This essay adds a fourth question to the three posed in No. 203. This is the hardest and the most scandalous as far as modern evangelicals are concerned. Even to raise this issue is to have people get upset and leave the room. It is proof of my total stupidity that I would even entertain the question above.
But then, since evangelicalism is moribund and compromised, I really don’t care if they think I’m stupid. So, I’ll ask the question and try to get real in Genesis one more time.
What was the language at Babel?
The answer to this lies in the chronologies. Adam spoke the language God spoke to him. Adam lived 930 years. He lived 243 years after Methuselah was born, and Methuselah died in the Flood. Adam died 86 years before Noah was born. With these overlapping ages, and all those in between, it is clear that the original God given language could not have changed very much. These long living patriarchs would have had cultural control, and language would not have changed.
Noah lived 600 years before the Flood, speaking this language. Japheth, Shem, and Ham were born about a hundred years before the Flood, and they spoke this language. Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, and Eber (Genesis 11) lived well into the life of Abraham. Shem lived until after the death of Sarah, and Eber outlived Abraham, living beyond the births of Jacob and Esau. For all this demonstrated see my paper, “A Chronological and Calendrical Commentary on the Pentateuch”
One thing that emerges as absolutely certain from all this is that the language originally spoken at the Tower of Babel was the First Language. Of the Hebrews, only the Joktanites were involved at Babel (Genesis 10:30 + 11:2); hence, we may ask whether the language spoken by Shem, Shelah, and the Pelegite Hebrews underwent a miraculous change. It seems more likely to me that this line of people continued to speak the First Language. (On who was at Babel, see “The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on Daniel, chapter 5; published by American Vision, Powder Springs, GA.)
Terah and Abram lived in Ur of the Chaldees, but they were Hebrew descendants of Peleg. Did they speak one of the new languages, or did they speak the First Language, or did they perhaps
speak both? When God appeared to Abram, what language did God speak? Getting real, let me end with this question: Is there any reason to doubt that the First Language was in use at Sinai? Call it proto Hebrew if you must, but what I have set out here is by far the most likely scenario as presented by the Bible. After Acts 2, God has blessed all languages as vehicles for His Word and He is happy to use them all.
Now, this is the kind of thing that drives evangelical scholars bonkers. There is absolutely no way they can hold their heads up high in the academic world and believe anything like this. They laugh it out of court and won’t even think about it. Believe me.
And it is because of this that evangelicals are motivated first of all to thin out the reality of the early parts of Genesis, turning away from the implications, and then eventually to entertain the notion that the early chapters did not happen. First to go is the chronology in Genesis 5 and 11, even though you have to be mad to think that the original author did not intend to provide a chronology here. Really, do you think that the writer of Genesis 5:15-16 intended his hearers to hear this:
Mahalalel lived 65 years and begat one who led down to Jared. And Mahalalel lived 830 years after he begat someone who led down Jared, and he had sons and daughters.
Really? Really? Do you think anybody in the ancient world, hearing this text, would have thought such a thing? You really think that is possible? What have you been smoking? Nobody in the history of the world imagined anything so nutty until the evangelicals came along and were embarrassed by it and decided they had to do something about it. No Jewish tradition reads it this modern way. The ancient Jews did not.
Rather than do the hard work of rethinking the blatant errors of ancient world chronology and geology, the evangelicals as a body (not every individual) took the easy way out and came up with this absurd way of reading Genesis 5. It is really pathetic to see smart scholars advocating such patent nonsense.
Next to go is the creation narrative in Genesis 1. Soon afterwards the global Flood disappears.
(On this, see Richard M. Davidson, Biblical Evidence for the Universality of the Genesis Flood, essay published several places, available on line.) And of course, long ago disappeared the traditional notion that God spoke Hebrew to Adam.
This is why evangelicalism has no future. Once an evangelical gets too radical, as happened recently, he is forced out. But the root causes are not dealt with. The seminaries that drive out a too radical teacher are themselves sorely compromised when compared with the way the Bible has always been read in the church.
On the Hebrew background of other languages, the initial study has been done by Isaac Mozeson in two significant books: The Word: The Dictionary that Reveals the Hebrew Source of English (new edition 2001), and “The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Languages” (2006).
Others have joined Mozeson in his project, though it is still young. I mention this because it provides some extra-Biblical evidence to support what the Bible indicates, that the First Language, which was divided at Babel, was (proto©)Hebrew.
One other note: I have been amazed and dismayed at the ignorance projected by various‘ evangelical seminaries in defense of their positions. We are told that creation science is an invention of the Seventh-Day Adventists and that before they came along nobody believed God made the world in six days, in a worldwide flood, or in the Biblical chronology. This is so stupid that you have to marvel at what drives people to such idiocy. Well, duh, sure, in the 19th century science came along and challenged the Biblical picture of the past. So, duh, at that time some Christian groups began to come up with alternative science models that were faithful to the Biblical picture. The Seventh-Day Adventists were among these, but they were not alone.
Similarly, I have been told that there is no evidence of the Hebrew language before the time of David. This is said with full assurance. Well, I said, consider the books of Moses. These were written later on, even though the gist of them had been known from the time of Moses. This must be true, because Hebrew did not exist in Moses’ day. Hmmm. That’s a completely circular argument. So I ask for evidence. On what basis can we speak of an evolution of something else into Hebrew From Moabite evidence? I was told. Moabite evidence? How much Moabite evidence do we have, and what does this little bitty bit of evidence mean?
This is just plain sad. A few shards and fragments from the ancient world are blown up into a whole system of thought that contradicts the Bible, and evangelicals then buy into it.
It’s time for serious Christians to pack it in as far as the evangelical scholarly world is concerned. We can learn from them here and there, just as we learn from Jews and liberals here and there. But the future does not lie with this compromised religion.