I’m writing a new book about the truth of the Bible. I’m thinking of it as a graphic novel like my last book, The God Proofs. Young readers seem to like the graphic novel format. Graphic novels are fun to write!
As in The God Proofs, there are two characters, Doubt (D) and Reason (R). (By the way, if you haven’t watched any of the short videos based on The God Proofs, should really should check them out here). I enjoy making Doubt and Reason a little sarcastic.
As I envision it, this new book, for which the working title is “The Bible is True,” will have the characters talking about parts of the Bible that seem strange, parts of the Bible that might cause someone to think the Bible is made up. For me, one of those parts has always been the story of the Tower of Babel in Chapter 11 of Genesis, where God confuses the language of man. I used to think it couldn’t be true, now I know it happened. For the evidence for that, I invite you to read my draft chapter below. This is definitely just a draft, so if you have any questions/comments/suggestions for improvements please let me know.
Thanks for reading.
Doug Ell
DRAFT Chapter – The Tower of Babel
D I’ve got another doubt.
R What?
D Could be silly.
R What?
D The tower of Babel.
R I love that part! It explains the origin of languages and the dispersion of humanity after the Flood. Just so we’re on the same page, let’s review Chapter 11 of Genesis:
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man 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, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them 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 dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
D Seems odd, don’t you think?
R Why?
D Lots of ways. Didn’t language evolve gradually?
R There’s that word “evolve,” the word that hides a universe of ignorance. No linguist has ever come up with an explanation of how the world’s languages arose.
D Seriously?
R Promise. Here’s how one non-religious scientist described the problem:
You could take a gorilla or chimpanzee from its troop and plop it down anywhere these species are found, and it would know how to communicate. You could repeat this with donkeys, crickets or goldfish and get the same outcome. This highlights an intriguing paradox at the heart of human communication. If language evolved to allow us to exchange information, how come most people cannot understand what most other people are saying?
D I didn’t know that! Chimpanzees all have the same language?
R Yes. But there are 7,000 human languages, in different “families” that go back to the tower of Babel.
D Why was the tower built?
R Rebellion against God. After the Flood, God blessed Noah and his family and told them “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.”
D But they didn’t?
R Exactly! They defied God and stayed together. Perhaps they built the tower thinking they could survive if God flooded the Earth again. See that sentence about building a tower using brick and bitumen?
D Yes.
R Archeologists have found excavated stepped temple towers – sometimes called “ziggurats” — in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) made of baked bricks mortared with bitumen, exactly as the Bible tells us was used. Similar ziggurat structures are in Asia and Central America.
D Perhaps memories of the Tower of Babel.
R Exactly! Remember, when we talked about the Flood, how cultures all over the world had memories of it, legends or stories and sometimes even written accounts?
D Yes! Super impressive!
R It’s the same with the Tower of Babel! The Maidu Indians of California have a legend that everybody spoke the same language until during preparations for a special burning ceremony, when “suddenly in the night everybody began to speak in a different tongue except that each husband and wife talked the same language.”
D That does sound like the Tower of Babel.
R Here’s an Aztec legend:
Humanity was wiped out by a flood, but one man Coxcoxtli and one woman Xochiquetzal escaped in a boat, and reached a mountain called Colhuacan. They had many children, who were dumb until the time when a dove on top of a tree made them the gift of languages; but these differed so much that the children could not understand each other.
D Cool!
R The Quiches of Guatemala told of a time when the tribes multiplied and left their old home to a place called Tulan. Here the language changed, and the people sought new homes in various parts of the world because they could not understand each other.
D Are all these stories from the Americas?
R No! A legend of the Wa-Sania tribe in East Africa says
that of old all the tribes of the earth knew only one language, but that during a severe famine the people went mad and wandered in all directions, jabbering strange words, and so the different languages arose.
The Mikir tribe in northeastern India tells of the descendants of Ram who were strong men and were growing dissatisfied with earth and aspired to conquer heaven. They began to build a tower.
Higher and higher rose the building, till at last the gods and demons feared lest these giants should become the masters of heaven, as they already were of earth. So they confounded their speech, and scattered them to the four corners of the world. Hence arose all the various tongues of mankind.
The Greeks had a legend that
for many ages men lived at peace, without cities and without laws, speaking one language, and ruled by Zeus alone. . . . At last Hermes introduced diversities of speech and divided mankind into separate nations.
Polynesians on the island of Hao said that Rata and his three sons survived a great flood. Then
they made an attempt to erect a building by which they could reach the sky, and see the creator god Vatea [Atea]; but the god in anger chased the builders away, broke down the building, and changed their language, so that they spoke diverse tongues.
The Sumerians believed that all people spoke one language, as claimed in the poem “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”:
In those days . . . the whole universe, the people in unison, . . .
Enki, the Lord of abundance, . . .
Changed the speech in their mouths, and [brought?] contention into it,
Into the speech of man that [until then] had been one.
A legend of the Gaikho tribe of Burma (Myanmar) says,
In the days of Pan-dan-man, the people determined to build a pagoda that should reach up to heaven. . . . When the pagoda was half way up to heaven, God came down and confounded the language of the people, so that they could not understand each other. Then the people scattered, and Than-mau-rai, the father of the Gaikho tribe, came west, with eight chiefs, and settled in the valley of the Sitang.
D You can stop now. I get the picture.
R You want evidence, I give evidence.
D That is powerful! Ancient cultures all over the world have memories of the Tower of Babel.
R Noah had three sons — Shem, Ham, Japheth. Names derived from Noah’s sons and grandsons appear in ancient cultures worldwide.
D Cool!
R And there’s the genetic evidence.
D Seriously? There’s genetic evidence the Tower of Babel was a real event?
R Absolutely! Remember we talked about mitochondrial DNA – mtDNA – we get from our mothers, and the Y-chromosome that guys get from their fathers?
D Sure. You keep forgetting. Smarter than the average bear.
R You sure are. The structure of the global Y-chromosome phylogeny, the tree of haplogroups, mirrors quite nicely the branching of Noah’s three sons — Shem, Ham, Japheth — and their descendants in the next chapter of Genesis, Chapter 10.
D Don’t show off.
R What you do you mean?
D A lot of big words in that sentence.
R Sorry. The point is the genetic evidence, from the Y-chromosomes of men all over the world, matches what the Bible tells us occurred after humanity dispersed.
D Got it.
R And here’s something super cool. According to the Bible, after the Tower of Babel groups dispersed by patriarchal lines, meaning that related males moved together. Modern genetics confirms this; there is greater geographic dispersion among mtDNA than in the Y-chromosome.
D Complicated, but I get your point.
R You do?
D The Bible is true.