What Does Psalm 10:7 Mean?
His mouth is full of cursing, deceit, and oppression; under his tongue are toil and emptiness.
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
His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his tongue is mischief and vanity.THE KEY
The Hebrew consonants connect the tongue with slander, making speech itself the hiding place of harm.
THE MEANING
Cursing, deceit, and fraud fill the mouth; mischief and vanity lie beneath the tongue. The verse shows harm carried both openly and beneath speech’s surface, locating its danger in words themselves.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that injury begins only when words become physical action: here, the mouth and tongue already carry harm.
THE ROOT
לְשׁוֹנוֹ
leshono
GROWS FROM
ל-ש-ן
Tongue and speech, with a related verb for slander.
This consonant family links the tongue with slander, collapsing the distance between the organ and a way it is used. “Under his tongue” points to harm lodged within speech itself.
ALSO GROWS
lashon: Tongue; language.
לָשׁוֹן
This is the word in the verse: the tongue is also the instrument of language that carries its cursing and deceit.
lashan: To slander or speak maliciously.
לָשַׁן
Its shared consonants connect the tongue directly with speech used to harm.
עָמָל
ʿamal
GROWS FROM
ע-מ-ל
Toil, labor, hardship, or trouble.
The KJV’s “mischief” can sound like petty trouble, while עָמָל carries the weight of toil and hardship. The verse places that burden beneath the tongue, inside the harm speech carries.
ALSO GROWS
ʿāmal: To toil or labor.
עָמַל
The verb shows the root’s basic sense of strenuous effort beneath the verse’s word for mischief.
ʿāmāl: Toil, hardship, trouble.
עָמָל
This noun appears in the verse, revealing trouble with the weight of painful labor.
THE PATTERN
Speech can carry concealed harm beneath its familiar or outwardly harmless surface.
The words of his mouth are smoother than butter, but war is in his heart. His words are softer than oil, yet they are opened swords.Death and life are in the hand of the tongue, and those who love it eat its fruit.But the tongue no one is able to tame; it is an evil that will not stand still, full of death-bearing venom.THE THREAD
They whet their tongues like a serpent, and the venom of adders is under their lips. Selah.“Tongues” here comes from the same Hebrew word, לָשׁוֹן (lashon), as the tongue in Psalm 10:7. Psalm 140 makes the concealed danger vivid as poison under the lips, extending the image of harm hidden within speech.
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