The flood story as rendered in the OT has clear markings of being derivative from an older oral tradition, not unique to the Israelites. Other groups, prior to or contemporary with the OT authors, had different accounts (involving different gods with different motivations, and different characters with different interactions), but with a substantial set of common features in the narrative (there was a flood, a single boat, pairs of animals, etc).
The Tower story has always struck me as being of the same genre: it's another "just so" story shared by multiple groups with distinct "histories" to tell, and the OT version is just one among several. But I haven't succeeded (yet) in finding a "cognate" tale among the other traditions that surrounded or preceded the Israelites. If anyone knows of such, I'd be grateful for some info on that. (I've looked into "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta", but from what little I've seen so far, its relevance to the Tower of Babel seems tenuous.)
Apart from looking at its cultural origin, we can reasonably question the Babel account with regard to its (lack of) coherence. In a nutshell, it shows God making what must be the biggest mistake of His career in interacting with humans: having confounded everyone's language,
His own words, spoken to the Israelites before and after the Tower event, as wells as the words spoken later by Jesus,
were gibberish to the vast majority of contemporaries, and to virtually everyone alive today.
As a result, every attempt that humans make to "understand" those words requires a laborious, confusing, and ultimately imperfect process of "translation" into this or that other language. It seems like a truly pathetic yet laughable case of unintended consequences, and of taking action without taking the time to think it through. A pretty serious gaff, really, given the importance of "preserving God's exact words."
(The Muslims have an interesting take on this: if you don't make a personal commitment to learn the ancient form of Arabic used by their special prophet, you absolutely do not qualify as a real believer in their religion, and you can't hope, let alone claim, to really understand their beliefs. Of course, had this been literally true, and fully enforced, Islam would have died out generations ago. If only...)
Another point is the implication that Hebrew must have been the one single language that everyone spoke before the event. I mean, it really would have been way too stupid of God to change the language of the Israelites (as per the points made above about gibberish and translation). If that's the inescapable assertion, it's readily disproved, using linguistic and archeological evidence that unambiguously places Hebrew in a nested hierarchy descended from a language that is known to be older than Hebrew, and differs from it in ways that follow natural patterns of commonly observed linguistic changes. It's remarkably analogous to genetic descent (but different in interesting ways).
We could also go into the imponderable mechanics of the magical feat at Babel: the unconsciously formed neuro-muscular habits that control the coordinated movements of jaw, lips, tongue, uvula, vocal folds and lungs all suddenly change? And would it have been the case that a person thus affected was then unable to understand his/her own speech? (If such an experiment were possible, could the subject actually survive?) Were specific "subsets" of mutual intelligibility preserved at the Tower, so that people who were most closely related (or happened to have a common geographic origin) could still talk to each other?
It doesn't take long to reach a point where the concept becomes untenably nonsensical. No amount of inventive imagination would save it. But anyone who gives credence to the story at all isn't going to be concerned about the details, so this line of questioning is a dead end.
Even questions about the timing of the event, relative to what is known about language diversity going back at least 7000 years, won't be much use against a believer. There's a convenient vagueness on this point, except from the young-earth literalists, who are already so thoroughly refuted in so many ways.
I would just add that a decent understanding of how we acquire and use natural language not only suffices to explain the observed facts about linguistic variation and change (though there is still plenty to be learned about how it works); it can also lead us toward a better understanding of the human condition, of what our potentials and our limitations are, and even, in some regards, a better understanding of how our perception, cognition, and culture affect our interaction with and comprehension of reality.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
™ Version 4.2
