Catholic Commentary
Divine Judgment on the Deceitful Tongue
3What will be given to you, and what will be done more to you, you deceitful tongue?4Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.
Psalms 120:3–4 presents a rhetorical question condemning the deceitful tongue and divine punishment for it, echoing Hebrew covenant curse formulas where judgment matches the offense's magnitude. The psalmist invokes God as the Mighty Warrior whose sharp arrows of judgment penetrate the falsehood precisely and inescapably, addressing the tongue itself as if in a courtroom before the Divine Judge.
The deceitful tongue deserves arrows—not because God is vengeful, but because lies wound in ways no earthly court can reach, and only divine justice can truly reckon with slander's invisible damage.
Verse 3: "What will be given to you, and what will be done more to you?"
The verse opens with a rhetorical device rooted in the Hebrew legal tradition — a question that is its own indictment. The form echoes covenant curse formulae found in Deuteronomy (cf. Deut 28), where punishment is calibrated precisely to the offense. The doubled expression — "what will be given… and what will be done more" — is a Hebrew intensification pattern (mah yitēn lĕkā ûmah yōsîp lāk), stressing that the judgment will be not merely adequate but exceeding, overflowing, commensurate with the enormity of the sin. The Psalmist addresses the deceitful tongue directly, in the second person singular — a dramatic apostrophe that makes the lying tongue itself the accused standing before God's tribunal. This is not merely personal complaint; it is a formal laying of a charge before the Divine Judge.
The question implies that ordinary human punishment is insufficient. No earthly court can fully reach the tongue's treachery — its private slanders, its half-truths, its weaponized words. Only divine action can truly reckon with it. St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, notes that the Psalmist's question signals a kind of holy bewilderment: what human penalty could ever equal the damage wrought by a lying tongue that destroys reputations, fractures communities, and corrupts souls?
Verse 4: "Sharp arrows of the mighty"
The answer arrives with stark, military force: hitsê gibbôr shĕnûnîm — "the sharp arrows of a mighty man" (or warrior). The image is of arrows that do not merely wound but penetrate deeply, traveling far and striking with precision. The "mighty one" (gibbôr) frequently designates a divine warrior in the Hebrew Bible (cf. Ps 24:8; Is 9:6), and many patristic readers understood this as pointing to God Himself as the executor of judgment. The arrows are not scattered randomly but aimed — divine justice does not punish blindly but with the exact measure the deceit deserves.
Notably, the same word gibbôr is applied to the Messiah in Isaiah 9:6 (El Gibbôr, "Mighty God"), giving this verse a latent Christological resonance that the Fathers exploited: Christ, the Word of God, is Himself the arrow of truth that pierces falsehood. St. Jerome, commenting on related passages, identifies the sharp arrows of God with the penetrating power of divine truth — truth that exposes and wounds precisely because the lying tongue has made itself an enemy of reality.
The verse may also contain a second image (see v. 4b in some traditions, including coals of juniper/broom wood), though the cluster here focuses on the arrows. The arrow imagery for divine justice recurs throughout the Psalter (Ps 7:13; 38:2; 64:7), forming a consistent theological picture: God's judgment against falsehood is active, targeted, and inescapable.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Allegorically, the Catholic tradition reads the "deceitful tongue" as a figure of the devil — diabolos in Greek literally meaning "the slanderer" or "the accuser." The sharp arrows of the Mighty One then become the Word of God and the sacramental life of the Church, which alone can overcome diabolical deception. Morally, the passage calls every believer to examine the interior life of speech: do our words build up or destroy? Anagogically, the scene anticipates the Last Judgment, where every idle and deceptive word will be brought to account (cf. Mt 12:36).
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage on several levels. First, the Catechism of the Catholic Church dedicates significant attention to the sins of the tongue — detraction, calumny, lying, and perjury — precisely because speech participates in the image of God (imago Dei). "The human person has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is himself truthful" (CCC 2465). The deceitful tongue is therefore not merely a social failing but an ontological rebellion against the God who is Truth (Jn 14:6).
Second, the Church Fathers treat this Psalm as a Song of Ascents prayed by pilgrims approaching Jerusalem — and, in its spiritual sense, by souls ascending toward the heavenly Jerusalem. St. John Chrysostom saw the judgment on the lying tongue as inseparable from the Eighth Commandment: false witness is an assault on the social fabric that God's covenant orders. The sharp arrows of divine justice are thus an expression of God's covenantal fidelity — He defends the innocent who have been slandered.
Third, St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 110–113) develops a rigorous taxonomy of lying, identifying it as intrinsically evil because it corrupts the faculty of speech, which is ordered by nature toward truth. The divine punishment described here is, in Thomistic terms, the natural consequence working itself out in the moral order: lies destroy, and their destruction rebounds on the liar.
Finally, Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia (§106) and earlier in various homilies has warned that gossip and slander are "terrorism of the tongue" — a phrase that echoes the Psalmist's own military metaphor. The sharp arrows belong to God precisely because human society cannot fully defend itself against the tongue's invisible warfare.
In an age of social media, anonymous online commentary, and algorithmically amplified outrage, Psalm 120:3–4 speaks with unsettling directness. The deceitful tongue no longer requires proximity to wound — a single tweet, a forwarded message, a manipulated image can destroy a reputation across thousands of miles in seconds. The Psalmist's cry for divine justice against slander is not a primitive revenge fantasy; it is a realistic acknowledgment that human institutions — courts, platforms, cancel culture — cannot ultimately reach the full moral weight of a lie.
For the contemporary Catholic, this passage issues two concrete invitations. First, an examination of conscience about one's own speech: Do I forward rumors? Do I speak charitably about those I dislike, even in private? The Sacrament of Reconciliation is the concrete place where damage done by the tongue is named and healed. Second, a spiritual comfort for those who have been slandered: the sharp arrows of the Mighty One are not ours to fire. We are called to entrust our cause to God, who judges justly (1 Pet 2:23), and to resist the temptation to answer lies with lies. The Psalm models prayer as the right response to injustice — bringing the wound before God rather than inflaming it further.
Commentary