Re: Dick Fisher's "historical basis" remains no less doubtful

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, ed babinski wrote:

> What do you mean by an "historical" "tower of Babel" incident? I believe
> Paul Seely, another ASAer, was working on a paper on that topic, or had
> one published in the Westminster Review not long ago. See also Walton's
> NIV APPLICATION COMMENTARY on Genesis, found at any major Evangelical
> bookstore to read what he has to say about the Tower of Babel story.
> There is no linguistic evidence that all of the world's languages began in
> Babylon. The world's languages appear to have evolved naturally, just as
> Old English grew to differ from Middle English and that grew to differ
> from modern English. Or as Latin evolved into various European languages.
> The process of the evolution of language has been examined, especially so
> since the written languages arose, and not found to require supernatural
> initiative.

I don't think that Dick espoused the idea that all the world's languages
began at the Tower of Babel. There was a recent posting to the contrary
that I think came from him, but I haven't kept it, and so I can't check
its authorship. In this posting it was advocated that we should read
Genesis in the order in which it was written, i.e. Chapter 10 before
Chapter 11. Chapter 10 records the dispersal of Noah's descendants and
mentions the existence of a multiplicity of languages.

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Sat Nov 13 18:57:08 2004