What Does Psalm 50:20 Mean?
You sit and speak against your brother, and you place it against your mother's son.
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 sittest and speakest against thy brother; thou slanderest thine own mother’s son.THE KEY
Slander is pictured as a gift: you “give a blemish” to the person the verse names as your own kin.
THE MEANING
When you speak against your brother, your words do more than express an opinion: they assign a blemish to someone bound to you as family. Calling him “thy mother’s son” brings the accusation into the closest kinship, where contempt is directed at someone named as your own.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that contemptuous speech is weightless because it is only speech; the verse pictures it as giving a mark of defect to your own kin.
THE ROOT
תִּתֶּן דֹּפִי
titten dofi
GROWS FROM
נ־ת־ן
to give, set, or place
“place it against” in this verse is titten dofi. The Hebrew phrase behind “slanderest” says that you “give a blemish.” The verb makes accusation an act of placing something on another person, and the verse names that person as your own kin.
ALSO GROWS
natan: to give, set, or place
נָתַן
This verb names the action in the phrase: the blemish is something given to the brother.
mattanah: gift
מַתָּנָה
This noun comes from the same root for giving; here, what is given is a blemish rather than a benefit.
THE PATTERN
Speech functions as an action that can place harm on another person, especially when the target is kin.
Death and life are in the hand of the tongue, and those who love it eat its fruit.With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who have been made according to the likeness of God.THE THREAD
Do not speak down against one another, brothers. The one who speaks down against a brother, or judges his brother, speaks down against the instruction and judges it. But if you judge it, you are not a doer of the instruction, but a judge.Both verses place speech against a brother inside a kinship bond. James joins speaking evil to judging; Psalm 50 sharpens the act as giving that brother a blemish, making the judgment something imposed through speech.
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