James 5:2

2 Your wealth is become rotten, and your garments moth-eaten.

James 5:2 Meaning and Commentary

James 5:2

Your riches are corrupted
Either through disuse of them; and so the phrase is expressive of their tenaciousness, withholding that from themselves and others which is meet, and which is keeping riches for the owners thereof, to their hurt; or these are corrupted, and are corruptible things, fading and perishing, and will stand in no stead in the day of wrath, and therefore it is great weakness to put any trust and confidence in them:

and your garments are moth eaten;
being neither wore by themselves, nor put upon the backs of others, as they should, but laid up in wardrobes, or in chests and coffers, and so became the repast of moths, and now good for nothing.

James 5:2 In-Context

1 Go to now, ye rich, weep, howling over your miseries that [are] coming upon [you].

2 Your wealth is become rotten, and your garments moth-eaten.

3 Your gold and silver is eaten away, and their canker shall be for a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as fire. Ye have heaped up treasure in [the] last days.

4 Behold, the wages of your labourers, who have harvested your fields, wrongfully kept back by you, cry, and the cries of those that have reaped are entered into the ears of [the] Lord of sabaoth.

5 Ye have lived luxuriously on the earth and indulged yourselves; ye have nourished your hearts [as] in a day of slaughter;