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Catholic Commentary
Petition Against Deceitful Speech
3May Yahweh cut off all flattering lips,4who have said, “With our tongue we will prevail.
In these two verses, the psalmist calls upon God to silence the proud and deceitful speakers who trust in the power of their own words rather than in divine truth. Verse 3 is a petition for divine intervention against flattery and falsehood, while verse 4 reveals the root sin: a godless self-sufficiency expressed through language. Together, they diagnose a spiritual disorder in which the human tongue attempts to seize the sovereignty that belongs to God alone.
The psalmist exposes a primal sin: using words as a weapon to seize power that belongs to God alone.
In the spiritual (anagogical) sense, the petition "may Yahweh cut off all flattering lips" anticipates the eschatological judgment of the Word made flesh — the one whose word is a two-edged sword (Heb 4:12), by which all false speech will ultimately be silenced.
Catholic tradition reads Psalm 12 as a meditation on the moral order of language, an order that is theological before it is ethical. The Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes considerable attention to the eighth commandment's prohibition of false witness, identifying lying as "the most direct offense against the truth" and linking it to a violation of the dignity of the person (CCC 2483–2484). But Psalm 12:3–4 goes further: it locates the sin of deceitful speech not merely in social harm but in a metaphysical usurpation — the attempt to replace God's Word with the creature's word as the ground of reality.
St. Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, meditates on this passage as a description of the City of Man, characterized by self-love "to the contempt of God," versus the City of God, characterized by love of God "to the contempt of self." The boast "our tongue shall make us mighty" is, for Augustine, the defining grammar of earthly pride — the libido dominandi expressed in speech.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on the related passage in James 3, identifies the uncontrolled tongue as the organ through which the disorder of original sin most visibly operates in social life. The Church Fathers consistently saw the redemption of speech — its reordering under the Logos — as a central work of Christian sanctification.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (§§2–3), grounds all authentic communication in participation in the divine Logos, the Word who "is truth." Flattery and boastful speech are thus not merely social failures but theological ones: they represent a severance from the Logos who is the source and norm of all true words. The petition of Psalm 12:3 becomes, in this light, a prayer for the restoration of the Logos's sovereignty over human language.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with precisely the culture Psalm 12 diagnoses. Social media platforms are engineered to reward flattery and rhetorical dominance — the digital equivalent of "our tongue shall make us mighty." Political discourse, advertising, and even some forms of religious communication run on smoothly crafted messages designed to manipulate rather than illuminate.
For the Catholic today, this passage offers a concrete examination of conscience: Do I use words to serve truth or to manage impressions? Do I offer flattery where I should offer honest fraternal correction (Matt 18:15)? Do I trust in my rhetorical skill — in committee rooms, in arguments, on social media — more than in the simple witness of truth?
Practically, praying this psalm regularly can be an act of conscious surrender of the tongue to God. Catholics might also invoke this passage before difficult conversations, asking God to cut off their own "smooth speech" before asking Him to cut off others'. The petition is not merely about enemies; it is a mirror. The discipline of silence in the tradition — in lectio divina, in the Liturgy of the Hours, in Eucharistic adoration — is the structural Catholic answer to the tyranny of the boastful tongue: learning to let God's Word speak first.
Commentary
Verse 3 — "May Yahweh cut off all flattering lips"
The Hebrew verb yakhret ("cut off") is forceful and irreversible, used elsewhere for the extermination of enemies and the removal of the wicked from the covenant community (cf. Prov 2:22; Ps 37:9). This is not a petty wish for social relief but a covenantal imprecation — a formal appeal to God as the sovereign guarantor of justice. The psalmist is not acting in personal vengeance; he channels his cry through the divine name Yahweh, acknowledging that the rectification of human speech belongs to God alone.
"Flattering lips" (sifté khalaqot) renders the Hebrew root khalaq, meaning "smooth" or "slippery." The image is of speech that glides past the conscience without friction — words polished to please rather than to reveal truth. Pairing "flattering lips" with "a tongue that speaks great things" in the same breath (implied in the transition to v. 4) shows that the Psalmist sees these two vices as a dyad: flattery operates downward toward those one seeks to manipulate, while boastful speech operates outward as a declaration of personal autonomy. Both are distortions of the communicative gift God gave humanity at creation.
The plural ("all flattering lips") signals that this is not a complaint against one adversary but a structural lament about a culture saturated with dishonesty — a society in which falsehood has become the governing grammar. This universalizing note gives the petition its prophetic weight.
Verse 4 — "Who have said, 'With our tongue we will prevail'"
The original Hebrew is more vivid: ligvir comes from gabar, meaning "to be mighty" or "to overcome." The boast is not merely rhetorical confidence; it is a claim to power — "Our tongue shall make us mighty." Speech is here unmasked as a bid for dominion. The wicked are not merely lying; they are constructing an alternative world in which words, rather than God, determine outcomes.
The second half of verse 4 ("Our lips are our own; who is master over us?" — included in many versifications of this cluster) amplifies this: the lips are claimed as private property, subject to no lordship. This is, at its core, the logic of original sin repeated in the register of language: the creature declaring independence from the Creator. The tongue becomes an idol, a source of autonomous power.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Typologically, the "smooth lips" of the deceivers in Psalm 12 prefigure the false prophets condemned throughout the Old Testament (Jer 23; Ezek 13) and, in the New Testament, the scribes and Pharisees whose "whitewashed" speech Jesus denounces (Matt 23:27–28). The Fathers saw in the boastful tongue of Psalm 12:4 a figure of Satan himself, the "father of lies" (John 8:44), who in the Garden used the instrument of speech to undermine God's word.