RE: Question for Dick (or anyone else)

David wrote:
 
Bill -- I don't doubt what you're saying. If the Babel story is more
than a local dispersion of a local group of people, no doubt it has to
be dated much earlier than the geneologies suggest. For those who hold
that the geneologies are relatively complete, I'm curious how the Babel
story is understood.
If you read Genesis 2-11, please note that the dispersion of the sons of
Noah is covered in Gen. 10. The incident at Babel follows in Gen. 11.
Thus the dispersion precedes the Tower of Babel event if we trust the
writer got his facts right. That precludes the notion that the world's
population was concentrated after the flood and had their common
language confused and dispersed speaking various languages. In essence,
just reading the Bible alone can clear up this misinterpretation.
 
If we translate the Hebrew erets as "land" rather than "earth," and the
Hebrew word saphah is translated literally as "lip" rather than the
broader "language," we would read the text as follows: "And the whole
land was of one lip and one speech."
 
Since we know the Sumerians and Accadians spoke unrelated languages and
the Accadian language is the basis for Hebrew, and if we assume the
writer of Genesis was at least as knowledgeable as we are, then we
should be able to reason out that at least two languages were spoken in
the region at the time that tower building was all the rage. So it is
unlikely the writer of Genesis was trying to convey that everybody spoke
a common language since we know they didn't.
 
After the flood the mud brick platforms that were constructed in the
Mesopotamian cities began to grow and take on religious connotations.
The ziggurats became the dwelling places of the gods and temples were
constructed as places to worship the gods.
 
It appears that the builders at Babylon were caught up in a ziggurat
building contest. To show their faith and allegiance to their one true
God they tried to outbuild the competition. You can imagine how happy
God would be to have a mud brick ziggurat dedicated to him that was ten
feet higher than the one dedicated to the moon-god, Nanna. So He
confused their speech and the Semites located at Babylon terminated
construction and scattered, but their basic language was unaltered.
 
So I believe that Genesis 11:1 refers to the predominant topic of
conversation of the day which was about building mud brick platforms and
adorning them with temples of worship. Thus everyone in the whole land
(Mesopotamia) at that time was talking about the same thing, they were
of "one lip."
 
Dick Fischer
~Dick Fischer~ Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
 <http://www.genesisproclaimed.org> www.genesisproclaimed.org
 
Received on Fri Mar 17 14:10:36 2006