lashon

Most often the word names the physical tongue, the muscle used for tasting, licking, and above all speaking. But Hebrew rarely stops at the body part. Because the tongue is what shapes words, it stands in again and again for the act and the moral quality of speech: a person IS their tongue. So the same word that means the thing in your mouth means the lying you do, the comfort you give, the praise you sing.

This is why the tongue gets such moral weight, especially in Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. It can be sharpened like a sword or a razor, it drips poison or honey, it heals or it destroys. The point is never anatomy; it is that words have power, and the tongue is where that power lives.

When the text wants the plain organ (a thirsty tongue cleaving to the mouth, a dog's tongue, Leviathan's tongue), it is the same word, simply used literally. Reader and writer move between the body part and the speech it makes without any change of vocabulary, because in this way of thinking they are one thing.

A second, clearly separate use names not the organ but the system of words a people speaks, what we call a language or a dialect. From there it slides easily into naming the people themselves: a foreign tongue means a foreign nation whose speech you cannot understand.

This is concentrated in the table of nations, where humanity is sorted by family, land, and tongue, and in prophetic visions of all peoples streaming together. It is the natural ancestor of the New Testament phrase every tribe and tongue. Here the word is best rendered language, not tongue in the bodily sense, even though English keeps the same overlap.

The third use is the everyday picture-language any speaker reaches for: a long, narrow, protruding shape gets called a tongue. The Bible uses it three ways.

It names a wedge or bar of gold, a thin tapered ingot. It names an inlet or bay of the sea, the narrow tongue of water that reaches into the land, so the border of the Salt Sea is traced by its tongue. And it names a tongue of fire, the licking shape of a flame as it eats stubble. These are not poetry so much as ordinary naming, the same instinct that gives English a tongue of land or a tongue of flame.