James 5:4

Behold the hire of the laborers who mowed your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth out: and the cries of them that reaped have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.

It was not merely the rejection of Christ that provoked the judgment of God upon the Jewish state, although that was sufficient; but it was their gross rebellion against the very law they pretended so much to adore. Leviticus 13:13, and Deuteronomy 24:15, and countless other passages forbade the withholding of the laborers' pay even for the space of a single day, but the evil men James denounced had withheld it altogether, defrauding them of it.

The hire of the laborers ... This is an eloquent statement. It identifies the place of the offense cited as Jerusalem of Judea, the rest of the civilized world of that period having all of the farm work done by slaves. "Only in Palestine would field laborers have been hired help; elsewhere in the Roman Empire the fields were worked by slaves."[11] It also means that this epistle was surely written before the destruction of Jerusalem, because after that event the slave system prevailed in Judea also.

Lord of Sabaoth ... Some writers seize upon this as proof of their allegation that here we have a Jewish writing; but their error is due to a failure to discern James' reason for this usage. The judgment about to fall upon Israel was due to their having rejected the teachings of the Lord of Sabaoth, as inculcated in the Law of Moses; and it was most fitting that this lapse on their part should have been mentioned in connection with this prophetic announcement of their destruction. The expression means "The Lord of Hosts," "The God of the heavenly armies," "God of the heavenly hosts (such as the sun, moon and stars)," "God of all the armies of angels arranged in an orderly host," etc., etc. It speaks of the omnipotence, glory and eternity of Almighty God. Tasker called this "One of the most majestic of all the titles of God in the Old Testament."[12] The only other New Testament usage of this title is in Romans 9:29, where Paul quoted it from Isaiah in exactly the same context as that in which James used it here, namely, that of discussing the apostasy of Israel. How strange it is that some fail to see the same connection here.

[11] A. F. Harper, op. cit., p. 238.

[12] R. V. G. Tasker, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, James (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), p. 113.