to tame or subdue: bring a wild, violent, or unruly thing under control
In everyday Greek this was the word for breaking a wild animal, above all a horse, to human control. That concrete picture of mastering a creature that fights the yoke stays alive under every New Testament use, even when the thing being brought under control is not an animal at all.
The New Testament stretches the word across three very different objects, yet the core act never changes: taking something wild or resistant and bringing it under mastery.
- In James 3:7 it is literal, the whole animal kingdom broken in by human skill.
- In Mark 5:4 it is a violent man whom no chains could hold.
- In James 3:8 it is the tongue, which James calls the one thing no person can tame.
That one word carries all three jobs is the point of its most famous use. James lines up the taming of every kind of creature against the tongue that stays wild, echoing the old command to rule over the animals, and the surprise is that human mastery reaches everywhere except into its own mouth. Other Greek words for control come at it from different angles: mastering by sheer strength (κρατέω), or reining something in with a bridle (χαλιναγωγέω, the very image James uses a few verses earlier). This verb keeps the particular flavor of breaking in something wild and resistant.
Nuances
Whether the emphatic "no one of humans" in James 3:8 hints that God can tame the tongue even though people cannot.
- majorityThe phrase deliberately leaves the divine option open: what humans cannot do, God can, pointing ahead to the wisdom from above later in the chapter.; Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James (Pillar New Testament Commentary; Eerdmans, 2000); Scot McKnight, The Letter of James (NICNT; Eerdmans, 2011)
- minorityThe phrase is rhetorical overstatement about the human condition, not a coded promise of divine help.; Martin Dibelius, James: A Commentary on the Epistle of James, rev. Heinrich Greeven (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1976)