We Babble On

It's one of the more embarrassing memories I have. It was almost nine years ago now. I was in Greece, and I was making my way to the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, where I'd gotten special clearance to stay in the monasteries for a few days as a pilgrim. Early one Thursday morning, in the darkness, I'd taken a 5:30 bus from Thessaloniki two hours north to Ouranoupoli, where I'd picked up my pass (my diamontirion) and bought a ferry ticket at another office – the only way to the Holy Mountain is by boat. By the time that ferry reached the port of Dafni on the mountain's coast, it was quarter past noon, and all I needed to do was find another boat to the monastery. Only, I stepped off the first boat and realized that nothing was labeled and that most of the people milling around me couldn't understand a word I was saying. No longer could I assume everybody knew at least a few words of English. And my Greek wasn't good enough to get by. Eventually, someone directed me to a portly fellow in a cafe who understood me enough to grasp my need. He pointed me to a boat I'd passed back and forth a few times – a boat which had just pulled away, and which apparently sold its tickets on board, rather than prior to boarding like all the others. As I prepared to ask what other options I had, he made a pair of calls. Port police arrived, escorting me back to the dock to look at the departing boat – which was circling back for me. As a man on the back called out for an explanation, the port policeman pointed to me and, in an unmistakable tone, simply yelled: “Amerikano!” The results of a language barrier can be most mortifying.  

(Things were somewhat better once I was in the monasteries; I had good conversations with a couple American-born monks, I overheard a guestmaster use a bit of English to communicate with some Romanian pilgrims, and even my roommate at one monastery, a Russian Orthodox seminarian visiting from Moscow, spoke English well enough to bridge the gap.)

But back to the present, and better days. These past couple weeks, we've been exploring the opening verses of Genesis 11, the story of people who settle on the Sumerian plain and decide to bake bricks and build a city and a tower rising all the way to the sky. We've heard how the Babylonians thought of their city as maybe older than the gods themselves, but even if not, then at least built by gods for gods in the days of creation. That's certainly not the picture Genesis has, where this city's built by humans long after creation. We've considered the city as a political project, the beginning of a kingdom where men lord it over others. We've considered the city as a new kind of civilization, aiming to establish its own brand of truth and justice, although inevitably “iniquity and trouble are within it, ruin is in its midst, oppression and fraud don't depart from its marketplace” (Psalm 55:10-11). And we've considered the tower, a ziggurat meant to be a staircase for gods to descend to their temples on earth, as a religious project, the dawning of idolatry and its way of looking at the world.

At this point, we read that “the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of humanity have built” (Genesis 11:5). But there we've stopped, waiting to find out if he has anything to say, now that the action is shifting his way. And he sure does. The story started with a background note, asking us as readers to imagine that “the whole earth had one lip and one words” (Genesis 11:1). Now God calls our attention back to that: “Behold, one people, and one lip is for all of them” (Genesis 11:6). One lip, one language – ]we know, at some point in human history, there must have been just “one original language.”¹ And that's certainly no bad thing: “One single language was right for humble people.”² Certainly they could then “take proper advantage of their common language” to do good to each other, to foster understanding and harmony and virtue.³ Even this great city would make an awesome “institutional base from which to carry out man's mission in the world.”⁴

This 'one people' is equipped not just with “one lip,” but also with “one words,” maybe 'few words' (Genesis 11:1), “a particular uniformity of speech and writ.”⁵ Some linguists contend that “our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world.”⁶ Well, this one language gives this one people a “common understanding of the world” to share.⁷ But “a language can only give us a partial glimpse of reality, selected by the categories of that language.”⁸ So this one common understanding can only ever be incomplete, expressing a vision of the world that differs in some crucial ways from the world. And the fact that they have 'one words' could reflect there being just a few limited ideas – that, for all their aspirations, they've come to be uncreative and unreflective, as they all think about the same things in the same ways.⁹ No wonder, as they build their city and tower, that, unlike God surveying his creation, then never stop to see whether or not it's good.¹⁰

So suppose they finish it that way. Suppose God pats them on the back and walks away. It's a civilizational project that, by its very nature, will limit the people's ability to imagine anything outside this direction they've embarked on. If humanity stays just one people with a limited frame of reference, then who will ever rub idea on idea to spark a flame, when their whole system is designed to “limit the emergence of new ideas,”¹¹ to keep humanity “trapped in an echo chamber of its own design?”¹² How can their vision not become “a hermetically sealed shadow world cut off from what is real,” where “self-examination... would be impossible?”¹³ The city's also a political project bent on securing and keeping dominance. But a universal politics, which addicts its subjects and doesn't let them imagine a different world, “would have no effective source of opposition.”¹⁴ If this one-world empire faces no challenges, it can reign in eternal tyranny, their boots grinding humanity forever into the dirt under new suns. And this is a religious project that directs people to gods who can be cajoled down to barter in a world where dead idols are pampered while live children starve. If that's worldwide, if that same religiosity fills the earth, then humanity's soul will be chained by covenant unending with death. Early Christians wondered how a child taught its language by idolaters could avoid learning idolatrous habits, when “in that milieu he heard his earliest words and sucked in that falsehood with his mother's milk.”¹⁵

Such a city and tower are what “they have begun to do, and now,” says God, “all that they devise to do will not be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6). As one people with one language and one agenda, they can harness the entirety of human effort in the same direction all at once. When our Amish neighbors raise a barn, it's the power of their whole community poured into it, hence its swift achievement. But what could we raise with the mind and muscle of the whole human race? That's what Genesis invites us to wonder. What God sees when he looks down the road from here is “the prospect of unrestrained human powers exercised in support of unlimited imaginings and desires.”¹⁶ Suppose that, for the last four thousand years, we'd been harnessing the total human effort into furthering medicine. All the resources and attention wasted on other squabbles, poured into that instead. Would any cure have been withheld from us? Or suppose today, Earth put everything we have into finding a way to settle Mars. With the full backing of a world at peace, would that be withheld from us once we'd dreamed it and schemed it? Eventually, we'd surely make a way.

The possibilities are as endless as human desire. No wonder God judges that “nothing will succeed in checking their impulse,”¹⁷ that human beings “will not allow themselves to be turned away from what they have undertaken.”¹⁸ It sounds like quite the compliment. But imagine what it means if “anything that is good or evil will be within their grasp.”¹⁹ It's one thing for an angry caveman to go on a mass clubbing spree, a worse thing for his descendant today to be a mass shooter, and worse still to hand him some nuclear launch codes. More power without more virtue, more know-how without more wisdom, is a recipe for disaster. What God sees is that “the more power they are able to concentrate, the more harm they will be able to do to themselves and the world.”²⁰ There's no question that we'd “use the leverage of unity to magnify the human capacity for evil” – it's just what we do.²¹ If our dreams are unlimited, what about our nightmares?

All we seem to want, irrespective of consequences, is that “all that we devise to do will not be withheld from us” (Genesis 11:6). That language shows up just one other place in the Bible, when “Job answered the LORD and said, 'I know that you can do all things, and that your device cannot be withheld from you'” (Job 42:1-2).²² This is God's sole right, to irresistibly accomplish his plan. That's what we're demanding: in refusing to believe in words like 'impossible' or 'no,' humanity is grasping after a collective godhood.²³ If we could get hold of it, humanity would be a corrupt god loose in the universe. No wonder God sees already in this city and tower a “harmony that was full of harm.”²⁴ This one-track human ambition not only threatens humanity's humanity, but it poses “a great threat to the earth,” and beyond.²⁵ As one writer put it, “neither the earth will put up with it nor will the heavens bear to behold” what nightmarish hells an unlimited sinful race will crack open.²⁶

Later Babylonians had a saying: “If a city's top rises into the sky, that city will be abandoned; if a city's top rises into the sky like a mountain peak, that city will be turned to rubble; if cities rise into the sky like clouds, they will experience misfortune.”²⁷ God won't stand for it. So here he prepares “to foil the contrivance of their mad undertaking.”²⁸ If before “a man said to a companion, 'Come, let us brick bricks..., Come, let us build a city'” (Genesis 11:3-4), now God mimics them in heaven: “Come, let us go down and mix there their language, that a man not understand the lip of a companion” (Genesis 11:7). Which is exactly what he does: “the LORD mixed the lip of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). It's a weird turn of phrase, to 'mix' a lip or a language – it's a term you'd use in baking for mixing different ingredients together.²⁹ Middle Eastern kings used that phrase to describe forcibly resettling people into a city and integrating them into the existing population, which is the opposite of what God is up to.³⁰ Here, God mixes new ways of talking into the flour of the human experience.³¹

It's fitting, because when God says 'Let us mix,' 'Let us confuse,' it's spelled almost just like the word for 'brick' spelled backwards, suggesting that God will “unbrick what they brick,” deconstructing not their tower and their city but the language building-blocks that are holding up the very foundations.³² So here “the laws of language were torn apart,”³³ “their common speech became a babble of tongues.”³⁴ Taking this at face value, it must've seemed to them like “they began speaking nonsense, like insane people, to one another.”³⁵ As a result, “they were dispersed through their diversity of languages.”³⁶ “So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8), breaking up their united peoplehood and exiling them from the safe haven they'd tried to build themselves.³⁷ This city can't be their artificial Eden; they're sent every which way. The word 'mix' makes sense now: it's a blender without a lid, whirling and spattering humanity everywhere.³⁸ It was everything the city was supposed to stop (Genesis 11:4). In trying to stave off their worst fears, they guaranteed those fears. So naturally, “they stopped building the city” (Genesis 11:8). Why bother any longer?

“Therefore, its name is called...” (Genesis 11:9). The Bible is written so brilliantly. The word for 'name,' shem, sounds like the word for 'there,' sham, which itself is the first syllable of the word for 'heaven,' shamayim. The people settled in sham and wanted to build a tower all the way to shamayim so they could make their own shem; what results is that from shamayim, God comes down and judges them from sham, so that everyone imposes a shem on the city.³⁹ God cancels out the shem they meant to place and gives them the exact opposite of what they'd prayed for.⁴⁰ It's “poetic justice” – literally.⁴¹ Hence “they called its name 'Babel'” (Genesis 11:9).

The Babylonians hinted that Babel was named from its mighty rivers that enriched the soil and channeled the commerce of all the land their way, since their word for 'to channel' was babali.⁴² The Bible hits back and says Babel gets its name “because from there the LORD scattered them” (Genesis 11:9). The real flow doesn't channel the world to Babel but away from Babel, dislodging and impoverishing the city.⁴³ The Babylonians also bragged that Babel was bab-ili, 'the gate of the gods.' They therefore postured as “Babylon the pure,”⁴⁴ “the pure city.”⁴⁵ But in Hebrew, babel sounds a lot like balal, 'mix'.⁴⁶ Instead of an orderly gathering of gods, Babel is all scrambled. In fact, this word for 'mixed' leads to a Hebrew word for 'perversion,' mixtures like incest and bestiality (Leviticus 18:23; 20:12) – so far from being a 'pure city,' it's a disgustingly perverted city.⁴⁷

Not only does 'Babel' now refer to people being channeled away instead of channeled in, not only does 'Babel' denote a perverted scramble instead of a pure city where gods gather, but when God announces, “Let us mix,” that word is spelled the same in Hebrew as the word for 'foolishness.'⁴⁸ While they're pretending to be “Babylon which diffuses wisdom,”⁴⁹ God pronounces them the city of foolishness – not to mention that babel sounds a bit like mabbul, the Flood!⁵⁰ These intricate puns pile up, “bursting Babel's bubble of bombast.”⁵¹

So it's no surprise people read this as a straightforward story of “God's punishment” on human “audacity and impiety.”⁵² First, God “let them toil and labor” on the pointless project, letting them waste their efforts to teach them a lesson.⁵³ Second, God gave humanity newfound limitations, yielding “an enormous impediment to human labors.”⁵⁴ And third, what God does severs the social bonds keeping the one people together. The Apostle Paul said, “There are doubtless many different languages in the world, and none is without meaning, but if I don't know the meaning of the language, I'll be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker will be a foreigner to me” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11). Down through history, differences in language have often stoked “fear of foreigners.”⁵⁵ Once people saw each other as foreigners, “war broke out among them on account of the divisions that the languages brought among them.”⁵⁶ From then on, this judgment became “the most ruinous plague in human affairs..., the beginning and seedbed of all evils and discords.”⁵⁷ (My quest for the ferry at Dafni wasn't quite that dramatic, but the language barriers that made me a foreigner sure plagued me!)

But the early Christians saw another side, too: how, even in this, God “is entirely mercy to his creation.”⁵⁸ We needed help breaking out of the self-made cage we loved! God's intervention brought “a holy gift,” that an empire of sin “should not once more contaminate all people and make the offense general.”⁵⁹ God wanted “to make it impossible for them to form a dangerous unity” that could hurt us in the future.⁶⁰ Divided, we're limited in the good we can do, but we're also more limited in the amount of evil we can do.⁶¹ We're practiced enough in bringing nightmares to life as it is; God has kindly spared us from the nightmare of a world dreaming one invincible woe. He's stolen from us the strength we'd claimed to thrust all things down into hellfire.

In the process, “the mercy of the Lord appeared among their tribes and relieved those who were afflicted by their deeds.”⁶² Having been under the thumb of this political project, the forced laborers find great relief when the language of propaganda and control is shattered.⁶³ The tongue of tyrants' command being tangled, it can't demand allegiance from the uncomprehending masses any more.⁶⁴ The fall of this prospective one-world empire liberates the downtrodden, so that they can't be enslaved forever.

And since “habits of speech can create habits of mind,”⁶⁵ with all these new languages God introduces “into the drama of humanity different ways of thinking about and engaging with the world.”⁶⁶ So “a great variety of customs, religions, and ideas arose because of the diversity of languages.”⁶⁷ As one philosopher puts it: “a thousand gardens must bloom in order to avoid the flowers of evil becoming the world's monocultured crop.”⁶⁸ In setting human thought free to bloom in all colors, God “forced them to advance to a better state..., a good and beneficial discord.”⁶⁹ He breaks the level surface as if plowing and planting, summoning a new shoot of hope. Now peoples “each have their own language with the resources provided by the Lord,”⁷⁰ so that “with the tongues, as with gold, he made them rich.”⁷¹ There's a rich beauty to all these different words and thoughts, with “over seven thousand languages in existence today,”⁷² all born from older languages through change.⁷³

But those left behind in Shinar resented sorely the burden of Babel. They dreamed of a day when “the lands of Shubur and Hamazi, as well as twin-tongued Sumer..., together with Akkad... and even the land Martu, resting in green pastures, yea, the whole world of well-ruled people, will be able to speak to Enlil in one language! For on that day... shall Enki... change the tongues in their mouth, as many as he once placed there, and the speech of mankind shall be truly one!”⁷⁴ Impatient, empires down through history have tried to make it happen, often imposing a preferred language, a lingua franca, that can be shared by many peoples – today, English functions as the world's major lingua franca (as even my time on Mount Athos illustrates). But that's often happened by force: one Roman citizen said that “the imperial city has taken pains to impose on her subjugated peoples not only her yoke but also her language..., but at what cost this was achieved: all those terrible wars, all that human slaughter, all that human bloodshed!”⁷⁵

God warned Israel about this long before, that if they were faithless, he'd “bring a nation against you from far away..., a nation whose tongue you don't understand” (Deuteronomy 28:49). And that's exactly what happened when he called Babel against Judah for her sins. Babel was “a nation from afar..., a nation whose tongue you do not know, nor can you understand what they say” (Jeremiah 51:5). And in exile, they had to learn “the language of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4). Even after resettling their homeland, “half their children... could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people” (Nehemiah 13:24). Early Judaism had to adapt, translating their Scriptures into Greek and explaining them in the synagogues in Aramaic.

It was into that situation that God sent his Son, the same Lord who had inspired Adam's language and scrambled the languages at Babel.⁷⁶ He was born into a multilingual Galilee where he and his apostles would've spoken Aramaic on a regular basis, Greek often, read Hebrew as needed, and used a bit of Latin here or there.⁷⁷ In such languages he ministered, not with wordless songs of angels, but with grammar and syntax like ours, nouns and verbs and adjectives people could understand. And when at last he went to the cross for us, at the top was a sign “in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek” (John 19:19-20). He died under the banner of the many languages of Babel to “ransom people for God from every... language” (Revelation 5:9).

But the Lord didn't stay dead. He rose from the grave, he ascended into heaven, and he told his disciples to wait for a new power to come. And then it was Pentecost morning. Just as Jews imagined that “the LORD sent a great wind upon the tower” that stretched toward heaven,⁷⁸ and that “the winds cast down the great tower from on high,”⁷⁹ so in this city “there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind” (Acts 2:2). The rushing wind hadn't come this time to cancel the one sound of human defiance, but to herald the LORD come down to build something new. “And there appeared to them dividing tongues as of fire..., and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:3-4), with “no foreign speech beyond their powers of comprehension.”⁸⁰ As a crowd gathered, visitors from every nation, “they were confused” – just like the people at Babel⁸¹ – “because each one was hearing them speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). The message bridged every Babel-divide, for “we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:11), as “every tongue among the people was confessing Christ and speaking of his mysteries.”⁸²

Babel is happening in reverse! “The spirit of pride fragmented language, and the Holy Spirit gathered dispersed languages into one!”⁸³ The upper room where the Spirit came down “is exalted even more than Babel,” had “conquered Babel in the benevolent speech of all tongues,” by becoming “a school for the sons of the light.”⁸⁴ What was built was a single people, the Church; and just as some Jews read Genesis as teaching that the people at Babel were originally “united in possessions, what one possessed being at the others' disposal,”⁸⁵ so this church was “together... and had all things in common” (Acts 2:44).⁸⁶ In time, this people grew troubled, as “a complaint by the Greek-speakers arose against the Hebrew-speakers” over unfair treatment (Acts 6:1). But “there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). And just as the first scattering had a silver lining in filling the earth, so now “those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). They “traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch” (Acts 11:19), but that was only the beginning of what God had begun to do in them – and all that Christ desired would not be withheld from them.

“If he had given his Good News to the world in a single language, only a single people would have received it to be made disciples; but now that he has given it abundantly in all tongues, all peoples of the earth have lovingly longed for it.”⁸⁷ By the close of the second century, we're told of “many nations” who “are barbarians with respect to their language but, as regards doctrine and practices and conduct, they are most wise and pleasing to God on account of the faith.”⁸⁸ Thus, “each one according to his language prays to God and sings his praises as he is able, and the Lord of Every Language hears those who pray in every language as though he were hearing one utterance.”⁸⁹ These were centuries of Scripture “spreading far and wide through translation into a variety of other languages” so that it “came to the knowledge of the nations for their salvation.”⁹⁰ By the late fourth century, Gospels had been “translated to the language” of “Syrians and Egyptians and Indians and Persians and Ethiopians and countless other nations,”⁹¹ a priest from the Balkans could celebrate German Goths “scrutinizing the utterances of the Holy Spirit” in their language,⁹² and a Spanish bishop could say that “Latium, Egypt, Athens, and Thracians, Arabians, Spaniards acknowledge God; the Holy Spirit understands all languages.”⁹³ “All these tongues express the one faith..., all tongues preach the same wisdom, the same doctrine and discipline,” but “however great the variety of languages, it is one and the same gold that is preached.”⁹⁴

Missionaries from France and Ireland brought a new mission to the island of Britain, gradually raising up poets and leaders in its various languages and translating the basic confessions and prayers of the faith into Old English.⁹⁵ In the ninth century, God raised up a pair of brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, who used their powerful language skills and prayer to evangelize the Slavic peoples, translating the Bible and the church's prayer and worship and getting it blessed by the bishop of Rome, Pope Adrian II, by laying their work on the altar above the bones of the Apostle Peter.⁹⁶ Some of us have been raised on the idea that Scripture in everyday language (the 'vernacular') wasn't accessible in the Middle Ages, that it took brave revolutionaries like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and Martin Luther to defy authority and set God's word free at great cost; but these days, that “old fantasy” of a fallen institutional church opposed to the vernacular Bible has been “wholly discredited.”⁹⁷ Before any of those men had even been born, already “more-or-less complete Bible translations were in Europe-wide circulation,” followed soon by a large “amount of Christian biblical writing... composed, copied, and printed in nearly every medieval language.”⁹⁸   (Visit the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, and you can even see a few of those old pre-Reformation vernacular Bibles among their many Latin counterparts.)

I could tell you of a man in the 1500s named Francis Xavier, sent half-reluctantly to southwest India, where “we couldn't understand each other, as I spoke Castillan and they spoke Malabar,” he said, “so I... sought out men who knew both languages..., and, by our joint efforts and with infinite difficulty, we translated the catechism into the Malabar tongue. This I learned by heart, and then I began to go through all the villages of the coast... I assembled them twice a day and taught them the Christian doctrine.”⁹⁹ After ministering there and in Indonesia, he led the first organized mission into Japan, writing that “if we all knew the language, I do not doubt but that a great many Japanese would become Christians. God grant that we may soon acquire it well, as we have already for some time begun to understand it,” even as his first Japanese convert “wrote out in his own native language a great many things concerning Christian mysteries and laws... and has diligently preached the gospel day and night to some relations and friends.”¹⁰⁰ By the time Francis died at age 46 while waiting for a ship to China, he may well have led more people to Jesus than almost anybody since the apostles (or so I've heard it said).

From the apostles until now, we've been filling the world with the gospel in many languages. And it's ongoing, and far from over. The Bible translator alliance illumiNations estimates that thousands of languages still have nearly no Scripture in them – something they're working diligently to fix. But all these languages praising Christ, with or without the Scriptures, are “a sign of the gathering together into the unity of the Spirit and of the way up to heaven,” not by a tower but by a cross of faith and hope and love.¹⁰¹ Down through these ages to now, “Christ joins and unites all into one faith through the gospel, even though the different languages remain.... If we both understand Christ, we mutually embrace and heartily kiss each other as fellow members,” Luther said, “but where Christ is not present, there the punishment of Babylon still prevails.”¹⁰² Our mission, then, is to rescue the babbling world from the 'punishment of Babel,' bringing the gospel in every language, facilitating worship and prayer in every language, restoring unity across every language barrier through the single doctrine and discipline of the Christ who is Lord of Every Language and the same peace and love woven by the Spirit who breathes one utterance!

The prophets left us with a promise that's happening before our eyes, and will happen more fully in the end. “At that time I will restore to the peoples a pure lip, that all of them may call upon the name of the LORD and serve him with one accord,” not with division (Zephaniah 3:9). All the earth, through this gospel, will become “a people humble and lowly..., nor shall there be found in their mouth a deceitful tongue..., and none shall make them afraid” (Zephaniah 3:12-13). For “the LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will quiet you by his love, he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17), and set us up all, at last, “for praise and for a name” (Zephaniah 3:19). Then we'll be “a great multitude that no one could number..., from all tribes and peoples and languages,” carrying the linguistic riches of the nations into the holy city, and crying out with one eternal polyglot shout that our God saves (Revelation 7:9-10; 21:24-26)! From and in every language, hallelujah, we will glory: Our God saves!

1  John H. McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Simon & Schuster, 2003), 10.

2  Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 54.11, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/17:65.

3  John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 30.6, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:223.

4  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 135.

5  Natan Levy, The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 (Routledge, 2024), 178.

6  Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (Metropolitan Books, 2010), 7.

7  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 223.

8  Marcel Danesi, Linguistic Relativity Today: Language, Mind, Society, and the Foundations of Linguistic Anthropology (Routledge, 2021), 131.

9  Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 106-107.

10  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 234.

11  Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 108.

12  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 130.

13  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 235.

14  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 135.

15  Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 64.6, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/17:271.

16  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 219.

17  John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 30.11, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:228.

18  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 11:6, in Luther's Works 2:225.

19  Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 118.

20  Donald E. Gowan, From Eden to Babel: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 1-11 (Eerdmans, 1988), 119.

21  R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 134.

22  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 355.

23  Phillip Michael Sherman, Babel's Tower Translated: Genesis 11 and Ancient Jewish Interpretation (Brill, 2013), 65; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 189.

24  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 58.27, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 16:6.

25  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 219.

26  Pseudo-Philo, Biblical Antiquities 7.2, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 2:312.

27  Šumma Alu ine Mēlê Šakin 1.15-17, in Sally M. Freedman, If a City Is Set on a Height: The Akkadian Omen Series Šumma Alu ine Mēlê Šakin (University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), 1:27.

28  Prosper of Aquitaine, The Call of All Nations 2.14, in Ancient Christian Writers 14:112.

29  James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 1-11: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Wipf & Stock, 2018), 127.

30  Jonathan Grossman, “The Double Etymology of Babel in Genesis 11,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 129/3 (September 2017): 367.

31  Cian Power, The Significance of Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible: Language and Boundaries of Self and Other (Mohr Siebeck, 2023), 85-86.

32  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 355-356.

33  Avitus of Vienne, Spiritual History 4.123, in George W. Shea, The Poems of Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 102.

34  Theognostos, Treasury 1.11, in Corpus Christianorum in Translation 16:38.

35  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 33.423, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 21:48.

36  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.120, in Loeb Classical Library 242:59.

37  Carol M. Kaminski, From Noah to Israel: The Realization of the Primaeval Blessing After the Flood (T&T Clark, 2005), 41.

38  Jonathan Grossman, “The Double Etymology of Babel in Genesis 11,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 129/3 (September 2017): 369.

39  Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan Academic, 2016), 148; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 105.

40  Andrew Giorgetti, “The 'Mock Building Account' of Genesis 11:1-9: Polemic against Mesopotamian Royal Ideology,” Vetus Testamentum 64/1 (2014): 17.

41  Iain Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 171.

42  Enuma Elish V.58, in Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013), 101.

43  Jonathan Grossman, “A Double Etymology of Babel in Genesis 11,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 129/3 (September 2017): 372.

44  Toil of Babylon v.19, in Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013), 310.

45  Founding of Eridu, line 16, in Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013), 373.

46  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (Eerdmans, 1990), 357.

47  Jonathan Grossman, “A Double Etymology of Babel in Genesis 11,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 129/3 (September 2017): 366.

48  John C. Lennox, Friend of God: The Inspiration of Abraham in an Age of Doubt (SPCK, 2024), 15.

49  Tintir=Babylon i.39, in Andrew R. George, Babylonian Topographical Texts (Peeters, 1992), 41.

50  Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 108.

51  Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan Academic, 2022), 215.

52  Augustine of Hippo, Questions on the Heptateuch 1.21, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/14:21.

53  John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 30.10, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:227.

54  Cian Power, The Significance of Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible: Language and Boundaries of Self and Other (Mohr Siebeck, 2023), 93.

55  Caleb Everett, A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think (Harvard University Press, 2023), 238.

56  Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 8.3.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 91:148.

57  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 11, in Luther's Works 2:215, 227.

58  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 33.550, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 21:58.

59  Marius Victorius, Alethia 3.285-292, in Daniel Hamilton Abosso, A Translation and Commentary on Claudius Marius Victor's Alethia 3.1-326 (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015), 81-82.

60  Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 54.11, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/17:65.

61  R.R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 134.

62  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 33.521-522, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 21:56.

63  John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 192.

64  Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 16.4, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:192.

65  Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (Metropolitan Books, 2011), 234.

66  Tony Reinke, God, Technology, and the Christian Life (Crossway, 2022), 41.

67  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 11, in Luther's Works 2:215.

68  Berel Dov Lerner, Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures: Covenants and Cross-Purposes (Routledge, 2023), 63.

69  John Cassian, Conferences 4.12.7, in Ancient Christian Writers 57:164.

70  Pacian of Barcelona, Letters 2.4.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 99:31.

71  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 58.44, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 16:8.

72  Caleb Everett, A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think (Harvard University Press, 2023), 4.

73  John H. McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Simon & Schuster, 2003), 33.

74  Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, lines 141-155, in Writings from the Ancient World 20:65.

75  Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 19.7, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:361.

76  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 33.251-252; 58.340-341, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 16:36; 21:40.

77  Hughson T. Ong, The Multilingual Jesus and the Sociolinguistic World of the New Testament (Brill, 2015), 325.

78  Jubilees 10.26, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 2:77.

79  Sibylline Oracles 3.102-103, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1:364.

80  Rufinus of Aquileia, Commentary on the Apostles' Creed 2, in Ancient Christian Writers 20:29.

81  Craig S. Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary, 4 vols. (Baker Academic, 2012), 843.

82  Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 2.3.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:105.

83  Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 54.11, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/17:65.

84  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 58.175-177, 194, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 16:20-22.

85  Genesis Rabbah 38.6, in Harry Freedman, Midrash Rabbah (Soncino Press, 1983), 1:305.

86  Phillip Michael Sherman, Babel's Tower Translated: Genesis 11 and Ancient Jewish Interpretation (Brill, 2013), 297-303.

87  Jacob of Serugh, Homilies 58.287-290, in Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 16:32.

88  Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 3.4.2, in Ancient Christian Writers 64:35.

89  Origen of Alexandria, Against Celsus 8.37, in Henry Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge University Press, 1953), 479.

90  Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine 2.5 §6, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/11:131.

91  John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John 2.5, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 33:17.

92  Jerome of Stridon, Epistles 106.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 148:16.

93  Pacian of Barcelona, Letters 2.4.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 99:31.

94  Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 44.24, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/16:302.

95  Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.23–2.6; 3.25; 4.24; 5.8, in Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, Bede's Ecclesiastical History (Clarendon Press, 1969), 69-73, 131, 221, 231, 301, 415, 475; Bede, Letter to Bishop Ecgbert 5, in Christopher Grocock and I. N. Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Clarendon Press, 2013), 131-133.

96  Life of Constantine 8, 14-16, and Life of Methodius 6-8, 15-17, in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes (University of Michigan, 1983), 43, 67-77, 113-115, 125-127.

97  Nicholas Watson, Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 1:19, 43.

98  Nicholas Watson, Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 1:43.

99  Francis Xavier, letter to the Society of Jesus in Rome, 31 December 1543, in Henry James Coleridge, Life and Letters of Francis Xavier (Burns & Oates, 1874), 1:151.

100  Francis Xavier, letter to the Society of Jesus in Goa, 11 November 1849, in Henry James Coleridge, Life and Letters of Francis Xavier (Burns & Oates, 1874), 2:242, 251.

101  Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 2.3.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:105.

102  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 11, in Luther's Works 2:215-216.