THE TOWER OF BABEL PART 3

by John Thomas Lowe
(Woodruff, S.C.)

PART 3
Islamic tradition

Turris Babel from Athanasius Kircher
Although not mentioned by name, the Quran has a story with similarities to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, although set in the Egypt of Moses: Pharaoh asks Haman to build him a stone (or clay) tower so that he can mount up to Heaven and confront the God of Moses.
Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of Babil but tells of when the two angels Harut and Marut taught magic to some people in Babylon and warned them that magic is a sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith. A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the Lisān al-ʿArab ar (xiii. 72). However, without the Tower: humanity were swept together by winds into the plain that was afterward called "Babil," where they were assigned their separate languages by God and were then scattered again in the same way. In the History of the Prophets and Kings by the 9th-century Muslim theologian al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the Tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of humanity, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century, Abu al-Fida, relates the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case because he would not partake in the building.
Although variations similar to the biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel exist within the Islamic tradition, the central theme of God separating humankind based on language is alien to Islam, according to the author Yahiya Emerick. In Islamic belief, he argues, God created nations to know each other and not to be separated.39
Book of Mormon
In the Book of Mormon, a man named Jared and his family ask God that their language not be confounded at the time of the "great tower." Because of their prayers, God preserves their language and leads them to the Valley of Nimrod. From there, they travel across the sea to the Americas.
Despite no mention of the Tower of Babel in the original text of the Book of Mormon, some leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assert that the "great tower" was indeed the Tower of Babel - as in the 1981 introduction to the Book of Mormon - despite the chronology of the Book of Ether aligning more closely with the 21st century BC Sumerian tower temple myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta to the goddess Innana. Church apologists have also supported this connection and argued the reality of the Tower of Babel: "Although many in our day consider the accounts of the Flood and tower of Babel to be fiction, Latter-day Saints affirm their reality." In either case, the church firmly believes in the factual nature of at least one "great tower" built in the region of ancient Sumeria/Assyria/Babylonia.
Gnosticism
In Gnostic tradition recorded in the Paraphrase of Shem, a tower, interpreted as the Tower of Babel, is brought by demons along with the great Flood:
Moreover, he caused the Flood and destroyed your (Shem's) race to take the light away from the faith. But I proclaimed quickly by the mouth of the demon that a tower came up to be up to the particle of light, which was left in the demons and their race - water - that the demon might be protected from the turbulent chaos. Furthermore, the womb planned these things according to my will, that she might pour forth completely. A tower came to be through the demons. The darkness was disturbed by his loss. He loosened the muscles of the womb. Moreover, the demon who would enter the Tower was protected so that the races might continue to acquire coherence through him.
Confusion of tongues

The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré, a woodcut depicting the Tower of Babel
The confusion of tongues (confusion linguarum) is the origin myth of the fragmentation of human languages described in Genesis 11:1-9 due to the construction of the Tower of Babel. Prior to this event, humanity was stated to speak a single language. The preceding Genesis 10:5 states that the descendants of Japheth, Gomer, and Javan dispersed "with their tongues." Augustine explained this apparent contradiction by arguing that the story 'without mentioning it, goes back to tell how it came about that the one language common to all men was broken up into many tongues.' Modern scholarship has traditionally held that different sources wrote the two chapters, the former by the Priestly source and the latter by the Jahwist. However, that theory has been debated among scholars in recent years.
During the Middle Ages, the Hebrew language was widely considered the language used by God to address Adam in Paradise and by Adam as a lawgiver (the Adamic language) by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholastics.
Dante Alighieri addresses the topic in his De vulgari eloquentia (1302–1305). He argues that the Adamic language is of divine origin and, therefore, unchangeable.
In his Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1320), however, Dante changes his view to another that treats the Adamic language as the product of Adam. This had the consequence that it could no longer be regarded as immutable, and hence Hebrew could not be regarded as identical to the language of Paradise. Dante concludes (Paradiso XXVI) that Hebrew is a derivative of the language of Adam. In particular, the chief Hebrew name for God in the scholastic tradition, El, must be derived from a different Adamic name, which Dante gives as I.
Beginning in Renaissance Europe, priority over Hebrew was claimed for the alleged Japhetic languages, which were supposedly never corrupted because their speakers had not participated in constructing the Tower of Babel. Before the acceptance of the Indo-European language family, these languages were considered to be "Japhetite" by some authors (e.g., Rasmus Rask in 1815; see Indo-European studies). Among the candidates for a living descendant of the Adamic language were: Gaelic (see Auraicept na n-Éces); Tuscan (Giovanni Battista Gelli, 1542, Piero Francesco Giambullari, 1564); Dutch (Goropius Because, 1569, Abraham Mylius, 1612); Swedish (Olaus Rudbeck, 1675); German (Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, 1641, Schottel, 1641). The Swedish physician Andreas Kempe wrote a satirical tract in 1688, where he made fun of the contest between the European nationalists to claim their native tongue as the Adamic language. Caricaturing the attempts by the Swede Olaus Rudbeck to pronounce Swedish the original language of humanity, Kempe wrote a scathing parody where Adam spoke Danish, God spoke Swedish, and the serpent French.
The primacy of Hebrew was still defended by some authors until the emergence of modern linguistics in the second half of the 18th century, e.g., by Pierre Besnier fr (1648–1705) in A philosophical essay for the reunion of the languages, or, the art of knowing all by the mastery of one (1675) and by Gottfried Hensel (1687–1767) in his Synopsis Universae Philologiae (1741).
Linguistics
Further information: Origin of language and Mythical origins of language
For a long time, historical linguistics wrestled with the idea of a single original language. In the Middle Ages and down to the 17th century, attempts were made to identify a living descendant of the Adamic language.
Multiplication of languages

Tower of Babel by Endre Rozsda (1958)
The literal belief that the world's linguistic variety originated with the Tower of Babel is pseudolinguistics and is contrary to the known facts about the origin and history of languages.
In the biblical introduction of the Tower of Babel account, in Genesis 11:1, it is said that everyone on Earth spoke the same language, but this is inconsistent with the biblical description of the post-Noahic world described in Genesis 10:5, where it is said that the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their language.
There have also been several traditions worldwide that describe a divine confusion of one original language into several, albeit without any tower. Aside from the Ancient Greek myth that Hermes confused the languages, causing Zeus to give his throne to Phoroneus, Frazer specifically mentions such accounts among the Wasania of Kenya, the Kacha Naga people of Assam, the inhabitants of Encounter Bay in Australia, the Maidu of California, the Tlingit of Alaska, and the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala.
The Estonian myth of "the Cooking of Languages" has also been compared.