The Tower of Babylon Incident
In the traditional interpretation of the Tower of Babel incident,
the whole Earth spoke one language. This is one translation of what
you find in Genesis 11:1:
At one time all the people of the world spoke the same language
and used the same words. (NLT)
This is clearly not true. But there are other interpretations that
make more sense. The first interpretation comes from Richard
Fischer in his book Historical Genesis From Adam to Abraham,
1.
Fischer thinks that the translation and interpretation of verse one
is incorrect. Fischer writes that:
These were huge, demanding work projects involving the entire
community. Thus everyone in the land, Shinar (or Sumer), at that
time was talking about it. They were of "one lip". (page 157)
So Fischer proposes that the translation of verse 1 should be:
And the whole land was of one lip and one speech. (page 156)
Fischer also writes:
God caused confusion in their speech however, and the builders
terminated construction and scattered, but their basic language was
unaltered. We know this because inscriptions recovered written in
Canaanite, Amorite, Aramaic, and Assyrian were all in Semitic
dialects. (page 157)
Exactly what "confusion in their speech" means is unclear however.
Another interpretation comes from Jeffrey Goodman in chapter 8 of his book
The Comets of God
2.
Goodman claims that verse 11:1 should be translated as:
And the whole land was of one government and one commander
3.
because the phrase "one lip" was an ancient idiom meaning "one
government". The text then is saying that there was this one large
empire (it was the Akkadian Empire) and it had one dictator in
charge. Now God was unhappy with this empire being so large and so
powerful and so He set out to destroy it using a comet. In 2001, a
crater now called the Amarah crater was discovered in Southern Iraq.
Goodman, using the source of an ancient text titled "The Curse of
Akkad", has this to say:
In The Curse of Akkad the cometary goddess Inanna, the Queen of
Heaven, who like a warrior hastening to his weapon, went forth
against Akkad in battle and combat to attack it. The Curse of
Akkad and related works tell how there were "flashing potsherds
raining from the sky," "many stars falling from the sky," so that
"the raining dust rose sky high."
4
Then, obviously, the destruction of the area by a comet could cause
confusion. Many people would flee the area and that was the end of
the empire.
[Fischer 2008] Fischer, Richard, 2008, Historical Genesis: From Adam to Abraham, http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Genesis-Richard-James-Fischer/dp/0761838074/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402768124&sr=8-1&keywords=richard+fischer+historical+genesis University Press of America, 2008. [Goodman 2010] Goodman, Jeffrey, 2010, The Comets of God, Archeological Research Books LLC. http://www.amazon.com/Comets-God-New-Scientific-Evidence-archeological/dp/0984489126/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371161772&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Comets+of+God, chapter 8. 
|