How does the Biblical story about the Tower of Babel explain the origin of different languages?

Answer 1

When God struck the people with different languages, the people were forced to find the other members of their own language and they grouped together. Since the different groups couldn't understand eachother, they went off into different directions. That's where the diversity came from. Up until the tower of Babel, everyone spoke the same language and (generally) looked the same. Once people started branching off, everyone changed. This is of course a religious myth devoid of evidence or substance. It is entirely ridiculous when you see how eg the English language grew up from a basis of Celt, Germanic, Scandanavian, Latin, French and Greek origins. It was a progressive synthesis and development from over a couple of millennia, not a language which Jehovah struck onto a group of people at Babylon. Language evolved just as people evolved. It started with noises generated to indicate actions or items. And these noises grew up in different locations and were different. A classical example is the similarities between Latin and Greek words. The words relating to the nomadic pastoral era are plainly similar. Those relating to agriculture are different. So it is obvious that those particular Mediterranean nomadic peoples, with an original common language, separated into different areas when they settled on the land, and invented/adapted their language to agricultural pursuits locally This is a misguided interpretation of what is actually going on. With you, right now, with those guys when they wrote it, with me writing, and everyone reading. How come none of these people are taken into account? How come God's ALMIGHTINESS isn't taken into account? Do you really think a couple footnotes in an obvious "Guideline" book are going to tell you every little indiscriminant detail about every little piece of his plan? If you don't think that God, in all his awesome HUGENESS of amazing POWER he has, can't come up with a way to make all this happen, for the reason it needs to happen, successfully among a system of rules, that he created, and constantly manipulated throughout The Bible. I mean, if we are going to say that the Biblical account IS true and the Tower of Babel does explain the origin of different languages. However, they are both right! Except for the part where Real Answerguy went all negative on the original Answer, they was really just offering a more full perspective on what God was trying to help you understand with his aforementioned "footnotes"; the Bible. We are coming back together from so many for a reason. === === It would be good for rationality if people would simply state their case, and let the readers make up their minds on the logic of the opposing positions, rather than insisting on their own rightness and righteousness, and worse still trying to win by attacking the opposing person rather than his argument. A demonstration of a little Christian charity might help here.

Answer 2

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis explains how different languages spread among people. According to the story, after the people tried to build a tower to reach the heavens, God confused their language, causing them to speak different languages and scattering them across the earth. This event is used to explain the diversity of languages in the world.

Answer 3

Genesis 11:1-9 talks of a Tower of Babel being built right up to heaven by the people in their arrogance, and of God punishing the people by dispersing them and making them all speak in different languages. Before this, there was only one language on earth.

This story was added to Genesis quite late in Jewish history, during the Babylonian Exile. The exiled Jews, who had never before seen a great cosmopolitan city like Babylon, were in awe of the great ziggurut, a pyramid-like tower, and at the same time surprised to meet people who spoke so many different languages. They associated the tower, which seemed to reach to heaven, and the many strange languages, and so developed the story of the Tower of Babel.
We do know is that there have always been different languages on earth. Even the Australian aborigines, who have been isolated from the rest of the world for some fifty thousand years, had several different languages among them. Thus, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel is not a historical explanation, but one that the exiled Jews developed in an attempt to explain something that surprised them.