AFTER BABEL

There are around 7,000 distinct languages in the world today (Ethnologue.com). According to Genesis 11, Noah’s three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth were the forefathers of three divisions of languages. However, these groups represent only a fraction of today’s languages. Obviously, Genesis 11 is only a sampling of them. 

Shem is said (Genesis 10.21) to be the ancestor of all the Hebrews. His descendants lived in different countries, with tribes (groups of people most often defined according to their patriarchs) that spoke their own individual languages. (Genesis 10.31).

After Noah became drunk and Ham dishonored him, Noah pronounced a curse on Ham's youngest son, Canaan. Of Ham's four sons, Canaan fathered the Canaanites [northwestern Semitic], while Mizraim fathered the Egyptians, Cush the Cushites [some African groups], and Phut the Libyans[primarily Arabic]. Hamitic includes the Berber, Cushitic, and Egyptian branches of the Afroasiatic language family. This family, together with the Semitic branch, was formerly called "Hamito-Semitic".

Some Muslim traditions claim that 36 languages can be traced back to Japheth, including the Turks, Khazars (a nomadic Turkic people), Chinese (actually Sino-Tibetan), Mongols (Altaic and a distinct family), and Slavs.

However, it takes a bold (or wild) interpretation and classification to demonstrate that most of today’s languages have descended from Shem, Ham, or Japheth. 

In Genesis 1.2, we read that God “commanded” that there be light. What language did he speak? In Genesis 2.16, God places a man in the garden, and he speaks to him. The man must have understood God. What language did they use? The man names all the animals—in Hebrew? God makes a woman, and they obviously speak the same language.

In Genesis 3, we read about the snake that God made, and the snake talks to the woman, and in v. 8, we read that God talks to the man. They converse, but in what language? 

Now, skip to Genesis 11, where “At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words.” Really, or could that be hyperbole, simply based on what the writer knew at the time? Did the writer know anything about the languages of Australia or North and South America? 

The result was the big bang of language dissemination, following when God said, “Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.  So the Lord scattered them all over the earth….”

The account in Genesis 11 must be very old. Languages take time to diverge, and people migrate from place to place, taking their languages with them. Was the language of Adam and Eve, Noah, and the pre-flood people Hebrew? Jewish midrash stories claim it was. Remember, we are talking about language before writing came into existence. (Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian are the oldest languages with a clear written record.) However, “The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity.” (Internet)

Language families are highly diverse; for example, Indo-European includes some 449 languages, including most of the groups in Europe and southern Asia. There are ten known branches or subfamilies, two of which are extinct (Tocharian divisions). The ancestral population and speakers of proto-Indo-European are estimated to have lived about 4500 BC.

In the Pacific area, where Joice and I worked, the main groups of languages are Austronesian, comprising some 1,257 languages, and Papuan, some 1,100 languages, of which 750 are spoken in PNG. A note on Wikipedia says, “Trans–New Guinea is perhaps the third-largest language family in the world by number of languages. The core of the family is considered established, but its boundaries and overall membership are uncertain. The languages are spoken by around 3 million people. There have been several main proposals as to its internal classification.” Kewa is part of this large group, but on a more mundane level, it is part of the Engan language family, described by Joice and me some 50 years ago.

There are 147 or so language families in the world, and 7 of them are considered major. However, some 120 or so languages do not fit easily within a family classification and are called isolates. Basque is probably the best known and has about 750,000 speakers.

The “mixing up” of the languages described in Genesis 11 was highly effective, and the mixing is still going on.

Karl Franklin