Tower of Babel & Linguistic Confusion: Possible Anthropological Explanation

Genesis 11:5-9 (RSV) And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The references to being scattered to “the face of all the earth” can scarcely be taken literally, since there were huge areas of the world unknown to the ancient Hebrews, such as North, Central, and South America. Chris Gousmett contends for this interpretation:

It is not the origin of all the languages of the earth, but instead describes something else entirely. . . .

While the expression kol-ha’aretz is translated as ‘the whole earth’ or ‘all the earth’ we could be justified in suggesting that there it refers to ‘the whole land’. In addition, we can ask whether the population of the whole earth migrated into the plain of Shinar. This would appear not to be the case, as this story follows an account of the dispersal of various groups into other lands. The scattering they feared was not dispersal over the whole earth, but across the plain into which they had migrated to settle. [1]

That this is only one group of people among many is indicated by their desire to ‘make a name’ (a reputation) for themselves as one people among many. If this were the whole population of the earth prior to their dispersal after the flood then for whom would they make ‘a name’? [2]

What Gen. 11 speaks about is not the origin of the many different languages spoken across the earth, but the confusion engendered by God among one group of people in the land of Shinar. [3]

Some have argued that what was in the mind of the author was not language in reference to literally the entire world, but rather, a lingua franca, which means a common or bridge language, or one that is common as a second language across widely different groups of people. Historically, such languages included Akkadian, Babylonian, and Aramaic in ancient western Asia, Koine Greek, Latin (which functionally lasted until the 18th century), Italian, French, Spanish, and English. In this understanding, Sumerian was the lingua franca c. 3000 B.C. in (at least the self-understanding of) Mesopotamia. The Babel story might be thought to possibly be a “morality tale” of the demise of Sumerian language and culture. Some background detail of Sumerian culture may be useful to back up this hypothesis.

Sumerian is believed to be a language isolate, meaning that “we know of no other languages that relate to it ancestrally.” [4] It was also the first written language in the history of the world, as a British Library article notes,

Full writing-systems appear to have been invented independently at least four times in human history: first in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) where cuneiform was used between 3400 and 3300 BC, . . .

Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.

From 2900 BC, these began to be impressed in wet clay with a reed stylus, making wedge-shaped marks which are now known as cuneiform. [5]

Sumerians, by the way, also developed the wheel, sophisticated irrigation and agricultural techniques, sailboats, calendars and cities, as far back as 3500 B.C. Now, it may be that Genesis 11 reflects this unique and particular historical circumstance, where we have the first complete writing system ever in history, and a language isolate at that. This would have been pretty dominant in 3400-3000 B.C. among Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia. Perhaps it was all they knew. Then when different languages started showing up, perhaps an oral tradition began to the effect that this was a judgment upon the Sumerian-speaking (and cuneiform-writing) Sumerians, who had seemed so dominant. Moser observes,

Little is known about when Sumerian-speaking people arrived in southern Mesopotamia, assuming they did not originate there. Either way, from a very early period a multilingual environment existed in southern Mesopotamia, which included languages like Sumerian, an early form of Akkadian, other Semitic languages, and Hurrian. [6]

Could this “multilingual environment” that Moser refers to “in southern Mesopotamia” actually refer to the confusion of languages in the biblical text? Unfortunately, he doesn’t indicate the exact time of this “very early period.” So we’ll have to do more “digging” ourselves for further “answers” along these lines.

Written language is not the same thing as spoken language. It may very well be that Akkadian started to be widely spoken in Mesopotamia before it borrowed cuneiform as its writing method, too (as eventually fifteen languages did). The biblical text refers to the Sumerians not being able to “understand one another’s speech” (Gen. 11:7). That’s talking, and it need not necessarily be related to writing at all. Complex and technologically advanced cultures like the Incas had no writing system, as was also true of most of the North American indigenous people (the Cherokees being a notable exception; and they simply invented it “on the spot”).

So it could have been that spoken Akkadian was part of the confusion referred to in the Babel story. Omniglot, “the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages”, states that “Akkadian was a semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia” starting around “2,800 BC” and that it “first appeared in Sumerian texts dating from 2,800 BC in the form of Akkadian names.” [7] If this is correct (and how do they know, I wonder?), it could correspond to a “late” date of the building of the tower of Babel, which I estimated provisionally to be from 3000-2800 B.C. That gives us a real possibility of linguistic confusion: from the first written language and the lingua franca and language isolate to a multi-lingual environment.

The Jewish Virtual Library [8] also dates Akkadian, defined as “the designation for a group of closely related East Semitic dialects current in Mesopotamia” to “the early third millennium,” which would be, presumably, about 3000-2800 B.C.: again fitting the time-frame schema for the possible explanation I am maintaining. Moreover, I found a scholarly article that deals with the inter-mixture of Akkadian and Sumerian and which refers to a “long history of linguistic symbiosis, stretching back several centuries [from before c. 2500 B.C.]” which reinforces “the impression of . . . a Sumerian-Akkadian linguistic area . . . Among the East Semitic languages of 3rd-millenium and earlier Mesopotamia were ancestral dialects of Akkadian . . .” [9]

Matthew A. McIntosh, who teaches ancient history, noted this cultural clash of the Sumerians and Akkadians, around 3000 BC:

When written records began in the late fourth millennium BC, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians) were entering Mesopotamia from the deserts to the west, and were probably already present in places such as Ebla in Syria. Akkadian personal names began appearing in written record in Mesopotamia from the late 29th century BC. [10]

The earliest positively proven historical attestation of any Semitic people comes from 30th century BC Mesopotamia, with the East Semitic-speaking peoples of the Kish civilization, entering the region originally dominated by the people of Sumer (who spoke a language isolate). [11]

Related to the above analysis is the understanding of the collapse of the Mesopotamian Uruk culture (c. 3300-3000 B.C.). K. Kris Hirst states,

After the Uruk period between 3200–3000 BCE (called the Jemdet Nasr period), an abrupt change occurred . . . The Uruk colonies in the north were abandoned, and the large cities in the north and south saw a sharp decrease in population and an increase in the number of small rural settlements. [12]

Hirst attributes this to “climate change” and “drought, including a sharp rise in temperature and aridity over the region.” That may very well be (we know that the region became much less fertile over time), but it doesn’t rule out clashes that come from language differences. In God’s providence — as I have argued many times — natural events may be and are incorporated into the divine plan. Whatever, or however many, the reasons, the end result was “a sharp decrease in population” in southern Mesopotamian cities around 3000 B.C., which is, of course, quite consistent with the biblical report of people in these regions being “scattered . . . abroad from there” (Gen. 11:8). This is fascinating, because now we have not only strong suggestions of linguistic discord at this particular time, but also a scattering or migration out of the area, which was precisely what we needed to find to corroborate the text.

Lastly, Dallin D. Oaks, a linguist, proposes an interpretation of the Babel account that has likely been largely overlooked:

I shall explore another possibility in the text, a possibility that a scattering of people is what caused the confusion of languages rather than vice-versa. In other words, the people were scattered, and their subsequent separation from each other resulted in a differentiation of languages, which would in turn help to keep the people separated from each other. If this latter interpretation better represents the intent of the text, the account is very compatible with the type of explanation scholars in historical linguistics commonly provide for the development of different languages.

One of the important implications of this alternate interpretation is that the confusion of languages would have been gradual rather than immediate. Does the biblical text allow an interpretation suggesting a more gradual change resulting from rather than causing a dispersion of people? A careful look at the account shows that it doesn’t actually say that the confusion was immediate. While the account says that the confusion of languages happened “there” at Babel, the identification of the location could be referring to the place at which the process of language change was initiated, since that was the place from which the dispersion of people occurred, and the dispersion is what caused the ultimate confusion of languages. And while some might believe that immediate change is implied because of their assumption that the confusion of languages caused the construction of the tower to cease, it should be pointed out that the account in Genesis doesn’t make such an overt connection, . . . [13]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Chris Gousmett, “The confusion of language in the interpretation of Genesis 11,” Evangelical Quarterly, 89.1 (2018), 34–50; quote from pp. 35-36.

[2] Gousmett, 41-42.

[3] Gousmett, 44.

[4] Jason Moser, “Sumerian Language,” World History Encyclopedia, November 7, 2015.

[5] Ewan Clayton, “Where Did Writing Begin?,” British Library, no date.

[6] Moser, ibid.

[7] “Akkadian,” Omniglot.

[8] “Akkadian Language,” Jewish Virtual Library. .

[9] Andrew George, “Babylonian and Assyrian: A History of Akkadian,” 37-38.

[10] Matthew A. McIntosh, “Ancient Semitic-Speaking Peoples,” Brewminate, July 19, 2020.

[11] J. Nicholas Postgate, Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern (British Institute for the Study of Iraq: 2007), 31-71.