James 5:1 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

Go to now, ye rich. — As in James 4:3, it was “Woe to you, worldly,” so now “Woe to ye rich: weep, bewailing” — literally, howling for your miseries coming upon you. Comp. Isaiah 13:6; Isaiah 14:31; Isaiah 15:3, where (in the LXX.) the same term is used; — a picture word, imitating the cry of anguish, — peculiar to this place in the New Testament. Observe the immediate future of the misery; it is already coming. Doubtless by this was meant primarily the pillage and destruction of Jerusalem, but under that first intention many others secondary and similar are included: for all “riches certainly make themselves wings” and fly away (Proverbs 23:5). Calvin and others of his school fail to see in this passage an exhortation of the rich to penitence, but only a denunciation of woe upon them; in the sense, however, that all prophecy, whether evil or good, is conditional, there is sufficient room to believe that no irrevocable doom was pronounced by “a Christian Jeremiah.”