Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Babel's Confusion was Not a Curse · Creation vs. Evolution: Three Questions on Quora · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Josephus on Nimrod and Babel, Vindicated · Unity, Precious AND Dangerous
Mystery of the Tower of Babel: The Prerequisite
Brad McFadden | 16 Sept. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lKyEq-Ibvg
11:01 I would say, they actually could make hand signs, but that would have been inadequate for continuing the project.
I would also say that the difference of languages would immediately have been a much greater obstacle then than it is now.
Why? Babbel, Rosetta Stone, DuoLingo, or Langenscheit or Teach Yourself, and dictionaries and language teachers, none of that existed as yet.
They had never been faced with learning foreign languages and they didn't know how one can deal with it.
Now, one new language would not be a shocker. Ten or 100 wouldn't be. One would conclude "Oh, God repeated the Babel miracle" make some kind of hand sign for tower and then make some kind of hand sign for dictionaries or language learning.
Back then it was a total cold shower. Ice shower. It was a totally new situation they had never really dealt with, closest candidate being having learned the native tongue as toddlers. "What? To understand those, we would need to be like children again?"
[Previous comment is gone. The following comment is the sole one left under his video, now:]
11:38 Zacharias was not relying exclusively on hand signs.
He could still hear, they could still ask "do you mean" and he could nod yes or no, and he could write, which being the same language they could understand, from his hand if not from his mouth.
- Brad McFadden
- @BradMcFadden
- @hglundahl good point
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- @BradMcFadden Thank you!
@BradMcFadden So, thank you for explicitly approving of my comment on time stamp 11:38.
I also commented to time stamps 11:01, 11:53, 12:22, 14:31, 15:19, 15:49, 16:13, and see none of those comments.
Did you delete them?
Did youtube spam mark them without you finding them yet?
Or did someone else delete them abusing the fact that I have no computer of my own?
[Following comments are (at least at present) gone.]
11:53 If God imposes on me a change of all language competence into Quenya and on you a change of all yours into High Vallyrian, the result woudn't be that I could figure out I had to talk to you in High Vallyrian, remember, that was the language competence He'd have given you, not me. I couldn't use it.
12:22 If we suppose that "they" were not the whole human population, but lords and labour representatives from other parts of (at least) the (Old) World, the urge would be for them to go to their kin at home elsewhere.
Where they could understand the language, because God had changed the language of Javanites staying in Greece at the same time as he changed that of Javanites having travelled to Göbekli Tepe.
14:31 "Lest we be scattered ..."
This supports that they had started to move out already. They wanted an international metropolis.
Perhaps they had been hunting gathering (I think they did) and figured out how that would push them further and further away from each other (though it seems it didn't), but the evidence for them being hunter gatherers at some time, if you pose that between Flood and Babel, would coincide with evidence for an already extant geographic spread. The scattering is over and above that, namely a disunion between people living in France and people living in China.
15:19 If you ask me, Nimrod was not very sophisticated in knowledge.
Whether he hoped for a rocket to reach heaven (and "tower the top of which etc" is the oldest expression for rocket) or he hoped to build a skyscraper, he was probably not smart enough in cosmology to figure out this was impossible.
According to Josephus, he really did intend to physically get to Heaven, because apparently the Flood hadn't reached up there because apparently God hadn't drowned.
15:49 Prevention or suspension.
God never says "lest they do whatever they have imagined" He said "they will do" ... God suspended the project to our times, when getting rockets up is technically possible, and given Voyager 1 and 2, they haven't reached the stars at 1 light day distance nearly, manned voyages up above the stars is impossible. We can know this in safety now.
Nimrod would have held them captive for even longer into this, and it would have been unsuccessful and wasteful and a neverending excuse for tyranny.
16:13 Obviously, if you get the history wrong, you might get the implications for us today wrong too.
New comment after above (with one exception) went down:
One comment that was taken down was about "and they removed from the east" not referring to a whole world population, but to an élite.
I would say, Isabel Brown makes and excellent point in the video I linked to under your video two in this series, and while doing so, she uses the phrase "the proverbial they" ...
So, what are the actual words again?
And the earth was of one tongue, and of the same speech And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it
[Genesis 11:1-2]
The argument for "no geographic spread before Babel" hinges, not just on identifying the event in 11:9 with the one in 10:32, but also identifying "they" in verse 2 (in the original a verb for 3mp = 3rd person masculine plural) with "the [whole] earth" in verse 1 (in the original a noun in the fs = feminine singular). What if Moses and his source instead intended a contrast, between what was happening globally (linguistic unity as a starting point, we are recapitulating before 10:32 mentions "languages") and a certain élite group?
If we presume Moses had sources like whatever Heber or Shem wrote down or dictated as a transmittable oral story (or you may say Noah, but I think he was already dead, that Peleg was born 401 after the Flood or possibly 531, as per LXX readings), would such a direct observer (who prophesied about what The Lord did in context) have said "they" if he was one of them? I don't think so.
