 Alright, in Mark 7, 1st 31, there's a strange account of Jesus healing the deaf and dumb man. Jesus puts his fingers in his ears, spits, touches his tongue, and then says, be opened. Could this Gentile have understood Jesus as performing the mouth opening ritual for idols? Could Jesus be enacting something similar, preparing this man as the idol image of God to receive God's indwelling spirit? I actually don't really think so. I don't think the opening of the mouth ceremony is in view for a couple of reasons. The ceremony itself, the ritual itself represented birth, you know, for an idol, again, it's the moment of animation. It also was a metaphor for rebirth, again, in a spiritual sense. Now in this passage specifically, we don't really have any commentary to the effect of this person becomes a believer now. It's just absent. You know, we don't have it. So anything you'd say about it in that direction is based on no data, you know, it's based on silence. For those interested in the opening of the mouth thing, again, to establish kind of how, you know, what it was for, I will post a couple of articles. There's two of them. And they're actually pretty long and really detailed, but it goes through the Egyptian ritual. And I personally, I used to have my students in the Egyptology class I taught here locally read both of these articles. They're really interesting because the opening of the mouth ritual mimics deliberately what you do with a newborn baby, in other words, how you clear its airways, like with your fingers and stuff like that, you know, what you do with the infant and even really what we do today, they would actually do those same motions and have ritual objects to substitute for fingers and whatnot, you know, they stick in the nose and all that. They would actually do that to idols to mimic, you know, what they would do to newborn humans. And the idea was this is the moment of birth. This is the moment of animation, again, for the idol and whatnot. So I'm going to throw those in the folder that newsletter subscribers get access to. They get the address, so to speak, to that folder. If you want to go up and read those two articles on the opening of the mouth, that's how you'd find them in the folder. You'd search for them that way. If you're into this kind of stuff, I think you'd find them really interesting. Let's go back to Mark Seven. There is a parallel to this in Matthew 15, but that one's even less detail. It's even more general. Both of the episodes in Matthew and Mark respectively precede the feeding of the 4,000. So again, we know that there's a parallel here, even without much detail. To be honest with you, there's really not much written specifically on this question like you get with the spitting of the dirt and making clay. We've done an episode. It was either an episode or there was an Q&A on that about how there's a dead sea scroll that ties Jesus spitting and the dirt and making clay and healing someone that way. It ties that to Jewish tradition about how God made man in the creation narrative. If you didn't listen to that, the phrase that man is created from the dust of the ground, there was a strong tradition that what was meant there was that God spitting the dirt made clay and then made the man. And the reason they thought that was because of Jeremiah, the whole potter and clay description of how God made human beings. So you don't really have though for this, you don't have any clay in view. So it doesn't really apply to this passage without the clay. The clay is kind of important because of the Genesis tie-in and the potter and the clay tie-in. This is something sort of related but different. And to be honest with you, you're not going to find much in terms of commentaries and journal articles on this. The people who comment on it, they get lost in the geography. There's this big huge debate of, does Mark understand the geography of Canaan in his day? And it's just a weird itinerary. It has Jesus skipping around all here and there. They get lost in the details about the geography. They get lost in the term Fafa in the verse. Is that Aramaic or Hebrew? This is the kind of thing scholars just get fixated on. So I'll be honest with you, you're not going to find very much that's terribly helpful even in a normally good commentary. And so far, we don't have any specific parallels to that. Now, I think lastly, I would say even though there's no clay here, you still do have spit. Okay, so if you went back and listened to that earlier episode, spit did have something to do with the act of creation. So I suppose that you could have had somebody think when they read this passage, somebody in the first century might think of a creator. But I'll be honest with you. I think it's a stretch because of the absence of the clay element. Again, the clay was important because of the Potter and clay metaphor for that we get in Jeremiah. So that's probably not much help. But again, I don't think it's the opening of the mouth ritual. I don't think we have the real.