Psalms 52:2-4

52:2 Your tongue carries out your destructive plans; ¹ 

it is as effective as a sharp razor, O deceiver. ² 

52:3 You love evil more than good,

lies more than speaking the truth. ³  (Selah)

52:4 You love to use all the words that destroy, ⁴ 

and the tongue that deceives.

Psalms 57:4

57:4 I am surrounded by lions;

I lie down ⁵  among those who want to devour me; ⁶ 

men whose teeth are spears and arrows,

whose tongues are a sharp sword. ⁷ 

James 3:6

3:6 And the tongue is a fire! The tongue represents ⁸  the world of wrongdoing among the parts of our bodies. It ⁹  pollutes the entire body and sets fire to the course of human existence – and is set on fire by hell. ¹⁰ 

[52:2]  ¹ tn Heb “destruction your tongue devises.”

[52:2]  ² tn Heb “like a sharpened razor, doer of deceit.” The masculine participle עָשָׂה (’asah) is understood as a substantival vocative, addressed to the powerful man.

[52:3]  ³ tn Or “deceit more than speaking what is right.”

[52:4]  ⁴ tn Heb “you love all the words of swallowing.” Traditionally בַּלַּע (bala’) has been taken to mean “swallowing” in the sense of “devouring” or “destructive” (see BDB 118 s.v. בָּלַע). HALOT 135 s.v. III *בֶּלַע proposes a homonym here, meaning “confusion.” This would fit the immediate context nicely and provide a close parallel to the following line, which refers to deceptive words.

[57:4]  ⁵ tn The cohortative form אֶשְׁכְּבָה (’eshkÿvah, “I lie down”) is problematic, for it does not seem to carry one of the normal functions of the cohortative (resolve or request). One possibility is that the form here is a “pseudo-cohortative” used here in a gnomic sense (IBHS 576-77 §34.5.3b).

[57:4]  ⁶ tn The Hebrew verb לָהַט (lahat) is here understood as a hapax legomenon meaning “devour” (see HALOT 521 s.v. II להט), a homonym of the more common verb meaning “to burn.” A more traditional interpretation takes the verb from this latter root and translates, “those who are aflame” (see BDB 529 s.v.; cf. NASB “those who breathe forth fire”).

[57:4]  ⁷ tn Heb “my life, in the midst of lions, I lie down, devouring ones, sons of mankind, their teeth a spear and arrows and their tongue a sharp sword.” The syntax of the verse is difficult. Another option is to take “my life” with the preceding verse. For this to make sense, one must add a verb, perhaps “and may he deliver” (cf. the LXX), before the phrase. One might then translate, “May God send his loyal love and faithfulness and deliver my life.” If one does take “my life” with v. 4, then the parallelism of v. 5 is altered and one might translate: “in the midst of lions I lie down, [among] men who want to devour me, whose teeth….”

[3:6]  ⁸ tn Grk “makes itself,” “is made.”

[3:6]  ⁹ tn Because of the length and complexity of the Greek sentence, a new sentence was started here in the translation.

[3:6]  ¹⁰ sn The word translated hell is “Gehenna” (γέεννα, geenna), a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew words ge hinnom (“Valley of Hinnom”). This was the valley along the south side of Jerusalem. In OT times it was used for human sacrifices to the pagan god Molech (cf. Jer 7:31; 19:5-6; 32:35), and it came to be used as a place where human excrement and rubbish were disposed of and burned. In the intertestamental period, it came to be used symbolically as the place of divine punishment (cf. 1 En. 27:2, 90:26; 4 Ezra 7:36).