Tower of Babel: Dialogue with a Linguist

Mark  Liberman is a linguist,  with a dual appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, as Trustee Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Linguistics, and as a professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He is the founder of (and frequent contributor to) Language Log, a blog frequented by dozens of professional linguists, which is one of the most widely used blogs dealing with linguistics. I was honored to have one of my articles cited on this blog, by Dr. Liberman. His words will be in blue; those of others (with permission) in various colors.

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I was cited in the article, “The Origin of Speeches? or just the collapse of Uruk?” (Language Log, June 23, 2023).

I’ve wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.

But in “Linguistic Confusion and the Tower of Babel“, National Catholic Register 6/21/2023, Dave Armstrong argues that the usual interpretation of the Tower of Babel story is simply a mistake, due to a bad job of sense disambiguation:

[T]he Hebrew word for “earth” (eretz) can mean many things, including the entire world (e.g., Genesis 1:1, 15; 2:1, 4), but also things like the “land” or “ground” of countries, such as Egypt (eretz mitzrayim) and Canaan (eretz kana’an), the dry land (Genesis 1:10), and ground from which seeds grow (Genesis 1:12). The New American Standard Bible translates eretz: country or countries 59 times, ground 119 times, land 1638 times; compare to earth, 656 instances, and world (3).

And, he argues,

The context indicates very strongly that Genesis 11 is not talking about the entire earth, but rather, the land which is described repeatedly as the place where the events occur: southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer, as it was known at the proposed period of history.

So he goes on to suggest that what really happened was the transition from a mono-ethnic (or at least mono-linguistic) culture, where everyone spoke (or at least understood) Sumerian, to an infiltration of other languages such as Akkadian, associated with the collapse of the Uruk culture.

I’m not sure that Armstrong can make the timeline work. But his proposed interpretation seems more plausible than the idea that humans everywhere spoke the same language before about 3000 BC, or even that there were no humans anywhere else on earth before that post-Babel dispersion.

Armstrong’s version seems to make Genesis 11 much more pedestrian — no longer the explanation for world-wide linguistic diversity, but just the story of a specific culture’s disintegration. Though Armstrong’s last sentence proposes a partial restoration of the chapter’s importance:

It may be identifying Babel or Shinar as the place where the dispersion of people began.

Which is pretty strongly contradicted by archeological evidence, I should think — so maybe there’s still a place for an empirical argument about “wrathful dispersion theory”.

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And here is my reply:

Dr. Liberman,

Thanks for this interesting and thought-provoking comment on one of my articles. First of all, it should be understood that this 1000-word article is an abbreviated version of a blog article that was 4817 words long: almost five times larger: “The Tower of Babel, Archaeology, & Linguistics” (4-13-23).  As an academic, you’re surely well aware of the usefulness of presenting complex material in a more accessible form. That’s what I was doing here, and what I often do in the course of my apologetics (I am a professional Catholic apologist and author of more than twenty “officially” published books, with six publishers). In the shorter article, I stated, “I’d like to speculate a bit about Babel.” That’s all I was doing. It was a fascinating topic. I wrote in my longer original article:

All must understand that the early chapters of Genesis (particularly the first eleven chapters) represent a genre and form of thinking that is very difficult for us to fully understand or interpret with an assurance that we are grasping the author’s intention. So everyone is engaging in guesswork to more or less degrees. That said, I submit this story is not simply myth, and it has several demonstrable connections to known history, verified by archaeology, as I will show.

I’m not an academic and don’t claim to be an expert on this matter. That said, I don’t think it’s improper for the “layman” to speculate and think about topics like this. In my case, it’s part of a larger project to understand the Bible in terms of secular learning; in this instance, linguistics, anthropology, historiography, and archaeology.

I had a book recently published, entitled, The Word Set in Stone: How Archaeology, Science, and History Back Up the Bible. It’s doing decently on Amazon, and has been in the top 100 in the category “Religious Antiquities & Archaeology” for two months now. The nature and goal of the book is evident in the title. The (longer) Babel article was intended as a chapter in a follow-up book.

I’ll respond now to some of your comments:

I’ve wondered for a long time why Biblical inerrantists have a big problem with biological evolution, which contradicts Chapter 1 of Genesis, but not so much with historical linguistics, which contradicts Chapter 11.

Like all historical, orthodox Christians, I believe that the Bible is inspired revelation, and without error in what it intends to claim for itself. Of course the big question is: “what does it claim in the first place?” That gets into exegesis and hermeneutics. My point in my book, and generally, is that the Bible is a complex book (it has over 200 forms of figure of speech; many quite complex). One must determine what was intended to be literal and what was non-literal. The Bible is filled with both sorts of literature.

I am a theistic evolutionist, and contend that evolution per se is not in necessary conflict with the Bible. It is if one erroneously interprets Genesis hyper-literally, but that is what fundamentalists do: a tiny portion of all Christians today and throughout history. Nor do I have a problem with historical linguistics (and I don’t think it contradicts Genesis 11). My analysis of Babel was an attempt to synthesize the Bible with the relevant fields of secular knowledge. I don’t claim much for it, but I think it has some strengths and perhaps made a few points worthy of consideration.

Christians — like everyone else, and far from being “hostile” — have learned a lot from secular sciences, and it has positively affected our biblical interpretation. Geology has shown how the earth is more than 6,000 years old, and Christian scholarship modified its view accordingly. Biology has shown that processes such as evolution occur, and we have taken that into account, although the basic idea is not as new in Christianity as many suppose. Both Augustine and Aquinas wrote about processes in biology that are distinct from instant creation: that God put potentialities into life.

[see: A Neo-Patristic Return to the First Four Days of Creation, Part IV, by John F. McCarthy; see also Parts One, Two, Three, Five, and Six; the last two parts deal with St. Thomas Aquinas’ similar views. See also, ”How Augustine Reined in Science,” Kenneth J. Howell (This Rock, March 1998); Davis A. Young, ”The Contemporary Relevance of Augustine’s View of Creation,” and Andrew J. Brown, ”The Relevance of Augustine’s View of Creation Re-Evaluated” [PDF] )

Likewise, we have learned from astronomy and physics, and the Big Bang theory (developed by a priest and originally opposed by Einstein) has become consensus, and is completely consistent with the biblical account of creatio ex nihilo. Similarly, we can learn from anthropology and the history of language with regard to the story of Babel. I wrote about Noah’s Flood in my book: arguing for a local Mesopotamian Flood, c. 2900 BC. Belief in a local Flood has been the standard view among both Protestant and Catholic scholars for well over a hundred years. We modify our views, as we learn more about science, just as all other thinkers do. A local Flood doesn’t contradict Genesis: it helps to interpret it in a much more plausible, sensible fashion.

his proposed interpretation seems more plausible than the idea that humans everywhere spoke the same language before about 3000 BC, or even that there were no humans anywhere else on earth before that post-Babel dispersion.

The Bible doesn’t require either interpretation. I noted in my shorter article that “differentiation of language was already cited several times in Chapter 10 (10:5, 20, 31).” Genesis 10:5 refers to “each with his own language” (RSV). Thus, before the Babel account, the Bible acknowledges people over wide areas (the ones known at that time), speaking different languages. That’s why I argue that Babel is strictly about southern Mesopotamia (Shinar, or Sumer) at a time soon after the [local] Flood. It’s not attempting to explain the origin of all language.

In my longer article I explain how archaeology has verified three important facts mentioned in the biblical account: the use of bitumen in construction, the use of the new technology of kiln-fired bricks, and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, that were the “towers” in that time and place. That’s pretty significant for a text that ancient. It’s not nothing. It shows that the account has historical elements that can be verified.

Armstrong’s last sentence proposes a partial restoration of the chapter’s importance: ‘It may be identifying Babel or Shinar as the place where the dispersion of people began.’ Which is pretty strongly contradicted by archeological evidence, I should think . . .

Well, you have interpreted it completely out of context, if that’s what you think of that statement. I made it clear in my second paragraph:

The context indicates very strongly that Genesis 11 is not talking about the entire earth, but rather, the land which is described repeatedly as the place where the events occur: southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer . . .

After arguing for a local phenomenon, and discussing the local language (Sumerian, evolving into Akkadian, etc.), why would I switch on a dime at the very end and argue for Sumer as the origin of all languages? That makes no sense, and I didn’t do it. The proper context was the previous paragraph, where I wrote:

Whatever, or however many, the reasons, the end result was “a sharp decrease in population” in southern Mesopotamian cities around 3000 BC, which is, of course, quite consistent with the biblical report of people in these regions being “scattered … abroad from there” (Genesis 11:8).

If you or others here want to argue that there was no such population decrease or shift at that time or place, feel free. I think there was, from what I could find on the topic, and if so, it’s consistent with an interpretation of the text that I made: that such scattering may tie into the linguistic diversity that the text referred to.

I’d be glad to continue to discuss many aspects of this. Thanks for allowing me to express and clarify my views.

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Colin Watson wrote: “skimming through the principal rabbinic commentaries on the relevant verses, they generally seem to assume that it meant the whole world.”

This ties into my statement: “Christians — like everyone else, and far from being ‘hostile’ — have learned a lot from secular sciences, and it has positively affected our biblical interpretation.”

“Everyone else” includes Jewish commentators and other scholars. As we believers in the Bible learned much more through the years about history, anthropology, and linguistics, including the origins and evolutions of language, we saw that a notion of all the people in the world being present in southern Mesopotamia and speaking one language [the origin of all others] is absurd and unable to be sustained in light of what we have learned.

This explains how the ancient rabbis might have had one interpretation (universality and single origin of languages) from reading the text over-literally, or prima facie, whereas both the facts of science and history suggest that a quite permissible non-literal interpretation of “all the earth,” etc., is much more plausible and in line with known and demonstrable facts.

It doesn’t follow that Genesis was “wrong” in this regard. I think it follows that historical interpretation in some regards was erroneous and that human beings (including us Christians, and our esteemed brothers in monotheism, religious Jews) have been wrong about some things in the past, just as we were about the age of the earth, prior to modern geology.

Religious, observant Christians and Jews are no different from anyone else. We learn over time. Scientists have believed in many things, too, that are laughable today (I’ve written about several). They evolved and learned over time. It’s the same with Bible interpretation. The human condition is to continue to learn as we go along.

The more I learn of science, the deeper my faith grows. This is what my latest book was about: the harmony of [primarily] archaeology and the Bible. When I learned that the historical accuracy of the Bible has been and continues to be affirmed again and again by archaeology and other sciences, my faith (including in biblical inspiration) is stronger.

“All truth is God’s truth,” as we like to say. We welcome developments in science, and thus far (after 42 years of engaging in apologetics), I have yet to see anything in science that causes me to have any fundamental difficulty in believing in Christianity. Faith and science exist together in a profound harmony.

This is one of the many reasons why I love being an apologist: working through and better understanding the harmony of faith and reason, including science, and passing along what I have learned.

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Benjamin Orsatti wrote:

Thanks for stopping by! When apologists and linguists and laymen are all tossing around thoughts and research, interesting ideas always seem to come out of it. I’ve sometimes thought that it would be “neat” to print a Bible, the text of which would be printed in 4 different colors, to indicate “literal,” “moral,” “allegorical,” and “anagogical” hermeneutic. I know that, strictly speaking, you’re supposed to apply all four to any text, but maybe we could get a heads-up as to which one “prevails?”

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks for the warm welcome.

I think if we were to pick one of the four approaches to exegesis and hermeneutics as one that “prevails”, it would be literal, as a sort of “default” position: tied into the larger framework of the grammatico-historical method. But we must always be on the “lookout” for context, cultural background, non-literal figures of speech, and the general absence of a Greek “rationalist” outlook (which is how most of us think today).

The problem is that the factors I mentioned are largely overlooked, and we tend to either apply a hyper-skeptical or hyper-literal approach to Scripture. There is a happy medium that avoids both extremes (guided by some notion of historic “orthodoxy”), and I try to abide by it.

The Tower of Babel story is usually regarded as merely mythical, but I have shown that important elements of it can be verified by archaeology and what we know of history, in at least four significant ways. Even if there are mythical-type elements, there also seems to be preserved history, and it brings to mind C. S. Lewis’ acceptance of Tolkien’s suggestion (at the time he converted to Christianity) that there was such a thing as “a true myth.”

Similarly, historians believe that King Arthur existed, notwithstanding the overlay of much mythology for some 1500 years now. We may have more objective verification of aspects of the Babel story than we do with Arthur, despite its being 3500 years older (!). And we do because we have this remarkable and extraordinarily accurate document, the Hebrew Bible.

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Practical Matters: Perhaps some of my 4,300+ free online articles (the most comprehensive “one-stop” Catholic apologetics site) or fifty-three books have helped you (by God’s grace) to decide to become Catholic or to return to the Church, or better understand some doctrines and why we believe them.

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Photo credit: The Tower of Babel (1563), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/1530-1569) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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Summary: Reply to a linguist who made comments on my related NCR article. I maintain that the biblical account is consistent with Mesopotamia; not a worldwide interpretation.