Speech?

December 25th, 2021| Topic: RaMbLeS | 1

Egyptian mummies are strange and mysterious and intriguing.

[And BTW, we have one here in Louisville, in the Boyce Library of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that dates back to 700 BC (the mummy, not the seminary). More about that another time.]

A few weeks ago, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced that two ancient mummies, one male, one female—unearthed at a site in Mimya, Egypt, as part of an excavation under the auspices of the University of Barcelona—had, if you can believe it, golden tongues!

[Another gold-tongued one was found earlier this year in Alexandria, Egypt.]

Not solid, though. Just gold foil. But still, pretty rare, and quite unusual.

But why gold tongues to talk to God? Perhaps it was to restore the function of the tongue in the afterlife. But then, why did only tongues get the golden treatment? What about other organs?

Who knows?

But there is one question that must have perplexed those ancients: What language does one use to speak to deity? Egyptian language itself had gone through multiple periods of transition that were accompanied by different scripts and forms. And they were probably aware of a variety of languages across their known world, too. So what do you do in the afterlife? How do you communicate with the gods deciding your fate?

The Egyptians probably figured that humans needed a little help. What better way to talk to a god than with a golden tongue?

Apparently, golden tongues were meant to enable the deceased to speak to the god Osiris in the afterlife. They were, in our modern parlance, a kind of prosthetic or technological device that could enable the wearer to be understood by the gods. In ancient Egyptian theories of the afterlife, in which the righteousness of the deceased was assessed by the gods after death, the ability to converse with one’s judges would have been particularly important. You acted as your own attorney, with those gold tongues.

As the press report continued:

The golden tongues are technological enhancements that allowed deceased people to speak the divine language. Not only would this modification assist them when they came to judgment before Osiris, the god of the dead, it would allow them to participate in postmortem society more broadly.”

OK.

The fact is, God (and not “gods”) hears us. Dead or alive. In English or in Malayalam (my mother tongue) or in any language.

Come, hear, and I will recount, all who fear God,
what He has done for my soul.
To Him with my mouth I cried,
and extolled [Him] on my tongue.
If I regard harm in my heart,
the Lord will not hear.
But truly God heard;
He attended to the voice of my prayer.
Blessed be God,
who has not turned aside my prayer
or His lovingkindness from me.
Psalm 66:17–20

The eyes of Yahweh are toward the righteous,
and His ears to their cry for help.
The face of Yahweh is against those who do evil,
to cut off their memory from the earth.
They wail, and Yahweh hears,
and from all their distresses He rescues them.
Yahweh is near to the brokenhearted,
and those crushed in spirit He delivers.
Psalm 34:15–20

He hears. And he does so even if we have no language!

The Spirit also helps our weakness;
for we do not know how to pray as we should,
but the Spirit Himself intercedes
with groanings too deep for words.
Romans 8:26

No gold needed. No golden tongues needed. Indeed, no tongues needed at all!

God hears. One way or another!

SOURCE:
Yahoo!