With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men: James now departs from his use of metaphors and turns to an example of how the tongue is used inconsistently. The two actions bless and curse are incompatible. Blessing God is something all Jews understood. Whenever the name of God was mentioned, they had to respond by saying “Blessed be he!” Every day in the synagogue devout Jews had to repeat the so-called Standing Prayer, in which each thanksgiving closes with the words “Blessed art thou….” And the continuing use of this formula by early Christians is seen in the thanksgiving prayer “Let us give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 1.3; 1 Peter 1.3, Good News Bible).

To bless in this context is “to worship,” “to praise,” and “to give thanks” rather than “to bestow goodness and favor.” The latter is done by God to human beings. The subject of blessing is we. It is unlikely that we should limit the we to the “teachers” as in 3.2. Also it does not seem appropriate to understand the we simply as the author’s modesty in including himself among those being rebuked. It is perhaps best to take it as an all-inclusive we, stressing general human weakness in the conflicting use of the tongue. The object of blessing is the Lord and Father. This combination is unique; the more common combination is “God and Father,” and this explains the attempt to change the text to this form, as reflected in the King James Version rendering “God, even the Father” (similarly Knox). Elsewhere in James the title Lord is applied to Christ, but here it obviously refers to God. In the Greek both titles share one article, and they therefore refer to the same person. Here the connective and has the force of a predicate, thus “the Lord who is Father.” This rendering is desirable for languages where the connective and may be misunderstood as distinguishing Lord and Father, referring to two separate persons. Since the subject of the blessing is we, the relationship between we and the Lord and Father may be brought out clearly as “our Lord and Father,” as Good News Translation has done (so also Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch, Revised English Bible, Contemporary English Version, and others), or as “the Lord our Father” (Goodspeed). For the meaning of the words Lord and Father, see the discussions in 1.1 and 1.27 respectively. In some languages the word for “Lord” is also the word for “chief,” and so the word “God” is added to make the reference clear; thus “the Lord [Chief] God as Father.”

And with it we curse men: praising God is the highest form of activity for a person’s tongue, but it can also engage in the lowest form of activity, cursing. The connective and does not mean that the tongue can do the combination of blessing and cursing at the same time. In order to avoid this possible misunderstanding, a number of connective particles may be provided; for example, “… and also to curse…” (Good News Translation), “we use it to praise…; then we use it to invoke curses…” (Revised English Bible) To curse in this context is to “invoke harm, misfortune, or injury to a person,” not just to “insult” or “say bad things about” a person. It is an attitude and expression of enmity. As such, cursing is forbidden in the New Testament. Jesus taught his disciples to “bless those who curse you” (Luke 6.28, TEV), and Paul echoed the teaching: “Ask God to bless those who persecute you—yes, ask him to bless, not to curse” (Rom 12.14, TEV). The word men here is meant to be general and inclusive and therefore may be rendered “other human beings.”

The fault of invoking curses on fellow human beings is deplorable because they are made in the likeness of God. This is obviously a reference to Gen 1.26-27. In the Genesis passage two words are used; one is “image” and the other is “likeness.” It is not clear why James chose the second word rather than the first one. In any case there seems to be no need to press for a different sense between the two, as they are obviously meant to have the same meaning. What James wants to communicate here is simply that acting against people who resemble God is the same as acting against God, who created those people. It is logically inconsistent to pretend to bless God and then to curse the representation of God (human beings). In other words, cursing other human beings is in effect cursing God, who created them. In languages where there is a difference in meaning between made and “created,” it may be desirable to use the latter, as Good News Translation has done. In some languages it is desirable to supply “God” as the agent of the verb and shift the construction to the active voice; thus “… whom God created in his likeness.”

The following may be used as an alternative translation model for this verse:
• We [inclusive] use our tongues to give thanks to [or, praise] our Lord and Father and also to invoke harm to happen to [or, call down curses on] our fellow humans whom God created to be like himself.

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 .