What Does Psalm 120:3 Mean?
What will be given to you, and what more will be added to you, O tongue that shoots?
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
What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?THE KEY
The deceitful tongue is asked what can answer it, and the next verse answers with wounds that pierce and heat that stays.
THE MEANING
The question brings the deceitful tongue face to face with what its speech sets in motion. Deception pierces and leaves a burn that does not vanish with the spoken word. The verse speaks now wherever false speech is treated as harmless.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that deceptive words disappear once spoken: their harm can remain sharp and burning.
THE ROOT
לָשׁוֹן רְמִיָּה
lashon remiyyah
GROWS FROM
רמה
r-m-h
To deceive or deal treacherously.
“tongue that shoots” in this verse is lashon remiyyah. The word for “false” carries the sense of treachery, not merely a statement that is inaccurate. The root makes the tongue’s danger relational: speech becomes a betrayal, which the next verse renders as piercing arrows and enduring coals.
ALSO GROWS
ramah: To deceive or deal treacherously.
רָמָה
The verb shows that the tongue’s falseness is an act of betrayal, not just an error of fact.
mirmah: Deceit or guile.
מִרְמָה
This related noun names the treachery carried by the speech and clarifies why the verse asks what consequence can answer it.
THE PATTERN
Deceptive speech carries the force of a weapon or fire: it pierces, spreads, and leaves lasting harm.
Sharpened arrows of the mighty, with coals of broom.There is one who blurts like the piercings of a sword, but the tongue of the wise is healing.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
Sharpened arrows of the mighty, with coals of broom.The next verse answers the question in Psalm 120:3 by turning consequence into two images: arrows that pierce and coals that keep burning. The sequence makes the deceitful tongue’s harm tangible and lasting.
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