Were We WRONG About the Tower of Babel?

we actually know where the site was that's the fascinating thing about it we actually have archaeological ruins for it people have been digging at it just to give you an idea it's about 50 52 miles south of Baghdad that's about 85 kilometers just give people an idea where it's at but there's an actual site people and archaeologists have been digging they've been studying this for many years now it's actually kind of exciting research [Music] all right it's our Babel was it the real event or just a mythological story you know it's interesting that you say that because if somebody hops on the internet and you know because that's where everybody seems to go you hop on the internet you type in Tower of Babel guess what pops up Wikipedia Britannica top two and right off the bat what do they say here it is Wikipedia the Tower of Babel narrative and Genesis 11 1-9 is an origin myth and Parable blah blah blah yep exactly right there yeah according to Wikipedia here it says according to Modern Scholars the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was likely influenced by the end of monarchy Stephen l Harris pose this occurred during the Babylonian captivity so right there what they're saying is simply a mythological story just invented by ancient men we see that with with Britannica right off the bat Tower logical Tower and then they say this myth may have been inspired by okay a lot of people struggle with this issue and if they go to the internet and they look at some of these encyclopedias they're not going to get the true biblical answer to this and why is it important both that we base ourselves on the real historical event Tower of Babel well here's the thing it's an authority issue that's what it comes down to are you going to trust what people are telling you are you going to trust what God has to say there is no greater Authority than God God is the absolute Authority in every single area even the subject of the Tower of Babel and that's why we're here talking about it's a matter of biblical Authority and when we start with the authoritative word of God we actually have answers to Big questions and big problems of our day for example like what about the diversity of all the languages around the world uh what about all the people groups that we see you see when we start with the word of God we have those answers starting with the Tower of Babel account right and it really does make sense to the world you know so when I see something on Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica and I see that God disagrees with them guess what I'm going with God there is no doubt about it and that should be a key point when anyone disagrees with God in his word you need to step back that should be a red flag going should I trust what they're saying on this site let's go back to God in his word yeah so whether it's God's word actually say about the tower Bible what is this event exactly about okay well it's in Genesis chapter 11. uh just a big picture we have God creating everything God creates everything in six days rests on the seventh it's a perfect creation it's expected from a perfect God uh Genesis chapter 3 we see the fall into sin when Adam and Eve sinned against God they committed high treason against God God cursed the ground curse the animals sentence man to die then we have the flood of Noah's Day when people are being so rebellious against God God judged them with a with a flood and then after the flood the God said God said to man he said be fruitful multiply fill the Earth that's in Genesis 9 1. yeah Genesis 9 1 After the flood God bless Noah in the sons and said told them be fruitful multiply and fill the Earth and then we skip forward now Genesis 11 where we get the Tower of Babel account which actually is only nine verses only nine verses but people are already starting to defy God they didn't want to fill the Earth they wanted to come together they wanted to build a city and Tower so let's go ahead sometime later we see that man has no interest in obeying God's command which not much has changed today right I mean you're seeing this as well yeah rejection of God's word to not obey his word but let's go ahead and jump to the text here Genesis 1 11 1-4 says this now the whole earth had one language in the same words and as people migrate from the East they found the planes in the land of shinar and settled there and they said to one another come let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly and they made and they had brick for stone and for bitumen which is asphalt or tar uh for Mortar then they said come let us build ourselves a city in the tower with its top in its heavens and let us make a name for ourselves lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth now right off the bat here Bodhi so building towers and cities is that evil in itself it's not what they're doing is they're trying to intentionally defy God to not fill the Earth so they're in fact what they're doing is they're going against God saying okay well God said this we're going to go against it and God's not going to let him get away with that but you know what this makes sense After the flood everybody spoke the same language it was no and his family there's eight people that survived the floods of course they have one language they have one speech if you will now here they are traveling now just so you know they've come off of the ark Noah has settled he has a farm he's living in tents he actually had a Vineyard and so forth there's some events that go on there now people are traveling probably where they're supposed to go and yet they don't do that instead they come together and they build the city and Tower and they say hey let's make a name for ourselves yeah and that's really the problem their problem here was Pride they were on their goal was to make a name for themselves but who is the name above all names it's God they should be giving giving all of all their praise all their worthy attention to him and basically trying to enable themselves to remain together in that one place ultimately defying God's command in their Rebellion that's what we're what we're seeing here today so it wasn't the fact that they were building a giant Tower or building a city it was the fact that they were uh they were they were filled with this pride and they were unwilling to obey God's command what I also thought was interesting here too is that they're using brick and mortar so obviously it was intended to be a long lasting Fortress really uh it's against any attempt to try to disperse them as well all the way across the across the land right so they're they're making a monument to themselves really what they're exactly and and the text goes on to say here in verse 5 uh through seven and the Lord came down to the city and the tower which the children the man had built and the Lord said behold they are one people and they all have one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them come let us go down and they're confused their language so that they they may not understand one another's speech so right there God intervened yeah he really does and you know the Lord has always been intimately involved we sometimes disconnect Christ from the Old Testament I don't want people to do that Christ is the creator according to John 1 Hebrews 1 Colossians 1 and here's the Lord back in the Garden of Eden here's the Lord shutting the door of the Ark hears the Lord coming down to see this rebellion and he ends up confusing their language but you know they built the city they built the Tower and uh the the I like the way this is stated in verse six uh you know indeed the people are one they all have one language this is what they begin to do in other words if the Lord let them get away with that they could get away with anything and he wasn't going to let them do that so he came down and he confused their languages and now they struggle to understand one another and that then causes them to scatter yeah obviously God wasn't clueless or unaware of the situation actually in his Mercy he didn't just wipe them out like he had just did with the flood as well he actually went down there and divided the multiple language groups he had commanded them to do in the first place really just separating them into Nations I think better than any Great Wall of China could ever do yeah it was really neat well you know I I love that the sanctity of marriage was actually retained in this each husband and wife still spoke the same language so they uh still went uh to different places we know that because of the chapter before this and I know a lot of people get confused at this Genesis 11 1 and I what we're reading right now this is the chronological account this is what's actually occurred Genesis chapter 10 it just happens to be sitting in our Bibles right before Genesis 11 1-9 but that is a breakdown of all these different families that come out with a new language to a new land that are being scattered at different places so we need to understand these are not in contradiction Genesis 10 doesn't precede Genesis 11.

this is just a breakdown of what occurred as a result that's a good point there yeah so just big picture here for the first time in history now we have a language barrier that's being seen they're totally unable to understand each other at this point so it goes on here in the text verse 8 through 9 says so the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the Earth and they left off building the city therefore its name was called Babel or Babel I don't know which one we want to say this one because there the Lord confused the language of all the Earth and from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the Earth so construction obviously ceased at this moment right yeah I mean people are leaving the city you don't need to keep building the city yeah they can communicate with each other it's kind of hard property values with them yeah exactly so yeah if people go to different places now obviously they're going to go settle places initially closer to Babel but then they're going to continue to move on and go to different places and different lands and so forth and so yes we do see this now is this too hard for an all-powerful God to go down and confuse our language no it's not it's not at all this is all too easy but notice this is nine verses it's very easy to understand it's very easy to follow and yet we have people out there saying this is a myth this is a myth why is it that they want to say it's a myth here's why because in the heart of hearts they don't want to follow what God says they don't want to follow the word of God it's the exact same problem that they're having right there at the events again it comes down to a Biblical authority issue and when you no longer abandon if you're not standing on God's word then by default who comes becomes the ultimate Authority man it's man's marriage and that's what it is is a sinful rebellious man we we love the sin like the Bible says we love Darkness we hate the light it's the same way a criminal doesn't want to see a cop and that's really the the root of the issue it's not hit it it's not a head issue it's not a knowledge issue it really is a heart issue but here so we see all these different smaller groups that are formed with all these different languages now beginning to scatter away from the city ultimately God's judgment was effective here and that's really one of the main takeaways is God's will will always be done yeah and so their attempted so-called unified Kingdom now broken up right now it's broken apart uh when and where did the events uh actually take place you know was it here in North America was it Antarctica no it wasn't it was it was in the land what we call Babylonia today but uh this region is called the land of shinar according to scripture shinar meant between two rivers it's placed between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers these are post-flood rivers they are named for some pre-flood rivers in case people are wondering but they actually match up differently from what you see in the early Pages prior to the flood however when you look at this we actually know where the site was that's the fascinating thing about it we actually have archaeological ruins for it people have been digging at it just to give you an idea it's about 50 52 miles south of Baghdad that's about 85 kilometers just to give people an idea where it's at but there's an actual site people and archaeologists have been digging they've been studying this for many years now it's actually kind of exciting research yeah so you so you're saying this Tower was a real Tower then yeah not just um according to the biblical account but there's actually confirmation outside of the biblical account as well we see a footprint of this Tower at archaeological Babel and we see a number of different ruins over ancient temples and so forth now you also have to understand a lot of stuff has happened at this this city called Babel it's also known as Babylon it's the same name in Hebrew throughout the Old Testament it's just we we separated out we translated as Babel in Genesis 10 and 11 however when it comes to the rest of the scripture we call it Babylon which is more the Greek name that's Americans we say Babel of course here right yeah there's Babel there's Babel depending on where you're at in the world sorry if you pronounce the table Babel but right that's how that's that's what we're used to we're used to calling it that's right our Webster's Dictionary here in the United States allows us to say it either way so so we're safe that way um but yeah just to give people a big picture when this occurred obviously it's after the flood and before the call of Abraham according to the Bible it says this occurred in the days of Payless Genesis 10 25 during the days of pay leg the Earth was divided so basically if you count up those genealogies we're basically in the fourth generation After the flood right but is this division is this mentioning like a geophysical splitting of the continents no it's not a lot of people get confused at that they see you know the Earth was divided and they say oh is that the Continental shifting no that's not the case Continental shifting actually occurred during the flood that was the mechanism that caused that where the screen screen sorry Springs of the great deep verse fourth we see Khan Continental shifting going on at that time and a good confirmation of that is the ark landed in the Mountains of Ararat now why is that significant the Mountains of Ararat are right in the middle of where the Eurasian plate the African plate the Arabian plate and the uh indo-australian plate all kind of pushed together and they push up this whole Alpine region including the mountains of arat so any Continental shifting would have been done at least for that general area primarily by the 150th day of course we have residual and things like that since then but that would have been the Continental Shifting the context of this is the linguistic divisions and the people being spread out on the earth and so it's good to stick with it was a smashing explanation there good on you yeah obviously the high Mounds were already in place and plus if you have a continental splitting at this time that would have caused another Global flooded catastrophe obviously which which we don't see so um so yeah based on the days of pay like and actually chronologist Archbishop James Usher he also um says this as well he says about 106 years after the flood so by a modern dating that would be about 2242 BC now we don't know exactly if that's for certain date but let's assume that it is and yeah and it's interesting even to think about that because you know that you know pay leg was born 101 Years After the flood Archbishop posture gets this from an old historian named manitho who said the events occurred five years after the birth of peleg so he had five more years on and gets 106 years now it might be a little bit more than that because what is the meaning of in the days of pay leg that really becomes an interesting question because all the days of paling are actually within the the days of Noah Noah actually outlived a peleg so it gives us more of a precise time was it somewhere in there when peleg was more significant for example we talk about the days of Gideon that wasn't necessarily when he was born but it was a time when he was judging Israel for example that's in judges 8 28. so there might be a little time frame in there because pay leg was actually born when his father was 34 years old old yet peleg has an older brother who had 13 sons that came out of the Tower of Babel with a new language so there might be a little bit of time in there so hold on in a second here about uh Buddy says you're saying at Babel eight people got off the ark and after about a century there were nearly 7 000 languages that were developed over that time frame is that what you're saying no that's actually not what I'm saying thank you for bringing that up no okay so here's what's interesting you have these different families that come out of the tower battle in fact if you add up all those ones in Genesis chapter 10 you get somewhere in the neighborhood of about a minimum of somewhere around 78 at least right right because they're in Genesis 11 later on it actually tells us there were some other sons and daughters in there in shims line it just doesn't give us all the data so a minimum of about 78 that's if you subtract off Noah his three sons and even pay leg if he happens to have been young enough yeah from jff you have 14 from him you have 39 Shem 25 and that's a minimum that's at least right so you have okay at least 70 to say a hundred uh language families coming out of the Tower of Babel how do we get seven thousand um it actually makes a lot of sense if you understand languages and how they still continue to change for example my wife is from Australia and she speaks a language that's totally different sometimes now she sounds more like an American because she's been over here for so long but every once in a while she'll throw a word out there that I have to say stop time out what was that what does that mean even though you guys are both speaking English so you still can't quite communicate right and you know I've been to a lot of English-speaking places you know I've been to England I've been to Canada I've been to Tennessee you know they're all different languages you know I grew up in Western Illinois we had a little bit of a hick dialect you know there in the Hills that's almost dying but what's interesting is English is actually classed as a Germanic language and yet we don't speak German you know we struggle with Germany now you know I speak a little bit of German um but at the same time we have Swedish you have Norwegian you have Austria and you have high and low German you have much the English these are all considered variant forms of the Germanic language family same sort of thing if you move over to Rome there are romance languages not that they're sweet cute or anything like that but you have romance languages languages of Rome think of Latin or modern day Italian or Romanian or French or Portuguese or Spanish these come out of that language family now they're experts who look at these different language families and they study them particularly for Bible translation things like that which is kind of cool but they'll lump these different language families we have out in the world and a lot of times their numbers hover around 100 or so and you know their numbers change a little bit because sometimes they add in constructed or new languages like if you came up with a code or even some of the computer codes those get added in as a language a Klingon apparently is a language now if people can speak Klingon but those are not those are not what we're talking about here we're talking about the classic language families and so you know we're right in the ballpark actually I think that's an amazing confirmation yeah there's one incident that said there was no more than 94 language families and of course that number is subject to change but right I mean that at least lines up with the biblical confirmation there of at least 78 different families and I mean if you just think about the nearly 7 000 languages the two develop you know from the less than 100 language families that began with that Babel in Just 4 000 years yes that is very possible I mean you were talking about the English language I mean think about just a few centuries ago when we're trying to read the old uh modern you know KJV type English we struggle even with that yeah and we go back farther than that let's go back a thousand years it's completely unintelligible yeah and you even think about just some of the Scandinavians too like the the ones that left for Iceland over a thousand year period the ones that are in Iceland the ones that are in Europe they can't understand each other anymore and that's just in a thousand years so obviously it's very easy to understand really see how all of these languages could have adapted and changed over that just short amount of time here which is obviously very contrary to The evolutionary worldview Evolution world view says you know all these languages traced back to essentially a single parent you know just think like all life comes from one organism that type of story it was actually an ape-like creature yeah but actually like like you were saying we're we're actually seeing a different way all these languages are tracing back to different language families and Roots which is again just another excellent confirmation of what we actually read in God's word yep and yet we still find language barriers today you know I've been to a lot of different countries where people spoke in totally different languages I actually translated English to English once did you know that really yeah there was an Australian and a guy from The Hills of Kentucky and they struggled to understand I started jumping in translating I'm like wait a second I'm translating English to English um even even just going down even just jumping across the pond over the island I remember actually um I did a study abroad study abroad I didn't study abroad but study abroad program over there during the summer one time and took a couple college classes out there and I remember when we got off the plane I was trying to figure out what time it was so I went up to the closest guy I could at the airport and I was like hey what time is it here and the Irish guy comes up to me and says oh it's half far and I'm like what's a half hour how far I mean means fire tarty because I still don't know what you're saying here maybe you have to spell it out for me 4 30.