Languages and Ethnicity - 16
Babel separated some and kept some together
When God multiplied mankind’s languages at Babel, it not only divided the peoples of the earth, but it also served to keep families together. After all, he did not remove children from their parents at Babel.
God did not give every person his own individual language. If that were the case, every man could only to talk to himself. At that point, no language would be necessary, for one can carry on a conversation with oneself without uttering a word. What I’m saying is that thousands upon thousands of languages did not come out of Babel, but far fewer.
How many different languages did God make? Today it is estimated that there are 6,900. However, of those 6,900 languages, the amount of language families1 is considered much less, somewhere between 94 and 120.2
Some Biblical interpreters maintain the number of languages first created comes from Genesis Chapters 10 and 11. This portion of Scripture is referred to as the Table of Nations. There are seventy different names mentioned in the list.3 And the names are listed as to ethnicity not as to individual persons. What does this mean?
George Rawlinson writes, “It may therefore be assumed, both from the cast of the passage itself, and from the light thrown on it be the rest of Scripture, that the object of the author of the tenth chapter of Genesis was to give us, not a personal genealogy, but a sketch of the interconnection of races. Shem, Ham, and Japheth are no doubt persons, the actual sons of the patriarch Noah; but it may be doubted whether there is another name in the series which is other than ethnic.”4
Rawlinson is not saying that no person ever existed by the name(s) Moses records, but rather that Moses use of the name had more to do with the people descended from that person or the geographical location those descendants were identified with.
Rawlinson says this of Genesis 10, “The document is in fact the earliest ethnographical essay that has come down to our times. It is a summary, like those which may be found in Bunsen’s ‘Philosophy of History’ or Max Müller’s ‘Survey of Languages,’ arranging the chief known nations of the earth into an ethnographic scheme.”5
This supports the idea that the ethnical lines marked out by the names of Genesis 10, could very well have been based on God changing languages.
Bill Cooper, author of the book, After the Flood, writes:
The Table of Nations had listed all the families and tribes of mankind in their correct groupings, whether those groupings were ethnological, linguistic or geographical.6
Cooper mentions the “seventy nations” as the number of people groups that Moses identifies in history. They were separated from one another and yet Moses still branched them back to Shem, Ham and Japheth. The Table of Nations was not necessarily language-based, or only language based, however language differences played a part in how they became separate entities.
Bodie Hodge suggests the families mentioned in Genesis 10 are directly representative of the language families7 that were separated at Babel. It is likely because of the sentences found throughout the chapter (v. 5; 20; 31).
Here is how those verses read:
Genesis 10:5 of Japheth’s descendants, “From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.”
Genesis 10:20 of Ham’s descendants, “These are the sons of Ham, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.”
Genesis 10:31 of Shem’s, “These are the sons of Shem, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.”
And then also the end of the chapter concludes, “These are the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations, and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.”8
Hodge believes, “The total minimum number of languages that may have come out of Babel according to Genesis 10 may have been at least 78, assuming Noah, Ham, Shem, Japheth, and Peleg did not receive a new language.”9
What is important to my purpose is that we factor into our history both ethnicity, which is genealogical, but also the fact that God confused the tongues even of people who shared a common ethnicity. After which time, people migrated out from the east (where Babel was) and away from others who now spoke foreign languages. These separated peoples began to build new societies around their common tongues. It was pretty much practical.
So then, ethnicity did not begin with Babel, but it was arguably strengthened by it. When God confused the tongues, He in essence built verbal walls around families of people. Simultaneously, those verbal walls kept out families of people who spoke foreign languages.
A people’s language glues them together, and as they multiply and teach their descendants the tongue of the community, that community gradually spreads into the land around them. This is an oversimplification, but the general idea is correct.
Try communicating with a foreigner. We often equate that word foreigner with differences according to nationality - where a person is from. And that is not totally wrong. However, nations usually developed according to people groups (original families and their descendants) who shared a language.
One such language family is the Germanic language. From that language root developed English, Swedish, German, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Austrian, Icelandic and more.
This includes groupings of sign languages and constructed languages. These family languages figures come from Vista World Languages and Cultures and Ethnologue. Both are cited in Hodge, Bodie, Tower of Babel, The Cultural History of Our Ancestors, p. 68.
https://asknoah.org/faq/70nations
Rawlinson, George, The Origin of Nations, p. 168. Also, it should be pointed out that Rawlinson uses the word “race” and the word “ethnicity” as interchangeable. It was common throughout history to utilize those words synonymously. It is modern history that has turned race into something based on physical (observable) traits.
Rawlinson, p. 169.
Cooper, Bill, After the Flood: The early post-flood history of Europe traced back to Noah, New Wine Press, United Kingdom, 1995. p. 38-39.
Hodge refers to them as root languages on page 73 of Tower of Babel, The Cultural History of Our Ancestors.
Genesis 10:32
Hodge, p. 68.