What Does Proverbs 4:24 Mean?
Remove from you the crookedness of the mouth, and put far from you twisted lips.
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
Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee.THE KEY
The verse gives crooked speech two motions at once: it bends out of line and turns aside from the straight path.
THE MEANING
Your words carry the shape of your direction: they bend out of line or turn aside as they cross your lips. The verse names this distortion as something removable and distanced, not as the whole of who you are. Speech is the threshold where crookedness becomes audible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that speech is only a surface behavior, separate from the direction of your life; this verse names crookedness and turning aside as shapes words can carry.
THE ROOT
עִקְּשׁוּת
ʿiqqĕšût
GROWS FROM
עקש
ʿ-q-sh
To bend, twist, or make crooked.
“Froward” translates עִקְּשׁוּת (ʿiqqĕšût), crookedness, from עקש (ʿ-q-sh), to bend or twist. The image is spatial: the mouth’s speech can be bent out of line, a physical shape English can hide beneath an abstract label for difficult behavior.
ALSO GROWS
ʿiqqēš: Crooked, perverse.
עִקֵּשׁ
This adjective makes the same root’s bent shape visible in the word used for crooked ways elsewhere in Proverbs.
ʿiqqĕšût: Crookedness, perversity.
עִקְּשׁוּת
This noun names the distortion itself, showing that the verse describes the shape speech takes, not only a speaker’s temperament.
לָזוּת
lāzût
GROWS FROM
לוז
l-w-z
To turn aside; to be perverse or deviate.
“twisted lips” in this verse is lāzût. “Perverse” is לָזוּת (lāzût), perversity or deviation, from לוז (l-w-z), to turn aside. This adds a second motion to crookedness: the lips do not only bend; their speech veers away.
ALSO GROWS
lāzût: Perversity, deviation.
לָזוּת
This noun in the verse describes speech as something that can depart from its proper direction.
nālôz: Perverse, devious.
נָלוֹז
This related form carries the same idea of turning aside, echoing the verse’s image of words that veer away.
THE PATTERN
Words carry the direction of the inner life across the mouth’s boundary, so scripture treats speech as an expression of what fills the heart.
Guard your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.You offspring of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.Let no rotten word come out of your mouth, but whatever is good for building up where there is need, that it may give favor to those who hear.THE THREAD
Whose ways are crooked, and they turn aside in their tracks.The same two word families that name crookedness and perversity here describe crooked ways and froward paths there. The shared roots join speech and movement: the distortion at the lips is the same pattern scripture also locates in a person’s direction.
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