tarmit

This is a rare word for deceit, and where it turns up tells you a great deal. Five of its six appearances stand in the prophets and the Psalms, in settings where deception has hardened into a way of life: a city that grips its deceit and refuses to turn back (Jeremiah 8:5), people who wander from God's commands and whose scheming proves to be a lie (Psalm 119:118), a tongue that will no longer be found in the mouth of God's remnant (Zephaniah 3:13).

Its sharpest use is Jeremiah's attack on the false prophets. Twice he says they prophesy "the deceit of their own heart" (Jeremiah 14:14; 23:26). The vision is not something God gave them, and not even something they borrowed from another; it is what their own minds manufactured and then dressed up as a message from God. The deception runs in two directions at once, fooling the hearers and the prophets together.

The remaining verse, Judges 9:31, uses a slightly different form of the word and has been argued over for a long time. Zebul sends word to Abimelech, and the phrase either says he did it under cover of deception or names the place where Abimelech was staying.

Hebrew has a crowded vocabulary for this, and each member of it does different work: שֶׁקֶר names the false thing itself, the lie told or the oath broken; מִרְמָה is the common word for calculated fraud and cheating; רְמִיָּה leans toward slack unreliability, the bow that fails the archer. All three are far more frequent than this one. Built on the verb רָמָה, meaning to fool someone who had every reason to trust you, this word keeps that broken trust in view.