Anger

Reading these passages

Colossians 3:8 lists two kinds of anger in the same breath and English gives them almost the same name: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. The first two words are orge and thymos. In Greek they are not synonyms. Thymos is the flare — the sudden heat that comes up and goes down. Orge is the settled thing, the grudge that has moved in and started paying rent.

Paul names both, which is worth noticing, because the advice usually offered about anger only addresses one of them. Counting to ten works on thymos. It does nothing whatever to orge.

Long of nostrils

The phrase that keeps recurring in Proverbs — slow to anger — translates a Hebrew idiom that is more physical than the English lets on. Erek appayim means, literally, long of nostrils. The picture behind it is the flaring of the nose in rage, and the virtue is described as having a long way to travel before that happens.

So He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. This was a provocative sentence in a culture that ranked men by cities taken. It is not saying self-control is nice. It is saying it outranks conquest, using the conqueror as the unit of measurement.

Here the King James does the reader a quiet disservice. The same Hebrew phrase, erek appayim, is what God calls himself in Exodus 34:6, in the passage the Old Testament returns to more than any other when it wants to say what God is like — and there the translators rendered it longsuffering. Two different English phrases for one Hebrew idiom, so the connection is invisible in English and plain in Hebrew: the patience Proverbs asks of a person is the same attribute God claims for himself. Not an imitation of it. The same words.

Proverbs 14:29 adds the diagnosis: slowness to anger is not temperament but comprehension. He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly. The fast-tempered person is not described as passionate. He is described as not having understood something.

Stirred or appeased

Proverbs 15:18 sets the two temperaments against each other and gives them the same object: A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife.

The strife is there in both halves of the sentence. It is not that the patient man avoids conflict and the angry man attracts it; the same quarrel is available to each, and what differs is the direction it moves afterwards. Proverbs is not describing two kinds of life. It is describing two things that can be done with one situation.

Which is the point the more famous verse makes as well. A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger. The Hebrew behind soft is rak — tender, yielding, the word used of a young animal or delicate skin. The word behind grievous is etseb, which carries the sense of pain and hard labour. A soft answer is not a weak one; it is one that has had the sharp edge deliberately taken off it, which is work.

And Proverbs 29:11 makes a distinction that most summaries of it lose: A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards.

The Hebrew for what the fool utters is ruach — spirit, breath, wind. He empties the whole of it out. But look at the second half. The wise man does not swallow what he thinks; he keeps it in till afterwards. This is not a proverb about suppression. It is a proverb about timing, and it assumes the thing will be said — later, and by then in a form that is worth hearing.

Be ye angry

Ephesians 4:26 is the verse most often skipped past on this subject: Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.

The first clause is an imperative in Greek, and Christians have argued about what to do with that for centuries. Some read it as a genuine command: there are things a person ought to be angry about, and the absence of anger at them is a defect rather than a virtue. Some read it as permission — anger happens, and the sentence is telling you what to do next rather than instructing you to start. Some read it as concessive — a permission granted to someone already angry rather than an instruction to become so, which is how a good many translations handle it.

The grammar genuinely permits more than one of these and this page is not going to pick. What all three have to reckon with is that the verse does not treat the feeling as the offence. It attaches a deadline.

And the deadline is attached to a different word again. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath renders parorgismos, which is not orge or thymos but the state of having been provoked — irritation kept warm. The instruction is not that anger must be resolved by nightfall. It is that the provoked condition must not be carried into tomorrow, because tomorrow it will have become the settled kind.

There is a further detail underneath this that the King James lays out without comment. Paul is quoting Psalm 4:4, and the King James translates that psalm from the Hebrew: Stand in awe, and sin not. Paul is quoting the Greek Old Testament, which read the same Hebrew verb as be angry. So the two verses sit in the same Bible, one quoting the other, saying visibly different things. Neither translator was careless; the Hebrew word covers agitation broadly enough to carry both. It is a useful reminder that the verse everyone argues about is itself a translation of a translation.

Whose wrath?

Romans 12:19 contains an ambiguity that most readers pass straight through: Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

Give place unto whose wrath? The sentence does not say. Read one way it means step aside and leave room for God's wrath, which the quotation immediately following supports and which is how most commentators take it. Read the other way it means give your own anger somewhere to go rather than discharging it on the person — make space for it instead of acting on it.

The first reading is better supported and the second is not impossible, and the practical instruction is the same under both: the response is not yours to make. What the verse withholds is any suggestion that the wrong did not happen or does not matter. Vengeance is not cancelled in that sentence. It is reassigned.

James puts the same limit more bluntly, and it is worth reading the sentence after the famous one. Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath is followed immediately by the reason: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. Not that human anger is wicked — that it does not accomplish the thing it believes it is accomplishing. The objection is to its uselessness.

The one verse pointed the other way

Every passage above addresses the person who is angry. Colossians 3:21 turns around and addresses the person causing it: Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.

The verb is erethizo, to stir up or exasperate — the same territory as parorgismos two paragraphs ago, now aimed at whoever is doing the provoking. And the consequence Paul names is not rebellion, which is what the warning would be about if the concern were order in the household. It is lest they be discouraged: the Greek is athymeo, to lose heart, literally to be without thymos — the same word that meant the flare of anger, here meaning the spirit has gone out of them altogether.

That is a precise and rather bleak observation. A child provoked long enough does not stay angry. The anger runs out, and what is left is a child who has stopped expecting anything. Of all the passages on this page it is the only one that describes where unaddressed anger actually ends, and it puts the responsibility on the wrong person on purpose.

Ecclesiastes, characteristically, gets there in one line: Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools. The verb is about lodging — where something settles down and stays. Anger is not described as an event a fool has. It is described as a tenant a fool keeps.