GeoCreationism.com

The Tower of Babel

 ¹ Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

 ³ They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

 ⁵ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ⁶ The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

 ⁸ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. 

The Tower of Babel is the last story in the Bible that people (particularly non-Judaeo-Christian) tend to interpret as more allegory than history. I don’t mean that people accept all of the miracles heretofore as history per se (though they are), but that any subsequent miracles are typically assumed to be some actual physical event that the Hebrews or Jews of the time misinterpreted as miracles.

As I have researched Genesis 10 and the Table of Nations (i.e., the descendants of Noah and his sons after the Flood), it has forced me to consider the Tower of Babel story from several perspectives, and I have found it fascinating. Based on the history with which it aligns, I am convinced that it happened.

Development of Language

I first seriously considered The Tower of Babel as an event that must have happened shortly after the development of language. However since then, I have studied the history of the region of the Middle East, and have discovered that it was written language that accompanied the most dramatic changes after the flood… and when did written language start? According to Wikipedia, “The first pure alphabets … emerged around 1800 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had a slight possibility of being inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for upwards of a millennium.” In other words, they began around 2800, right at my date for the flood, which I believe was 2807 BC.

The confusion over development of spoken word over written is really confusion over how many languages were being spoken in the region in and around Shinar at the time of the Tower. Well, it would seem that even with the spoken language, human society was stagnating until around 2900 BC. Then, we see a sudden gap in the archaeological evidence… not a complete gap, but a surprising lack of events and genealogy for the period 2900BC-2800BC, approximately. This is almost universal throughout the Middle East, and is easily explained if the Flood occurred in 2807 BC. The fact that these areas survived to the extent they did suggests that the region was not completely devastated, but many aspects of it were seriously impacted, hence leaving us with scant evidence for the prior 100 years. Then, shortly after the flood, society not only began to grow again, but it flourished.

It seems that after the flood, there was a dominant language for the region, and other secondary languages here and there. It was a great opportunity to conquer, and as they did, conquerors usually bring their language with them. The Semitic languages (which led to Hebrew) date to around 3700BC or sooner, so that appears to be a surviving language of the time, but it was not a conquering one. According to tradition it survived the conquering that occurred after the Tower because Eber and his people refused to participate in its building. Though they were scattered like everyone else, but were allowed to keep their language (though Hebrew literature itself does not appear in anything that dates before 1,000 BC). The rest of the peoples involved in the Tower however were confused by suddenly speaking new and different languages (not Hebrew). They were scattered and they regrouped, while the strongest among each group would seem have become leaders, and the most militaristic of those leaders started making plays to conquer each other. At some point, the two most prominent languages left were Sumerian and Akkadian. According to Wikipedia…

During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC (the exact dating being a matter of debate).

- - -

Akkadian was first attested in Sumerian texts in proper names from around 2800 BCE.

- - -

Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) since at least the 4th millennium BC.

My guess is that Sumerian was a pre-existent language, much as Hebrew was. Noah’s descendants (at least Eber) spoke Hebrew. The societies they live among spoke Sumerian. After the Tower of Babel, Eber’s people were allowed to leave intact, peacefully. The rest of the people speaking Sumerian suddenly spoke multiple languages among each other, one of them being Akkadian. After the scattering, Sumerian and Akkadian would seem to have assimilated all of the other languages, and then Akkadian assimilated Sumerian.

So, let us go back to the beginning of the story, where I believe there was one main language (Sumerian) and one secondary language for Noah’s descendants (Hebrew): 

¹ Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

From the perspective of Eber, in the world but not of the world, the one language was Sumerian, though his language was Hebrew. This didn’t include places like India and China, but as far as Eber was concerned, the Middle East was the whole world.

² As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

This constitutes the arrival of, not only Eber, but Noah’s descendants in general. They arrived speaking Hebrew, at a place surrounded by cities speaking Sumerian. They found a plain, and settled there.