The creativity inherent in the language capacity is the engine that lies behind language diversification. As Adam began to name the animals, the language began to change. (32)
Comment: When Adam named the animals, he needed to create new words. Thus language is creative by its very nature. However, no matter how creative it is, Adam was still using the same language. This kind of creativity is categorically different from that of God's diversification of language in Gen 11.
Humans are not just language users, they are more fundamentally language makers (Harris 1980, i). As a social practice that is handed down from one generation to the next, a language is constantly changing as each new generation makes the language its own. Throughout history, when peoples who do not share a language have come into extended contact, they have solved the communication problem by making a rudimentary language called a pidgin (McWhorter 2003, 132–37). Then when that language is learned by children as their native language, they make it into a full blown language through a process called creolization (McWhorter 2003, 212–14, 137ff). (32)
Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God… He also gradually changed the government into tyranny; seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his own power. (Antiquities 1.4.2, Whiston, William, trans. The Works of Flavius Josephus. 1737. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/index.html.)
Nimrod is a character introduced in the preceding chapter of the biblical text (Gen. 10:8-12). There he is identified as the builder of an empire that began with Babel and extended to other cities in Shinar and Assyria. Influential Christian thinkers like Augustine, Luther, and Calvin continued to name him as the tyrant who instigated the building of the tower (Hiebert 2007a, 131, 132, 135) (37)
The Babelite declaration of “Come, let us make bricks” may sound to a modern reader like the beginnings of a benign communal building project. However, it must have had a very different ring to the original readers of the Torah who would have been attuned to the intertextual connections between Genesis 11 and Exodus 1 (Smith 1996; Smith and Carvill 2000, 215–16; Sherman 2013, 58–60). In addition to the prominence of bricks in both stories (Gen. 11:3, Ex. 1:14), the “Come, let us…” formula that is used in the Hebrew text to announce the plan of the tower builders (Gen. 11:3, 4) is also used by Pharaoh (Ex. 1:10) to announce his solution to the problem of the growing Hebrew population. (37-38)
The word that is most commonly translated as “language” in the opening sentence is the Hebrew word saphah. The primary meaning of this word is “lip” as a body part. In other occurrences where saphah is translated as “language” or “speech,” it refers to the content of what is said, rather than to the language as a system (Gousmett 2018, 42–43). The usual Hebrew word for a language is lashon “tongue” and that is the term used in Genesis 10 in naming the descendants of Noah by their “clans and languages”. The seeming discrepancy between chapters 10 and 11 can be solved if the “one lip” is taken to be a lingua franca that makes it possible for people of different “tongues” to communicate (Hamilton 1990, 350; Marlowe 2011?, 30). As explained by Cyrus Gordon, a major proponent of this interpretation, “the meaning is that while the component ethnic elements of the International Order had their speech for family and ethnic communication, there was an international lingua franca that made communication possible so that great projects like the Tower of Babel could be constructed” (Gordon 1988, 295). (38-39)
Christoph Uehlinger’s (1990) monograph on the exegesis of Genesis 11:1-9, World Empire and “One Speech”, establishes the context for such an interpretation by investigating the rhetoric of empire in the written records of ancient Mesopotamia. He finds that three of the motifs found in the Babel story — one speech, city building, and making a name for oneself — are also recurring themes in the ideology of Mesopotamian kingship.... (39)
Against this backdrop, we can identify a third major way of reading the Babel story — as a tale of domination and deliverance. In this reading, the sin that needed to be addressed was the act of dominating diverse peoples through imperial power that sought to stop their scattering and to rule them through a common language. (39)
Many modern scholars have embraced the interpretation that Babel is a story of the oppression of dominated peoples (Klingler 2004; Green 2008, 209-11; Marlowe 2011; Kim 2013, 108-9), including those from the global South where the domination of local peoples by imperial powers from the global North characterizes their recent history (Croatto 1998?; Miguez-Bonino 1999?; Andiñach 2016?). (40)
“God’s will for his creation is diversity rather than homogeneity. Ethnic pluralism is to be welcomed as a divine blessing” (Anderson 1978, 75). (as quited on p. 41)
Anderson, Bernhard W. “Unity and Diversity in God’s Creation: A Study of the Babel Story.” Currents in Theology and Mission 5, no.2 (1978): 69–81.
? = missing in the original references or insistant information