What Does Psalm 50:19 Mean?
You send your mouth into evil, and your tongue binds deceit.
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
Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frameth deceit.THE KEY
The mouth is sent forth carrying evil, while the tongue fastens deceit to what it says.
THE MEANING
Your speech leaves you as something sent into the world, and your tongue can fasten deception to it. This verse names a present condition: harmful words do not merely pass through; they travel and make falsehood cling.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that words disappear as soon as they are spoken: what leaves the mouth can carry harm and cause deceit to hold.
THE ROOT
שָׁלַחְתָּ
shalachta
GROWS FROM
שָׁלַח
shalach
Send forth, release, let go.
“send” in this verse is shalachta. The verb translated “givest” carries the image of sending the mouth forth into evil. The word holds release and direction together: speech leaves the speaker and enters the world.
ALSO GROWS
shilleḥah: Sent away or released.
שִׁלְּחָהּ
This form shows the root’s sense of sending out or letting go; here the mouth is what gets sent forth.
Shiloach: A water channel called “Sent.”
שִׁלֹחַ
The name connects sending with waters that move outward; in this verse, the mouth also sends something outward, though it carries evil.
תַּצְמִיד
tatsmid
GROWS FROM
צָמַד
tsamad
Join, fasten, cling.
“binds” in this verse is tatsmid. The Hebrew verb pictures the tongue fastening deceit to what is said. English “frames” can sound like mere composition, while this root adds the force of attachment: the falsehood is made to cling.
ALSO GROWS
tsemed: A joined pair; also a yoke of animals.
צֶמֶד
The image of things joined together illuminates how the tongue couples deceit to speech.
tsamad: To attach or fasten together.
צָמַד
This is the root’s joining action: deceit is not only spoken but attached to the tongue’s words.
THE PATTERN
Speech can release harm from the mouth and make it take hold in a life.
Guard your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit.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
And afterward Moses and Aaron went in and told the Great House, Thus says the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may dance a feast to me in the wilderness.The verb behind “givest” is שָׁלַח (shalach, “send or release”), the same root in the command “Let my people go.” The shared word makes the mouth a sending point: speech can release people from constraint, or release harm into the world.
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