Whether or no this interpretation be accepted--and no interpretation of this passage has as yet been suggested which is free from difficulty--it must be clearly borne in mind that no explanation can be correct which does not preserve the connexion between the humiliation of the rich man and his passing away as the flower of the grass. This fading away _is_ his humiliation, _is_ the thing in which he is to glory, if he glories in anything at all. The inexorable "because" must not be ignored or explained away by making the wealth of the rich man shrivel up, when St. James twice over says that it is the rich man himself who fades away. The metaphor here used of the rich man is common enough in the Old Testament. Man "cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down" (ὥσπερ ἄνθος ἀνθῆσαν ἐξέπεσεν LXX.), says Job, in his complaint (xiv. 2); and, "As for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more," says the Psalmist (ciii. 15, 16). But elsewhere, with a closer similarity to the present passage, we have this transitory character specially attributed to the ungodly, who "shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb" (Ps. xxxvii. 2). None of these passages, however, are so clearly in St. James's mind as the words of Isaiah: "All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the breath of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever" (Isa. xl. 6, 7). Here the words of St. James are almost identical with those of the Septuagint (ὡς ἄνθος χόρτου· ἐξηράνθη ὁ χόρτος καὶ τὸ ἄνθος ἐξέπεσεν ... ἐξηράνθη χόρτος, ἐξέπεσεν τὸ ἄνθος); and, as has been already pointed out (p. 59), this is one of the quotations which our Epistle has in common with that of St. Peter (1 Peter i. 24). "Grass" throughout is a comprehensive term for herbage, and the "flower of grass" does not mean the bloom or blossom of grass in the narrower sense, but the wild flowers, specially abundant and brilliant in the Holy Land, which grow among the grass. Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount, what are first called "the lilies (τὰ κρίνα) of the field" are immediately afterwards called "the grass (τὸν χόρτον) of the field" (Matt. vi. 28, 30).