Genesis 11:1-9 The Tower of Babel
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar* and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel** -because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
* That is, Babylonia
** That is, Babylon; Babel sounds like the Hebrew for confused .
1587, Unknown Flemish Master
Babel. For Hebrews bent on suffering and servitude that tower always had to come down. This symbol of unspeakable, God-taunting hubris – people stacking bricks layer upon layer, reaching up into the sky, speaking one language, presumably even exuding happiness – simply had to be punished. A city, haven of contentment, or merely the beacon of a streamlined, prototype fascist society where the only way is up and the only way out is down? Thus the crumbling of the tower, the confusion of language and the scattering of people across the earth, pending on your point of view, created either an abyss of alienation or a new multicultural garden of Eden.
Babylon. The Greek word for Babel. For the Greeks, a city considered one of the seven wonders of the world yet cursed by the Hebrews, as they wept humiliated and despised sitting by its rivers. None of its beauties, be it the hanging gardens, or the brilliance of its gold could make up for the terrible scourge of enslavement.
The quest for a unifying language that can solve all communication problems is a old one. The Romans clearly believed that the Pax Romana also implied a Lingua Romana, Latin as a common and universal language shared across the empire. Yet, Latin’s uniformity inevitably eroded from within and from without and could not stem the blossoming of numerous vernacular languages across every corner of Europe. Latin, as a language relegated to matters of law and religion, first started to run out of ideas by the late 16th century and eventually also ran out of words. By 1964 the catholic church was ready to promote vernacular in its services. But back in the 12th century, Hildegard already sensed that one day Latin would no longer do and devised her lingua ignota as a new language of divine origins and perhaps an imaginary portal to the masses. Her 900 word catalogue remained buried in a Viennese library for most of 900 years. Recent times saw several attempts at constructing a universal language of which Esperanto is the best known. Yet the new unifying languages, if at all they exist, are the professional medical, scientific and commercial jargons shared across the world, none more explicit than contemporary IT coding languages and txt-speak.
The linguistic chaos that once thrived outside the walls of court or church, now thrives everywhere in a secular world driven by free trade and mass communication. Sadly, many indigenous languages are no longer but on the other hand, regional accents and minority language groups have found a new lease of life. The philosophical underpinning of linguistics and semantics generated a multitude of post-modern theories which have greatly influenced the way we now approach or teach language. Yet most of this was preceded by the weird and wonderful exploits of human imagination (Lewis Caroll and Kurt Schwitters spring to mind) that defy any theory.
© Roland Peelman
