Bible Strands
James 5:2
Your riches have rotted and moths have eaten your clothes.
Berean Standard Bible
Follow its threads on the canvas →
Study note
Setting — James addresses wealthy individuals, declaring their impending misery. He speaks at the moment of judgment, immediately following a summons to weep and wail over their coming fate.
The words — The Greek term πλοῦτος (ploutos) denotes "riches," paired with σέσηπεν (sesēpen), meaning "have rotted." These words describe the physical decay of accumulated wealth and stored garments.
The thread — This imagery of decay runs parallel to Matthew 6:19, where moth and rust destroy earthly treasures, and Job 13:28, which compares human deterioration to a moth-eaten garment.
Why it lands — The text states that material accumulation is physically vulnerable to irreversible decay. It requires readers to abandon reliance on perishable possessions and recognize their ultimate uselessness at judgment.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Greek words
King James Version
Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
Cross-references
- Matthew 6:19 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.
- Job 13:28 So man wastes away like something rotten, like a moth-eaten garment.
- Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide yourselves with purses that will not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys.
- Isaiah 50:9 Surely the Lord GOD helps Me. Who is there to condemn Me? See, they will all wear out like a garment; the moths will devour them.
- Isaiah 51:8 For the moth will devour them like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool. But My righteousness will last forever, My salvation through all generations.”
- 1 Peter 1:4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you,
- Psalms 39:11 You discipline and correct a man for his iniquity, consuming like a moth what he holds dear; surely each man is but a vapor. Selah
- Jeremiah 17:11 Like a partridge hatching eggs it did not lay is the man who makes a fortune unjustly. In the middle of his days his riches will desert him, and in the end he will be the fool.”
- Hosea 5:12 So I am like a moth to Ephraim, and like decay to the house of Judah.
- James 2:2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in.