The Tower of Babel (2242 BC) was a post-Flood rebellion against God by Noah’s descendants. God judged them by dividing the single language into multiple language families. As these groups spread out and became isolated, certain features (e.g. skin shade, eye shape) became dominant in certain groups.
There exist a great many confirmations of the Bible’s account of the Tower of Babel and what happened as a result. Language changes, ziggurats, names of Noah found throughout the world, and tower legends are excellent confirmations of the events at Babel.
God’s gentleness in judging the rebels at Babel is a lesson for us today. By changing one language into many, He separated nations more effectively than any Wall of China. God stepped in to prevent the human race from falling under the sway of a single, absolute tyrant over all the earth.
In their efforts to explain the multitude of languages, secular theories come up empty. They are upstaged by the biblical narrative, which credits God with the gift of language and the vast diversity of different language families. The words language, tongue, speech, and word appear in the Bible at least 1,401 times.
“Why do intellectually superior humans have around 7,000 distinct languages?” queries evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. Pagel heads a team searching for an evolutionary explanation for our many languages. The biblical history of the dispersion from the tower of Babel indicates that diversity of language emerged from the area of “a plain in the land of Shinar.”
Like the city of Enoch, Babel was ultimately destroyed and left in ruins. But unlike Enoch, there are archaeological remains of Babel that can be studied today.
In this chapter, we’ll examine the fascinating answers to questions about what happened on the plain of Shinar.
Some people think the Bible justifies their racist attitudes. Yet when we examine what the Bible says about the origin of different people groups, we find a different story.
Did the various families who left Babel leave any trace of their journeys?
The account of the Tower of Babel is under attack like the rest of Genesis 1–11.
Search for evolutionary explanation of languages falls short and lands at Babel.
Linguists lobbying against evolutionary oversimplifications refuse to yield to the authority of statistics
Bodie Hodge provides an answer to a surprisingly often-asked question.
Two separate linguistics studies provide findings consistent with a biblical worldview.
The building of Noah’s Ark is a way to challenge people to accept the truth of God’s Word, and just as important are the other exhibits of the Ark Encounter.
Were people separated at Babel because God miraculously changed the common language?
Nations that once feared God now ignore Him and despise His Word. Not much has changed in the lst four thousand years, since Babel.
How did Native American peoples get to North America after the Flood reduced mankind to eight people in the mountains of Ararat?
“But if universal grammar did not evolve by natural selection, how could it have arisen?” That’s one question posed by a recent study—one we can certainly answer!
View a chart illustrating how Babel explains our differences.
We all have communication challenges from time to time.
The simple answer is that the Bible does not tell us. All we know is that God intervened before the construction project was completed.
The special “Tower of Babel” issue of Answers magazine covers some fascinating aspects of the Babel account as recorded in Genesis 11.
Stories about a time when there was only one language do exist.
New research on the “evolution” of language supports the Bible’s description of all languages having appeared recently.
What we have in Genesis 10 is a general overview of what happened, but then Genesis 11 goes into more detail of why and how the nations were divided according to their languages.
A reader from Arizona asks about how the people spread out over the world after the Flood and about Ussher’s date of creation.
Many years ago a friend of mine said, in response to my biblical challenge to his theistic evolutionary ideas, ‘If God didn’t evolve us from apes, why did He make us to look so much like them?’ I didn
God’s judgment of the Tower of Babel was one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the world. In one moment, a massive, highly complex building project, involving the entire human race, came
One of the great mysteries of life is the origin of language. We use it every day to communicate with each other, but how did it begin?
Praise the Lord we are able to take the creation/gospel message into other languages to restore the truth they once had and preach the true history of the world.
The changes that have occurred in the Indo-European language family, for example, demonstrate that languages follow a 'downhill' simplification in inflections, etc. by natural processes.
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