condition prayer meets in the verse.
sympaschō: To suffer with, to share another’s suffering.
συμπάσχω
This branch shows that suffering can be shared; it need not define an isolated self.
THE PATTERN
Whatever condition is present receives a fitting expression toward God: distress becomes prayer, and gladness becomes song.
Call upon me in the day of the narrow place, and I draw you out, and you give me weight.Do not be pulled apart over anything, but in everything, through prayer and need, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.Shout to the LORD, all the earth. Burst open, ring out, and make music.THE THREAD
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and songs of breath, singing and plucking the strings in your heart to the Lord.James’s “sing psalms” and Ephesians’ “making melody” translate forms of ψάλλω (psallō), meaning to pluck a string or sing praise. The shared root opens James’s gladness into a song that gives the inward state an audible form.
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