What Does Deuteronomy 5:20 Mean?
Nor shall you bear false witness against your neighbor.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.THE KEY
The Hebrew verb translated “bear” means “answer,” so false testimony is an empty response placed into another person’s case.
THE MEANING
What you say about another person is an answer that helps shape how they are seen. Here, false testimony is named as emptiness: words can sound like evidence while carrying no truth. The neighbor remains a companion within that speech, not a faceless target.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie this verse dissolves is that a false account is harmless when it is only speech. It treats testimony as consequential speech against a person.
THE ROOT
תַּעֲנֶה
taʿaneh
GROWS FROM
ענה
ענה (ʿ-n-h; ʿanah) means to answer or respond; here the verb carries the sense of answering in the matter of another.
“bear witness” in this verse is taʿaneh. The verb translated “bear” is built from the root for answering. Testimony is framed as a response about another person, making false witness an answer turned against the neighbor.
ALSO GROWS
ʿanah: answered, responded
עָנָה
This form of the same root makes the answer-sense plain in Deuteronomy’s language about testimony.
maʿaneh: answer, response
מַעֲנֶה
This noun preserves the same idea of a reply, showing the response embedded in “bear witness.”
שָׁוְא
shav
GROWS FROM
שוא
שוא (shav) means emptiness, worthlessness, or falsehood.
The verse calls the witness שָׁוְא: empty or false. The same word appears in “in vain,” linking false testimony to speech emptied of truth.
ALSO GROWS
shav: falsehood, emptiness, worthlessness
שָׁוְא
This is the word describing the testimony in the verse.
lashav: in vain, for nothing
לַשָּׁוְא
This form uses the same word in the command against taking the LORD’s name “in vain,” tying empty speech about a neighbor to an empty invocation of a name.
THE PATTERN
Speech about another person shapes shared life, so truthful witness helps keep the neighbor’s standing intact.
You shall not lift up a false report; do not set your hand with the wicked to be a witness of violence.These are the things you shall do. Speak each man the truth to his neighbor, and judge the judgment of truth and wholeness in your gates.Therefore, taking off lying, speak truth, each one with his neighbor, for we are limbs of one another.THE THREAD
And the judges shall search well; and, behold, if the witness is a witness of lies, and has answered a lie against his brother;The same Hebrew root ענה appears in “hath testified falsely,” where testimony is again described through the language of answering. The later verse makes explicit what this command compresses: an answer about another person can become a false witness against them.
Read the SDV Bible.
Every verse has a Deep Dive in the app.
The iPhone Bible app with the Selah Decoded Version.
Does something in this reading look wrong? Tell us