You've got to wonder how anyone, living as we all do in the early years of the twenty-first century, could take the Babel story literally. This is simply not the way languages developed. And yet lots of people still do. Not on linguistic or etymological grounds, but because "the Bible tells me so", and they take pride in "a simple faith".
While that may cause some of us to grind our teeth in frustration along with the editors of National Geographic (see their lead article in March: The War on Science), even worse in my opinion is the well-intended appropriation of the Babel story by more liberal Christians in an (ineffective) attempt to rescue it from irrelevance. Sure, there are universal themes in the narrative, just like there are universal themes in the Epic of Gilgamesh. But should the fact that the Babel story is in the biblical book of Genesis privilege it beyond similar tall tales in Greek and Near Eastern culture (or Far Eastern, African or Pacific culture for that matter!) Etiological stories (can be well say etiology together, brethren?) of necessity touch on basic themes, whether they're in Genesis or Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.But I digress. Paul has put together an outstanding post on the Tower of Babel. Read it, then share it with a fundamentalist relative or acquaintance (oh the joy of being just a bit subversive).
Given the state of the Bible in modern Christian theology, how can conservative religious types have anything but a war when it comes to science?
ReplyDeleteIf you want magical religious superstition, you have to draw the line somewhere.
And yes, the illustrations are impressive as is the blog entry -- thanks for the reference (but you know it might be very difficult for me to even think about being subversive).
I have found that it is much easier to write a story about someone building a city than it is to actually build a city. I suspect that ancient historians, like Herodotus, probably found this to be true also.
ReplyDeleteCool illustration! I never pictured the Tower of Babel as being a helix. Looks like a medieval version of the Guggenheim Museum. If any COGlodytes happen to see this, they may assume that Frank Lloyd Wright was inspired by Nimrod!
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I likely fall into the category that Otagosh calls "liberal Christian." Peter Enns supports the idea, from a second hand source, that the tower account is a political satire directed against Babylon documented by a scribe during the Exile. (It would be very difficult for Evangelicals to believe that the Bible might contain satire but I can think of another example in the NT.) I would add that the scribe probably took some pages from traditional sources to compose this. I believe most of the events in early Genesis are regional rather than global. I envision a small collection of racially homogenous tribes and clans, an extended family whose genealogy is given in Genesis 10, thought to build a tower as an act of secular nationalism and they were dispersed by the confusion of tongues. "Tongues" also occur in the NT. And I doubt they were separate languages at all but different dialects of the same language. But this does not account for all the languages in the world as the KJ translators mistakenly wrote. "The whole earth" can and should be rendered "the whole land" which correctly transforms a global event into a regional event. No doubt this small group of clans described in Genesis 10 spoke a single language. But in the same time period, there were many peoples and languages extant on earth.
ReplyDeleteInherent in this is the perspective that this small group of clans were the only people on earth who counted from their own perspective. This is a common human conception. I am a member of a Native American tribe that refers to themselves as Chahicks-a-Chahicks. This means "men of the men". The implication is "of all men we are the true men." When they spoke of "men" they did not mean Sioux or Comanche or White people - they meant only members of the tribe. We see in Genesis this insular and clannish viewpoint. These people had no idea, my guess, or concern that there were Indo-Europeans living up on the Russian Steppes speaking a separate language. The OT is about the Jews.
-- Neo
I've read and admired Peter Enns' work, and posted about it a few times (e.g. here. I'd agree with much of what you say, though I think the idea that the Babel story is satire ignores its obvious function in explaining the origin of languages. The question remains for me though: why do we privilege these ancient texts above equally insightful but non-biblical sources?
DeleteNeo, even if you try to fudge the meaning of what phrases like "whole earth" mean, what does that get you? Do you think there was ever a time when all of Mesopotamia (or whatever you think the story's scope is) was deserted except for a great city and tower in Babylon? To say nothing about the confusion of languages and scattering of people across the earth — what is the rationalist explanation for *that*?
DeleteFurthermore, surely it is special pleading to claim the Babel story is literally true if you don't accept the same of a contemporary pagan text (Berossus' Babyloniaca) which also says Babylon was established by all the flood survivors and experienced a divine confusion of languages? On what basis does the anonymous author of Genesis possess special authority and knowledge that the known author of Babyloniaca does not?
@Gavin — Thanks for the link! I always enjoy reading your thoughts on these topics.
And nary a mention of the Chinese, the millions and millions of Chinese who had progressed technologically and very likely socially further than any of those writing the Old Testament could have imagined.
ReplyDeleteThe Jews ignored a significant part of the societies of the world and weren't as advanced as they thought they were at the time. We've outgrown slavery for the most part and our Western societies seems to have dispensed with a man selling his daughters into slavery, but I could be wrong.
For years, I have believed that the flood was a local Mesopotamian event, and that diverse peoples lived and survived outside that immediate area. Science has identifed and records five global extinctions, and neither the Noachian, nor the Gilgamesh floods are numbered amongst them. I don't know which of the five extinctions HWA held responsible for his "gap", but most of us recognize that as a mess of Hooehy anyway.
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