James 1:13 (KJV) states 'let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man,' while Genesis 22:1 (KJV) says 'God did tempt Abraham' -- directly contradicting James's assertion that God never tempts anyone.

This is a real, worthwhile lexical point resolved by attending to the actual semantic range of the underlying words rather than a single 17th-century English gloss. Genesis 22:1's Hebrew verb is nissah, whose dominant sense across its OT usage is 'to test, try, prove' (a character-revealing trial), used elsewhere of testing loyalty and faithfulness rather than enticement to sin (Ex 15:25, 16:4, Deut 8:2, 8:16, 13:3, Judg 2:22, Ps 26:2); the point of the Akedah narrative is that God is testing and proving the genuineness of Abraham's faith, confirmed by the angel's own commentary in v.12, 'now I know that you fear God,' not soliciting him to commit moral evil. James 1:13's Greek peirazo, though sharing the same broad test/try root as nissah (the LXX regularly renders nissah with peirazo), is used by James in this specific verse and context, vv.14-15, being 'lured and enticed by one's own desire,' leading to sin and death, with the narrower sense of enticement to sin -- and James's own chapter internally distinguishes this from the testing trials of vv.2-4 and 12, which God does sovereignly permit for the production of endurance and character, precisely paralleling the Genesis 22 sense. The objection, not the Christian reading, is the one flattening two genuinely different senses of the same root word together; modern translations (NRSVUE, NIV, ESV) render Gen 22:1 as 'God tested Abraham,' not 'tempted,' resolving the apparent verbal clash at the translation level, exactly analogous to other KJV-archaism issues addressed elsewhere in this project.

The consistent biblical doctrine across both testaments is that God sovereignly ordains and permits testing trials that reveal and strengthen genuine character and faith, never as solicitation to moral evil, which is contrary to his nature (Hab 1:13; Jas 1:13), while human sin originates from the corrupted human will's own desire (Jas 1:14) -- a theologically consistent picture once the lexical distinction is honored.