What Does Psalm 55:9 Mean?
Swallow, O Lord, and split their tongues, for I have seen violence and strife in the city.
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
Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues: for I have seen violence and strife in the city.THE KEY
The psalm asks God to swallow the agents of violence and split the speech that lets them act together.
THE MEANING
You see violence and strife in the city, and this verse gives voice to a prayer for God to engulf those causing it and fracture their shared speech. Its force is severe: the harm is named directly, and the requested answer is both removal and disruption.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that every shared voice deserves preservation: speech can bind people together around violence, and its division can interrupt their coordination.
THE ROOT
פַלַּג
pallag
GROWS FROM
פלג
p-l-g
to split or divide
The same root marks the earth as divided in the naming of Peleg. So the requested split reaches beyond individual speech toward a fracture in shared human life.
ALSO GROWS
niflegah: was divided
נִפְלְגָה
Genesis 10:25 uses this form for the earth’s division in Peleg’s days, linking divided tongues with a wider division of human life.
Peleg: a name linked to division
פֶּלֶג
Genesis 10:25 connects Peleg’s name to the earth being divided, keeping the root’s sense audible in the name itself.
בַלַּע
ballaʿ
GROWS FROM
בלע
b-l-ʿ
to swallow or engulf
“Swallow” in this verse is ballaʿ. The verb translated as destroy carries the image of swallowing whole. It makes the prayer’s demand for the violent actors’ removal forceful and concrete.
ALSO GROWS
billaʿ: swallow up
בִּלַּע
Isaiah 25:8 uses this root for death being swallowed up, showing its image of total engulfing.
tivlaʿemo: swallow them up
תִּבְלָעֵמוֹ
Exodus 15:12 uses the root when the earth swallows them; here it gives destroy the image of being engulfed.
THE PATTERN
Words can organize communal action, and disrupting their shared force can change what a community is able to do.
Come, let us go down, and there mix up their lip, so that they may not hear one another's lip and respond.A man of twistings sends out strife, and a whisperer splits apart the closest friends.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
To Eber were born two sons; the name of the one was Peleg, the splitting, for in his days the earth was split; and the name of his brother was Joktan.The verb translated divided comes from the same root as the psalm’s divide. That shared root makes the plea echo a division on the scale of the earth itself, carrying the line beyond a break in conversation.
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