[b-hebrew] ve-safah )ahat
Gabe Eisenstein
gabe at cascadeaccess.com
Mon Jun 1 15:08:46 EDT 2009
Dave Washburn wrote:
> While I agree that linguists don't generally accept Genesis, it doesn't say that the languages
> resulting from the Babel confusion were "in any measurable way similar to one another."
> The fact that people couldn't understand each other suggests just the opposite. So even if
> there was "a single parent language," there's nothing in the story to indicate that the
> resulting confusion of languages produced anything resembling said parent language.
>
>
I'm not so sure that there's nothing to indicate a resemblance. The
language was "babbled" or "mixed up" (BLL), which generally means "mixed
together", as in mixing flour with oil. The other key word in the story
is "scatter" (PWC): the people's original motivation is to avoid
scattering, and God responds by doing exactly what they feared. (They
thought that "making a name" would prevent it, and this seems to have
been exactly the wrong strategy.)
So the result is a scattering and mixing: people who were united are now
separated, and their languages have become mutually unintelligible. But
just as the people who are separated were once together, it seems
logical that the language has been "mixed" and "scattered" out of its
original elements.
You might argue that with only one language to begin with, there aren't
different things to mix. But it seems to me that the author's experience
was of different related languages, like Hebrew and Aramaic, which
present the appearance of a mixture, from the perspective of the other
side. (In other words, to a Hebrew speaker, Aramaic seems like Hebrew
mixed with something else.) And we do find Hebrew speakers claiming not
to understand Aramaic, and vice versa. The languages are mutually
unintelligible for some purposes (e.g. construction projects, where
precise terminology is needed); but of course a Hebrew speaker can
understand a lot of what the Aramaic speaker says.
None of this is to suggest that the account in Gen.11 is, or was ever
meant to be, a factual history rather than a myth. I think we miss out
on the real meaning when we make that mistake. The meaning of Gen.11:1-9
is far from obvious, and invites interpretation. The implications of
"making a name" and "scattering" are obscure. And the traditional
reading of (YR WMGDL WR)$W B$MYM is tendentious: it takes a formulaic
terminology ("city-and-tower" as a hendiadys for a common architectural
pattern; "head in the heavens" as a religious metaphor) and reads it as
some kind of sinful "assault" on God, which the story never says at all.
In fact, God's motivation here is quite obscure, and I think that's part
of the writer's intention. The writer tried to use the partial mutual
unintelligibility of the languages familiar to the audience as a
metaphor for the partial mutual unintelligibility of each person to
others--a situation whose origin indeed remains obscure.
Gabe Eisenstein
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