How Do the Desires Lead to Fighting? (4:2)

A second way we justify our role in fights is by rationalizing the moral impurity of our actions. James's point in 4:2 is, quite simply, that our desires lead to fighting because of our immorality in trying to grasp what we want. The verb "you want" epithymeo at the beginning of this verse does not automatically signify evil desires; with the same verb Luke has Jesus desiring to eat the Passover with his disciples in Luke 22:15. But the surrounding context here in James is clearly negative, and the verb recalls James's theme of "evil desire" epithymia in 1:14. Thus the NASB translates it "you lust."

What is complicated about this verse is the determination of the correct punctuation and the resulting structure intended by James (since the ancient manuscripts have no punctuation to guide us). One tradition perceives James to be thinking in a series of clauses coming in pairs with contrasting positive and negative verbs. This is reflected in the KJV as a series of three such pairs:

Ye lust, and have not:
ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain:
ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.

The NIV follows the same pattern. A more comprehensive version of this structure is advocated by Dibelius (1976:218) and Davids (1982:157-158) as a series of four pairs extending into 4:3. It could be outlined (translating literally):

You want,
and you do not have.
You murder and covet,
and you cannot obtain.
You quarrel and fight,
[and] you do not have because you do not ask.
You ask,
and you do not receive because you ask wickedly. . . .

In either variation, this view focuses on the pairs of verbs, a positive verb followed by a negated verb, as the guiding thought in James's meaning. If so, then James's intent is to describe the pattern of frustrated desires. The chief grammatical difficulty with this view is that it requires a key role for kai ("and" in an antithetical sense, similar to "but") to form each of the contrasts and therefore has to overcome the absence of kai from the third pair. Dibelius is willing to conclude that a kai must have been in the original text (1976:218), and Davids considers this a real possibility (1982:158).

A second way to punctuate the verse (preferred by Mayor 1897:131; Mitton 1966:147; Laws 1980:169; Moo 1985:140; Kistemaker 1986:131 and others) is reflected in the RSV, TEV and NASB. This view recognizes the first two contrasts of positive and negated verbs but ends the series where the text lacks the kai to continue the grammatical pattern. This view discerns two parallel statements, each asserting a cause and effect:

You want and do not have: (so) you murder.
And you covet and cannot obtain: (so) you quarrel and fight.

If this is James's meaning, then his intent is to draw a definite connection between desires and behavior. This has James making a clearer moral exhortation, warning that Christians' covetous desires lead to murderous fighting. It leaves the remainder of 4:2, with 4:3, as James's further exhortation on the matter of asking God for what they want.

This second rendering of 4:2 is to be preferred for two reasons. First, it avoids the grammatical difficulty of the missing kai. Second, the questions in 3:13, 4:1 and 4:4 are setting the outline of this section of the epistle, and the clear moral exhortation fits the context perfectly as James's answer to the question posed in 4:1. The conclusion, you quarrel and fight, is even stated with verbs sharing the same roots with the two nouns (in opposite order, fights and quarrels) in the initial question of 4:1.

Many commentators have found the verb kill (more precisely "murder") in 4:2 incongruous—too extreme for the context, especially when followed in sequence by the less violent sin of coveting (as in the rendering adopted by Dibelius and Davids, above). As a result, some have agreed with a conjecture dating back to Erasmus that the verb murder (phoneuete) is a textual error that was envy (phthoneite) in James's original text. (Cf. Mayor 1897:131; Dibelius 1976:217; Adamson 1976:168.) This makes the reading more acceptable to our hearing, but that is not sufficient reason to conclude that the text is corrupt; it is better practice of inductive study to see if sense can be made of the text and to adjust our hearing to the message. In the first place, there is no manuscript evidence for the theory of a textual error here. In the second place, this is not the only time James warns his readers about the sin of murder; he mentions it (with this same verb) in 2:11 and 5:6. Third, the frequent parallels we have found with Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount make it not at all improbable for James to be thinking with Jesus' categories, as in Matthew 5:21-22 where sins of hatred and insult are treated in the same category as murder. It is very likely, then, that murder did not strike James as incongruous at all. Moo wisely rejects the attempts to change or to dilute the term and counsels that "it is simplest to take `murder' straightforwardly and to regard it as that extreme to which frustrated desire, if not checked, may lead" (1985:141).

The purpose of 4:2, then, is to explain the answer James has just declared in the second half of 4:1 to the question he posed in the first half of 4:1. By the parallel structure James implies that quarrels and fights are like murder, and he draws a direct connection between unfulfilled coveting (the cause) and murderous fighting (the effect). James is laying bare the immorality of the motivation for our fights. We fight because we are coveting and are not able to get what we covet.