For whoever …: James now goes on to explain the concept that whoever is guilty of one commandment is guilty of all. He elaborates on what he has said in the previous verse with an explanatory For, even though he will not draw a conclusion of what he has been saying now until verse 12. This connective particle is sometimes left untranslated. However, to show the connection between the two verses and to maintain a general train of thought, it may be desirable in some languages to keep this link by having a “For,” “Because,” “It follows that,” or even “That is why” in the sense of “the reason is” (similarly the Japanese colloquial version).

Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it: this statement is meant to explain a well-known Jewish teaching that the Law should be observed in its entirety, as there is no distinction between important and less important commandments—the Law is indivisible. Therefore to break one commandment is to be guilty of breaking all. Here the whole law obviously refers to the Law of God handed down through Moses, and may also be expressed as “everything that God has commanded us [inclusive] through Moses” or “all the commandments that God has given to us through Moses.”

The verb fails is literally “trips” or “stumbles” (so New International Version), in the sense of making a mistake or a slip (Goodspeed, Moffatt: “makes one single slip”). In this context it refers to the breaking of the Law. In many languages a literal translation of the phrase keeps the whole law but fails in one point can create a problem, for it is difficult to think and say that someone keeps the whole law and yet fails in one point—since the “whole” obviously means all, and consequently there should be no exception. It is possibly for this reason that Revised English Bible has rendered the phrase as “… breaks just one commandment and keeps all the others.” A simpler rendering is found in Contemporary English Version: “If you obey every law except one.” Another way of saying the same thing without the apparent contradiction is to render simply “breaks one commandment,” leaving the phrase keeps the whole law to be understood from the context without actually mentioning it, as Good News Translation has done (so also Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch). In many translations this can be done without losing any significant component of the meaning of the phrase.

The word guilty is a legal term that can mean “liable for punishment,” or “guilty of crime,” or “guilty in respect of the law that a person has broken.” The first two meanings seem unlikely, in that the person who breaks one law is said to be liable for all the punishments or guilty of crimes listed for all transgressions. The last meaning mentioned appears to fit the context better and is probably the one intended by the author.

The phrase all of it in Greek is one word “all.” It can be understood in two ways. First, it can be understood as in contrast to “one.” In this case if we render the “one” as “one point [or, commandment],” the “all” here means “all points [or, commandments].” This is apparently the understanding of Good News Translation when it renders the phrase as “breaking them all” (compare also Revised English Bible “breaking all of them”). Other ways of expressing this are “breaking all the commandments” (meaning the Ten Commandments), “guilty of disobeying all God’s prohibitions,” or even “guilty of doing all the things that God prohibited.” However, all can also be taken as an equivalent of “entirety” or “whole,” as in the whole law. In this instance the phrase may be rendered guilty of all of it, or “guilty in respect to all of it” (New American Bible), or “guilty of breaking the whole Law” (as in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch).

Alternative translation models for this verse are:
• For whoever follows [or, obeys] all God’s commandments except for one is guilty of disobeying all of them.
• If you only disobey one of God’s commandments, it is the same as disobeying the whole Law [or, all of God’s words in the Law that he gave through Moses].

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 .