The Tower of Babel

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Gottle_of_Geer said:
Babylon is first heard of in about 2200 BC, under its Sumerian name Ka-dingir-ra, “gate of god” - the name Babel is a Hebrew form of Bab-ili, “gate of [the] god”.
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Very interesting (along with the rest of your paragraph). If you calculate the years from the Flood to Abraham you come at about 400 years, and thus the Tower of Babel would have happened sometime between 2250-2050 BC, of course favoring an earlier date.
Is 4200 years long enough to allow the degree of racial variation there is between those different peoples ? Even if so, there is still the history of language to deal with: Egyptian had a history of several centuries by 2200 BC, as did Sumerian & Akkadian; & they are all different languages.
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answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i3/sothic_theory.asp
This is how the method used to arrange Egyptian chronology is utilized and why it’s not to be trusted at all. I remember seeing a video in art class that mentioned the earliest writing in Egypt to be sometime around 2050 BC, but I don’t know, because there’s claims of 3500 BC for some hieroglyphs, so maybe it was something historically estblished. In any case, if one is to take radio-carbon-14 dating as a method, it’s fairly hard to establish a firm date before history because the levels of carbon-14/carbon-12 are different during different time periods and many factors can influence their ratio.
In fact, it has so far been impossible to connect Sumerian with any other. Either Babylon would have to be far older than it is, or the histories of the various languages would have to be far shorter, for the passage in Genesis 11 to be an account of the origin of all languages; & it makes very good sense even if - especially if ? - it is not taken in that sense.
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Many things are dated to hundreds of years before the biblical flood would have taken place. The Gilgamesh is said to be 3000-ish BC, not to mention Egypt. The king in the story is said to be the biblical equivalent of Nimrod, which would place the person around 2300 BC. I don’t know how they date the Egyptian pyramids or the hieroglyphs etc, but a story dated to 2600 BC by a pharaoh named Zoser is remarkably similar to a biblical counterpart which earliest would have occurred c.1750 BC:
Grain was scarce, and fruit was dried up. People robbed their neighbors. Babies were crying, and old men were sad as they sat on the ground with their legs bent and their arms folded. So begins an ancient legend about the Nile River…The legend tells of a time of low Niles, when Egypt had seven years of famine. This time fell during the reign of King Zoser in the 2600s B.C. The story finishes when the king has a dream by the floodgate god Khnum who tells him in a dream that the starvation will be over.
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Compare that with Genesis 41:1-7, 53-54. For those who claim the Jews ripped off the history of Egypt, and that the story was initially Egyptian, you can explain: 1) Why there was a famine according to the Egyptian legend as it seems to happen for no reason and is stopped for no reason, and 2) Why the Jews decided to rip off a legend that was 600+ years old and why only that story. The reader can judge for himself which is more historical.
 
Catholic_Dude said:
That story of the Tower of Babel is true and is from I think Gen 11 (or some chapter near that). As for how there are different races, that comes from the differences in climate, food, lifestyle, etc.

Yes, there is no contradiction in Gen 1 and 2.

They are both true and describe the same event. They are simply two perspectives.
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Genesis 11: 1-9 exactly
 
I don’t know if the Tower of Babel is true or not but it does remind me a lot of our own universe and make it easier for me to understand why the universe is so vast with all the stars, galaxies and planats. God would have to know that with our natural curiosity and technology we would one day get into space and seek out answers so if he created a small universe that we were capable of understanding or got to some wall or barrier that would only be explained by the supernatural or as proof that God exists, then that would defeat the purpose. So the universe had to be created this way and so complicated where no matter how far we go we will never have all the answers or be able to fully explain it.
 
Grace_Angel said:
There are indeed two creation stories, one written by an author called the Yahwest and the other by Priestly authors.
We know this because of the language used.
The Yahwest was written (It is believed) during the reign of Solomon and the Priestly during the exile in Babylon.
In One God is portrayed anthropomorphically, the Priestly shows a cultic nature of the writings. The writings were about 500 years appart.
GraceAngel.
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Read “Who Really Wrote the Bible.” It makes an argument against this thesis.
 
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