What Does Proverbs 18:21 Mean?
Death and life are in the hand of the tongue, and those who love it eat its fruit.
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
Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.THE KEY
The tongue’s words do not merely shape life or death, they grow into fruit that those who love its power must eat.
THE MEANING
Your words can bring life or death into reach. What your speech produces returns as something you and others live with; the fruit of the tongue is also food for those who love it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the belief that words are weightless once spoken: speech produces consequences that come back to be lived.
THE ROOT
פְּרִי
peri
GROWS FROM
פרה
p-r-h
To bear fruit, become fruitful.
The fruit here is something produced by the tongue and then eaten by those who love it. The image makes speech’s outcome tangible: what the tongue yields becomes what its lovers take in.
ALSO GROWS
parah: To produce fruit or become fruitful.
פָּרָה
This verbal branch makes the fruit an outcome of growth, illuminating how speech yields something that can be received.
peri: The produce or result of growth.
פְּרִי
This is the verse’s word for what the tongue produces and its lovers consume.
לָשׁוֹן
lashon
GROWS FROM
לשן
l-sh-n
Tongue; the related verb carries the sense of slandering or speaking ill.
The word holds the physical tongue and language together, joining the speaking faculty with what it says. A related verb, לָשַׁן (lashan), means to slander, one destructive branch of the tongue’s capacity; the verse also names its power to bring life.
ALSO GROWS
leshonot: Plural forms of tongue or language.
לְשׁוֹנוֹת
This branch shows that lashon can name both the bodily organ and the languages through which people speak.
lashan: To speak ill of someone.
לָשַׁן
This related verb reveals one way the tongue’s words can carry death.
יֹאכַל
yochal
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
To eat, consume.
“eat” in this verse is yochal. The verse uses the concrete act of eating for taking in the tongue’s fruit. Its consequence is not left outside the person who loves the tongue: that person consumes what it yields.
ALSO GROWS
akhal: To eat or consume.
אָכַל
This is the basic action carried by the verse’s verb.
ma’akhal: Something prepared or available to eat.
מַאֲכָל
This branch makes the image of consuming the tongue’s fruit concrete: its result becomes food.
THE PATTERN
Words produce outcomes that return as life, harm, or judgment for those who speak and prize them.
There is one who blurts like the piercings of a sword, but the tongue of the wise is healing.For by your words you will be made aligned, and by your words you will be condemned.And the tongue is fire, a world of crookedness. It is set among our limbs, staining the whole body and setting the wheel of becoming ablaze, and it is lit by Gehenna.THE THREAD
From the fruit of his mouth a man eats good; the living soul of the treacherous eats violence.This verse repeats the same picture of fruit from the mouth being eaten. It opens Proverbs 18:21 further: the tongue’s yield becomes something its lovers consume, whether good or destructive.
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