Stammering

Stammering appears in scripture in two registers: as a personal speech impediment that complicates a calling, and as a figure for foreign speech that the hearer cannot make out.

Moses, Slow of Mouth

When Yahweh commissions Moses at the burning bush, Moses pleads inadequacy: "And Moses said to Yahweh, Oh, Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before, nor since you have spoken to your slave; for I am slow of mouth, and slow of tongue" (Ex 4:10). The complaint is concrete — slowness of mouth and slowness of tongue — and it is offered as grounds for refusal. The calling proceeds anyway, with Aaron supplied as the speaker for Moses' words.

The Tongue Loosed in the Age to Come

Isaiah's vision of restored Judah pictures the impediments lifted. In the coming order, "the heart of the rash will understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers will be ready to speak plainly" (Isa 32:4). Stammering belongs to the disordered present; clear speech belongs to the future Yahweh is bringing.

Foreign Tongues as Stammering

The category also reaches outward, to speech that is unintelligible because it is foreign. Promising deliverance from Assyrian threat, Isaiah says of the besieging power: "You will not see the fierce people, a people of a deep speech that you can't comprehend, of a strange tongue that you can't understand" (Isa 33:19). The "deep speech" of the foreign army is, from the listener's side, indistinguishable from the broken speech of a stammerer — language without traction, sound that cannot be turned into meaning.