Was the Tower of Babel Real ? (Egyptian, genesis, myths, bible)

[LargeKingCat]

I have been so entertained ok more like intrigued with the belief of many behond the Ark Flood and the Exodus threads that I want to see if we can keep things moving on here
Let me start by abridging the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,[ they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel —because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

I was taught, as a kid, that this is why we have different languages.
Of course now, I do not believe that. here is a good proof of why this is not an actual event.

According to an old Testament/ Biblical Timeline, this event occurred roughly 2200 BCE. It postdated the Flood myth but Predated the Exodus story.
Well, besides the obvious (where are the remains of it?) we know that at 2200 BCE people were not living in a common language and with common speech. Proof of this is in writings dated prior to 2200 BCE that depict stories of other groups (such as Summerians) and no they were not destroyed by floods.
We even have archeological evidence of people inhabiting caves in the Paleozoic Era. Proof of this is on the walls of the caves which have been carbon dated.
We know too that language evolved According to Linguist Derrick Bickerton (2004) from a protolanguage 1 million years ago from scavenging societies. Individual vocabulary, as in different languages, had probably evolved 40,000 years ago, and is evident in archeological elements which show Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian languages existed prior to the Tower of Babel. So, we can safely say that language did not occur as a result of this fictitous event
We also know that humans did not always leave written records, so there is no way of knowing exactly how many people in the further reaches of africa or asia were speaking and writing a different language.

A tower (ziggurat) was built in 610 BC supposedly on the same location, but was destroyed by Alexander the Great. This leads no proof to the reality of the original, only proof of the acceptance of the myth.

Significance of the Myth
The myth has two morals. The first relates to the neccesity of communication and the difficulty humans will have when they fail to use the right language to communicate. Just as a variety of language will prevent future success (according to the myth) so would a common language (ie successful communication) preclude a degree of success
A darker second moral is that "god" impeded these people because had they succeeded, nothing would be immpossible for them. Clearly "god " does not want to be one-upped. (egotism) The dark moral that too many people have taken from this myth is that they should not try to excel and explore ie "reach for the sky" to use a metaphor. This idea has hindered and impeded the success of many religiousites who would say "Well I could be great, but god does not like that so I will just fail and make god happy" The myth shows the god vs human theme which recurred through Genesis myths.

[whoppers]

Good post, LKCat. You're perfectly right that different languages existed long before the story is supposed to have taken place. Later Jewish tradition would actually claim that Hebrew was THE original language, which we know to be utterly impossible linguistically, as it is virtually the youngest of the ancient Near Eastern Semitic language families (Sumerian, meanwhile, having no direct ancestors or relatives that we have found).

I'd add that ziggurats designed to bring the worshipper closer to the gods were a feature of Mesopotamia, and that the Biblical author made this connection and was punning on the name of the great city Babylon with his name for the tower, Babel - he provided a fake etymology designed to elicit a laugh from his listeners. For people in conflict with the great city, this would probably have been an effective form of derision for them.

Your significances are interesting. It certainly does seem as if Yahweh is a little annoyed at the exploits of the combined humans, and took steps to make sure they didn't overstep their "intended" bounds, thus keeping him in complete control (this would have been perfectly in line with that author's view of the non-omnipotent, non-perfect, anthropomorphic god that frequently had to learn as he went along). Thus we get a charming little etiological story that "explains" why people speak different languages.

[Clark Park]

Was the Tower of Babel real?

No, of course not.

[TRANSPONDER]

It's one of those questions that can't be easily answered yes or no.

Yes, it was real. The bab il Marduk ziggurat stood all through old and indeed new testament times and probably its use only discontinued in the Parthian or later roman period.

The Bible story evidently relates to this one major ziggurat, which is odd since it was surely standing in their day.

It was not made of baked brick unless one means sun - dried. It was built as pointed out, long after languages had separated out. It was, rather, just more of the story - telling intended to explain where we came from, why we look different and have different languages -all with the overarching polemic agenda of claiming that it only ever the particular god worshipped by the hebrews that was doing all this.

Like all the genesis material,the evidence does not support the Bible as fact, but suggests that it is myth.