Like other stories in Genesis, this is a story I take seriously as having historical content but subject to correction of the details according to the discoveries of science. In particular I see this story as God’s solution to the problems which led to the flood, avoiding a repeat of such a necessity. By obstructing our efforts to build a one world culture, God employed some of the same evolutionary strategies of diversity and competition in the development of human society. Thus we would not find ourselves stuck in a monolithic social system dominated by evil, but could escape to other nations where better values could prove their greater strength.
That should be “question and possibly dismiss”. Just because we question doesn’t mean we have to dismiss everything. Only in your world does a question automatically mean dismissal.
I think I concur there. I see no reason to doubt that the Tower of Babel could at the very least be based on a real, historical event, even if we don’t know exactly where or when it took place.
Wookin, do you have anything informed and constructive to add to this conversation, or are you just here to point fingers and make accusations like the Pharisees?
Oh and it’s called “the Bible” by the way. Not “the bible”.
I never said that if we question something, then we have to dismiss it.
I said, if you question or dismissing one thing in the bible, then we have to question or dismiss everything in the bible
Are you seeing the irony?
Dear Matthew,
Thank you for this. Yes that is consistent with reattach I have quoted in the past that the first language is dated to about 8,500 BCE and all other languages came from this as your graphic demonstrates. The word Baba-el has turned out to be a much older word than Sumarian or Babylonian also. It dates back to the earliest language and means “God the Father”.
So trying to place the tower of Babel into the 16 the century BCE or earlier does not make sense on two grounds. 1) there were already many languages (as per your chart) and 2) the meaning of “building a tower to Heaven” for the enlightened sons of Noah did not mean a physical structure, but a connection with the Father, to whom they dedicated their life and their work. (As Jesus taught.)
@Wookin_Panub I know you believe you can’t dismiss anything in the Bible (notice the capital B) but the way you are wording this you are implying you can’t question anything also. I don’t agree that dismissing one thing requires that I dismiss everything. That is just the typical YEC slippery slope argument.
I would love to know how you dated the babel event. There are no remains to date via c14, ,there is only a story and they don’t yield dates except in the biases of men
Edited to add: I don’t really care when babel happened, as I said in my opening post I don’t think it necessarily affected all humanity. It just seems to me that if one is going to state a date one should state how he got that date.
One other thing, I know different aspects of language evolve at different rates. I am at md anderson for my treatment tomorrow so don’t have my database available to look up glottochronology, I just remember something along those lines.
Yeah I just meant that in the sense the early chapters of Genesis seem to take place sometime in the Bronze Age. It could be based upon:
Or just an etiological tale that became part of their cultural traditions/narrative.
I’m also kind of curious why you think that it is a historical event at all in anyway shape or form? Do you believe that God supernaturally confused the languages? And if that was the case you wouldn’t actually be able to reconstruct any kind of language phylogeny. They would appear spontaneously in the same sense that many Christians believe species were created. But it seems that what you have helped demonstrate is that God never did confuse a bunch of languages.
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Okay @Wookin_Panub, @mitchellmckain, and @Bill_II (and anybody else I may be forgetting here), this has probably gone far enough. You’ve made your point, Wookin, that the Bible and God are the only sources of truth you will acknowledge and you will stick to that no matter what anybody else says about it. We get it. And the rest of you, whether or not somebody uses the same caps conventions as you (or assigns it the same level of importance) is probably not something to keep pursuing here. Your concerns likewise, are duly noted. If any of the above is important enough to you to keep pursuing then start a new thread about it. [or private message each other to your heart’s content.] Though I suggest that once you’ve had a few rounds of “yes it is; no it isn’t; yes it is …”, you’ve probably exhausted any productive dialogue to be had.
Meanwhile, let’s let this thread be about its stated subject: the Babel event.
Enjoyed these.
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Thank you for this article.
I have one question. How did you come up with a divergence in languages occurring 200,000 years ago?
While I have two supporting questions:
If you follow English, from Old English to Middle English and on to Modern English, how drastic are the changes over how short a time span?
As for DNA variations being the key to the age of this divergence. How rapidly is DNA varying today? For I honestly believe that DNA is varying at a rate that would indicate that all humans were related to each other quite closely and this within the last four thousand years, at most.
I am not a scientist and I am not basing this on known data, I am basing this on what the Bible says, while I am wondering, can I be proven wrong?
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Thank you for replying to my question and this seems to support me in seeing the Tower of Babel as a real event. Now to when it happened I don’t really know, it could have been decades after the Flood or centuries after it. I don’t think pointing an idea as to when and where it took place is the main issue, I think the main issue is showing that a Babel like event took place thus causing the dispersion of people groups to go all around the world.
We were just discussing Pentecost, on our tour group here in Israel, and the guide brought up the idea of the Christian Pentecost event being sort of a reverse Babel, where the confusion of languages was reversed with gift of the Spirit and the speaking in tongues, and with bringing together the peoples of the world into Christianity.
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Dear Phil,
I see the tower of Baba’el (Father God) to be equal to Pentecost where the apostles were also connected to God. The fall of the tower (fall away from God) has happened many times in the history of the Word with the most notably being under the hand of Nebuchadnezzar.
Best Wishes, Shawn
@gbob, thanks for this discussion. I found something I’d like the opinion of from you and folks on the Forum:
According to this site babel | Etymology, origin and meaning of the name babel by etymonline, “Babel” comes from "bab “gate” + ilu “god”
“The element bab figures in place-names in the Middle East, such as Bab-el-Mandeb, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea.”
Gate of God–it sounds like the name was made to fit the story. Could this be like the archetypal Adam and Eve “ha-adamah” (as Scot McKnight puts it, “Dusty”) and “hava,” (living/life giving)?
Thanks.
I’m no good with etymology of languages that I don’t know–at least, famous folks have made mistakes before–Dan Brown with the “sangreal,” for example (he thought it was “sang-real,” when it actually comes from “san-grail” or something like that). Maybe a Hebrew scholar can comment.
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Dear Randy,
The definition of Baba’el that I am referring to is older than Hebrew, Sumarian and Babylonian. It was the Babylonian’s who brought in the confusion to the definition as you mentioned, calling it “gate of the gods” and the place that brought blood sacrifice to speak to the gods.
Mr Murphy, thank you. Can you post reference? I would be interested! I did not mean this to be contradicting; I realize there are other possible etymologies, but was interested in this one.
Either way, the “gate to the gods” and sacrifice would fit; it’s an interesting idea. John Walton’s point of view was that people tried to reestablish communion without God’s approval:
Ruhlen is an outlier. The following paper concludes that his procedure was flawed, and it also lists the many papers that disagree with the hypothesis of a “mother tongue”: Simple combinatorial considerations challenge Ruhlen’s mother tongue theory
There is currently a considerable literature detailing how criteria for determining both a semantic and a phonological match are almost entirely lacking, and there are numerous publications arguing against multilateral comparisons (Campbell, 1988, 1998a 1998b, 1999; Guy, 1995; Matisoff, 1990; McMahon and McMahon, 1995; Nichols, 1996; Rankin 1992, Ringe, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999; Trask, 1996).
Aitchison provides an excellent summary of the problems, which we discuss further below:
Chance resemblances are easy to find among different languages if only vague likenesses among shortish words are selected…sounds change radically over the centuries. Words which existed so long ago are unlikely to have survived in anything like their original state… Taboo is a further problem… the ‘lucky dip’ approach does not make any attempt to eliminate accidental correspondences, nor does it control for phonetic probability or tabo… meanings tend to be reduced to fairly simple, straightforward items, with a limited number of phonetic shapes. In these circumstances, chance similarities are likely to play a worryingly high role, and this ‘mass comparison’ method is unlikely to stand the test of time. (Aitchison, 1996: 173)
In more damning critiques, many linguists even consider that the Global Etymologies “cannot teach us anything about the origins of human languages” (Bender, 1993; Hock, 1993; McWhorter, 2001; Picard, 1998; Rosenfelder, 1999; Salmon1992a, 1992b, 1997). In fact any demonstration of a relationship between languages depends largely on finding words of similar phonological shape and roughly equivalent meaning in the languages considered. However it must be shown that the similarities observed could not have arisen by chance. Unfortunately Ruhlen does not take this precaution. We must therefore determine whether the observed similarities give us reason to reject the null hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that the similarities are merely a product of chance factors.
As Hurford puts it: “As linguists like Larry Trask, Don Ringe and Lyle Campbell, to name but a few, loudly insist, no good answer has yet been given to the charge that the correspondences noted by the long-range reconstructionists are not above the chance level. In other words, no effort has been put into rejecting the null hypothesis.” (Hurford, 2003).
CONCLUSION (following a lot of math by the authors …)
We have demonstrated, by simple combinatorial considerations, that the Global Etymologies proposed for a proto-sapiens language in The Origin of Languages can be explained by random chance: The null hypothesis cannot be rejected. With the methodology used, Ruhlen and Bengtson had a 100% chance of finding 27 Global Etymologies common to the 32 families and thereby of validating their mother tongue hypothesis. They used too few Global Etymologies, too many equivalent meanings, too many languages per family, and too many phonological equivalences for a too small number of different phonological shapes.
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Dear Randy,
Thank you for the link. What I find often with such commentators is that they generalize the too much and do not recognize that people were just a varied then as now. There were highly spiritual people and there were materialistic people looking for material rewards - pagans. The most documented case of this was was at the Oracles of Delphi where people came with offerings and demanded information from the gods. This is what the pagans have always done, but not the spiritual minded peoples. For the spiritually minded people, the Tower of Baba’el was how they saw raising their thoughts to the Father in Heaven. No building or sacred space has ever been needed to do this.
Best Wishes, Shawn