Prayer for wisdom must be a prayer made with faith. James now turns from the nature of God’s giving to the nature of a person’s asking. He signals the shift by using an adversative But.

The imperative force of let him ask is best rendered here as “he must ask” (so New English Bible/Revised English Bible, Translator’s New Testament). Faith in this context is again a basic religious attitude; it is a matter of trusting in God and relying on his promises. It is not simply a general belief in the proposition that prayer will be answered. It is a confidence in God as one who gives generously. Since faith is an action or event word, it is often best rendered as a verb. In this case it may be desirable to shift the imperative force to the word “believe,” thus “when he asks, he must believe…” (New International Version), “… he must believe [or, have confidence in] God,” or “when you pray, you must believe God.” Faith or “believe” will be expressed idiomatically in many languages that use terms for speaking about “emotional centers” such as the heart, the liver, and so on. This is essentially because faith involves an intensive psychological experience. Here are some examples: “place heart in” (Thai), or “lean heart on.” A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark (pages 38-39) provides many other illustrations; for example, “to arrive on the inside” (Trique), “to join the word to the body” (Uduk), “to make the mind big for something” (Putu), “to hear and take into the insides” (Karré), and so on.

With no doubting is a negative way of saying in faith or “believe.” The verb “to doubt” basically means “to differentiate,” “to be divided against yourself,” and “to waver between two alternatives.” This means that the person who doubts is torn between his allegiance to God and his distrust of God. The two clauses may be rendered as “But when you pray, you must have confidence in God. You must not doubt at all.”

The author continues with an explanatory particle meaning for or “because” (New International Version, New Jerusalem Bible). He explains that the doubter is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. The Greek word translated here as wave occurs elsewhere in the New Testament only in Luke 8.24. It is a word for dashing or surging waves of the sea. The focus seems to be on the size rather than the movement of the wave. The metaphor of the sea is emphasized by means of two participles with identical endings and similar meaning, literally “being wind-driven and fanned.” The two words convey essentially the same idea, and so they are sometimes rendered as one motion; for example, “like a heaving sea ruffled by the wind” (Revised English Bible) or “like the waves thrown up in the sea by the buffeting of the wind” (New Jerusalem Bible). Other possible ways of rendering this are “like waves that the wind tosses around” or “like large waves that the wind drives along.” In some languages, especially those spoken on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, the expression wave of the sea will be redundant. It will be understood that “waves” are always present in large bodies of water such as “seas,” “oceans,” or “lakes,” unless indicated otherwise in the context. It may be noted that this metaphor of a rough sea may convey feelings of joy and excitement to some sea-loving people, but to the Hebrew people it is symbolic of evil and uncertainty. The point that James tries to convey is that the doubter is uncertain and unstable.

An alternative translation model for this verse may be:
• But when you pray to God, you must believe [or, have confidence in] him, and not doubt at all. For the person who doubts is like a large wave that the wind tosses about.

Quoted with permission from Loh, I-Jin and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Letter from James. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1997. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .