Problems with Language - Reflections on Genesis 11:1-9, Pentecost, Year C
by JOhn C. Holbert on Friday, April 11, 2025
I have always been a lover of languages, my native language, English, of course, as well as a host of modern and ancient tongues. My graduate work in the Hebrew Bible required ability in three past languages—Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic—and at least two modern ones—French and German. I tackled each of these with genuine pleasure and added a few more as the need arose. Genesis 11 tells a mythic tale about the origin of languages as a gift, or a curse, from YHWH.
Before examining the story, we would do well to acquaint ourselves with the language realities of an Israel of long ago. Hebrew was only one of a host of Western Semitic tongues that were spoken in and around the hills and valleys of that ancient land. There surely was some form of Philistine speech, used by the inhabitants of the coastal areas of the Mediterranean, uttered by peoples who had originated in the islands of the eastern sea sometime in the 12th-11th centuries BCE. The Canaanites lived in the land before later “Israel” showed up and had their own speech, probably something like the language of the Syrian coast, further north, whose written tablets were discovered in 1929 and that we name Ugaritic, employing many words we find in later Hebrew. And then there were the languages of the eastern regions, Akkadian spoken and written by the various cultures of the Mesopotamian valley and Aramaic that became the common tongue of commerce beginning in the 9th-8th centuries BCE. And no doubt there were a host of dialects unique to various groups of people scattered throughout the area. It must have been a jumble of tongues, a polyglot of babble hard to imagine in our modern American world. However, I am reminded of an East Indian couple I knew in my graduate school days who announced to me that in their own country, where they both were taxi drivers, it was necessary for them to converse in at least eight different languages if they were to be successful in their work. Clearly, their linguistic lives were far closer to those of ancient Israel than my essentially monolingual one!
Languages must have been a mysterious reality for those ancient people. Hence, the famous story of the tower of Babel. The usual emphasis of the story is on the dangers of human presumption and the technology that they use to attempt god-like feats of power. Though that is a crucial rationale for the story, the intricate uses of language itself speaks to the delight the narrator finds in the multiplicity of tongues that ensues from the presumptuous building of a great tower, with “its top in the sky” (Gen.11:4). He well knew the profusion of languages of his day, and devised the tale to explain just why that was so. But in creating this fabulous story, the writer could not resist employing many puns and word games to spice it up.
The builders of the tower say, “Come, let us bake bricks,” while God says in response, “Come, let us go down (God cannot even quite see the supposed vast building from where God lives, but must “go down” to catch a glimpse!). The builders are concerned “lest we be scattered,” and God scatters them! Indeed, the word for “language” occurs five times in the short narrative, also the phrase “all the earth.” As Robert Alter says, “The prose turns language itself into a game of mirrors.” (Alter, The Five Books of Moses, 2004, 59). Again and again, words in the story flow into one another: “bitumin” (Hebrew cheimar) turns into “mortar” (Heb. chomer). The repeated word “there” (sham) is the first syllable of “sky” (shamayim) and is an echo of “name” (shem). And of course the central pun of the story is Babel, the name of the tower, the result of which YHWH “makes the language of all the earth ‘babble’” (Gen.11:9) The verb here is balal, to “mix or confuse,” certainly a nasty crack at the Akkadian word “Babel,” meaning something like “gate of the god,” a clear reference to the famous city, Babylon, the capital of one of the great empires of the ancient world.
The entire narrative is nothing less than a play of languages, a drama that both explains why so many languages exist but also does so by demonstrating just how languages can, in fact, be a source of play! This author knows well the power of language, its flexibility, and its sheer fun, but he also knows that language can be corrupted for dangerous purposes, where language can become a source of hubris, an anti-God device to deny the influence of God as a check on human pretensions. Just as in the garden, the humans think they can “become God,” so here with a common tongue they imagine they may again do the same.
So in Gen.11 languages become a way of separating people intent on usurping divine power by technological means. The languages of the period become a way to prevent human unity that can lead to disastrous consequences. Of course, in our own time, similar dangers may be noted. Whenever an immigrant student is ridiculed for speaking a first language, be it Choctaw or Spanish or Polish, and is forced to speak English only, there may be seen the power of language to enforce conformity and to deny the value and wonders of diversity. Whenever a US American tourist demands that her requests for help be responded to in her native English, though she is traveling in France or Thailand or Bali, the power of language demand rears its dangerous head.
On the day of Pentecost, that day when Peter preached a sermon to the assembled folks in Jerusalem, we learn that “each there heard his words in their own language.” In other words, languages were no longer a barrier to full understanding and communication; the separation of languages at Babel was overcome by the power of the Spirit of God at Pentecost. But note: Peter’s speech was in his language, while all there heard what he was saying in their tongue. A miracle? Certainly, but the greater miracle was that every language was prized that day, as it should be in our own.