Biblical Babble about Babel

Number 3 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* Series:

by Farrell Till

Why do nations speak different languages? If you think it is because of isolationism in the distant past that made cultural interchanges and hence consistency in language evolution impossible, then think again. A trip to the Twilight Zone will give you the right answer. You see, there was a time when "the whole earth had one language and one speech" (Gen. 11:1), but the linguistically unified people of that time ticked off the petulant Yahweh, who "confused" their language so that they couldn't understand one another.  Ever since the world has been linguistically divided.

What did those people do that so irritated the whimsical Yahweh? Well, silly, they tried to build a tower whose top would reach "unto heaven." What else? It's all right there in God's inspired word. If people would just open their Bibles more often to experience the joys of traipsing through the Twilight Zone, they wouldn't have to ask stupid questions. It makes perfectly good sense to suppose that a linguistically unified people trying to build a tower to heaven would quite naturally arouse Yahweh's ire.  What if they succeeded? What then? The upstarts would have probably undertaken even more ambitious projects.

In fact, that was exactly what Yahweh thought. Although he is presumably omniscient and omnipresent, Yahweh "came down to see the city and the tower" (Gen. 11:5) and said, "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing they propose to do will be withheld from them" (v:6). Talk about your intolerable situations, this was certainly one of them.  What self-respecting deity could tolerate a planet of people who could do anything they proposed to do? They needed to be taken down a notch or two, so Yahweh said, "Come, let us go down [even though he had already come down according to verse 5] and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech" (v:7). Who the "us" was that Yahweh was talking to is anybody's guess. Bibliolaters say that this was just a case of the one God talking to the two other persons in his godhead, in other words, God the Father talking to God the son and God the Holy Spirit. If this seems confusing, just try to remember that in the Twilight Zone, one plus one plus one equals one, and it will all make sense to you.  At any rate, Yahweh confused the language of the people, put an end to their ambitious building  project, and "scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth" (v:8).

Every time I read this story, I'm a little embarrassed to think that, if bibliolaters are right, these people were my ancestors. Why would linguistic diversity prevent the completion of a construction project? Admittedly, Yahweh's little dirty trick would have caused some initial confusion--imagine how you would react if you woke up tomorrow and found that one member of your family could speak only German, another Arabic, another Japanese, etc.--but it shouldn't have shut the project down. Some enterprising construction boss should have figured out that if he grouped the workers according to what language they spoke, the project could have continued. Those who spoke language A could have made bricks, those who spoke language B could have carried them to the brick layers, who all spoke language C, etc. This type of division of labor is done quite often in international construction projects.  Because these people were completely unfamiliar with linguistic diversity, no doubt there would have been some initial communication problems, but within a year or two, multilingualism would have begun to emerge among the workers to a degree that would have virtually eliminated communication problems.  Anyone who has ever applied himself seriously to learning another language knows that reasonable fluency can be acquired within two years.

But maybe we are supposed to understand that every person working on the project was given a different language. (Who knows what to believe about these Twilight-Zone stories?) If so, when the people were scattered abroad "over the face of all the earth," how did they decide who would go with whom? If fifty people all speaking different languages left together to form a tribe elsewhere, wouldn't they have experienced communication problems just as serious as those they would have encountered had they remained at Babel to work on the tower? If the confusion of tongues prevented cooperation in the building of a tower, surely it would have made intratribal relationships quite difficult.

While we are trying to make sense out of this story, we must also wonder why Yahweh hasn't intervened in some way to put a quietus to the world's space programs. If trying to build a tower to heaven irritated him, one would think that the construction of space rockets would downright infuriate him. What is to prevent an astronaut from someday landing a spaceship right in front of Yahweh's heavenly throne?

By now, you are probably more confused than were those people who suddenly had their language confounded by divine intervention, but the silliness isn't over yet. Another short journey in the Twilight Zone to the events described just one chapter before the story of Babel should leave you almost totally confused. Here we are told how the descendants of the sons of Noah settled the earth after the flood. The descendants of Japheth became the Gentiles who were "separated into their lands, everyone according to his language,according to their families, into their nations" (Gen. 10:2-5). The descendants of Ham were listed "according to their families, according to their languages, in their lands and in their nations" (vs:6-20). The descendants of Shem, of course, became the Semitic tribes "according to their families, according to their languages, in their lands, according to their nations" (vs:21-31). So we are told in chapter 10 that the descendants of the sons of Noah settled over all the earth according to their languages and are even told that Nimrod, a descendant of Ham, founded the kingdom of Babel (v:10), but then we are told in the very next chapter that "the whole earth had one language and one speech" and that these linguistically unified people "journeyed from the east" to the "land of Shinar" (v:2) and there began building the city of Babel, which city was mentioned just one chapter earlier as an achievement of Nimrod, a descendant of Ham (v:10), whose people had settled there "according to their languages" (v:20).

I think that the people at Babel weren't the only ones whom Yahweh confused. He seemed to have thoroughly confused whomever he inspired to write the tower of Babel story.