To be dumb, or unable to speak, as in Exodus 4:11 and Isaiah 35:6, signifies people who cannot confess the Lord because they are ignorant of the truth. (Arcana Coelestia 6988, Apocalypse Explained 455)

In Mark 9:25, this signifies one who does not want to perceive and understand truth. (Apocalypse Explained 556)

575. Gnashing of teeth, however, is the continual dispute and combat of falsities with each other, consequently of those who are in falsities, joined with contempt of others, with enmity, mockery, ridicule, blaspheming; and these evils burst forth into lacerations of various kinds, since everyone fights for his own falsity and calls it truth. These disputes and combats are heard outside these hells like the gnashings of teeth; and are also turned into guashings of teeth when truths from heaven inflow hither. In these hells are all who have acknowledged nature and have denied the Divine. In the deeper of these hells are those who have confirmed themselves in such denials. Because such are unable to receive anything of light from heaven, and are thus unable to see anything inwardly in themselves, they are for the most part corporeal sensual spirits, who believe nothing except what they see with their eyes and touch with their hands. Therefore all the fallacies of the senses are true to them; and it is from these that they dispute. This is why their contentions are heard as gnashings of teeth; for in the spiritual world all falsities give a grating sound, and the teeth correspond to the outermost things in nature and to the outermost things with man, which are corporeal sensual. ¹ (That there is gnashing of teeth in the hells may be seen in Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28.)

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