One of the common interpretations of the Babel incident is that God miraculously altered the languages of the inhabitants and that they then wandered away by language groups.
This is probably exactly backwards from what happened. Languages tend to change and 'mutate' very rapidly -- as anyone listening to a teenager knows! Or, for instance, just look at English "as she are spoke" in England, Canada, the United States, Australia, etc. Just a few quick and funny examples of changes in our own time: my husband is Australian, and before we were married he told me to please hold the phone one time while he went to put on a jumper -- he was cold. I stared at the phone wondering if I was somehow engaged to a cross-dresser! No -- while a jumper in America is a girl's dress, in Australia it is a pullover sweater... Another incident occurred the other evening. He told me he was over at some mutual friends' home who have a new baby and that Vince, the daddy, was 'nursing the baby to sleep.' I laughed and told him to be careful using that term in the United States because here that meant 'breast feeding' and not just rocking and cuddling!
I don't think it took any miracles on God's part to change languages. All that had to happen was for people to be separated. And they were, by a cataclysm. I have to go outside Bible here to reference part of this, but it should be recognized that just as the Flood memory has come down in one way or another through time in all ancient cultures, any other wide-spread catastrophe would also be remembered.
There is a clue in the Genesis account we can work from, though: "But the Lord came down to see the city...." The "Lord coming down" seems to be a reference to the fact that something may have happened from the sky. We can read in Psalm 18,
The earth trembled and quaked,
and the foundations of the mountains shook;
they trembled because he was angry.
Smoke rose from his nostrils;
comsuming fire came from his mouth,
burning coals blazed out of it.
He parted the heavens and came down;
dark clouds were under his feet.
He mounted the cherubim and flew;
he soared on the wings of the wind.
He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him --
the dark rain clouds of the sky.
Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced,
with hailstones and bolts of lightning.
The Lord thundered from heaven;
the voice of the Most High resounded.
He shot his arrows and scattered the enemies,
great bolts of lightning and routed them.
The valleys of the sea were exposed,
and the mountains of the earth laid bare at your rebuke, O Lord,
at the blast of breath from your nostrils.
Whether or not this is referring to the Babel incident -- and I personally think it may be -- the point needs to be made that the Lord is seen as using nature to fight against His enemies.
Along this line of thought, there is a very interesting phrase in Gilgamesh, which refers to "the meteorite of An" in one translation and the "shooting star of Anu" in another. Both times it is singular. Now, a meteorite or shooting star does NOT pick up the name of the chief of all gods if it is a normal one. And if you look at the description of Gilgamesh's mother and then at the description of Semiramis, the wife of Ninus (Nimrod) in Hislop's book (referenced last post), you will see striking similarities. This was one strong and remarkable woman. I don't think it was two women. Gilgamesh seeks out Noah, by another name in that legend, but recognizably the same person. So he lived before Noah died. I think Gilgamesh was Nimrod's son, and that his epic speaks of the astroid hit which caused incredible devastation, and either sparked or came 'coincidently' with some enormous volcanism in the area. This would have driven survivors out of the area VERY quickly and the human migration would have gotten a kick start from God for refusing to do it on their own earlier.
What must have been a terrible devastation, with not a lot of survivors, would have driven people from the immediate area for some time. The Bible does say the Lord confused the languages. There may have been a bit of a push-start from the Lord in this area as well, and I would certainly not fight against that interpretation. However the evidence for a catastrophe here is in a number of other cultures. The Aborigines of Australia have legends of a time of human migration and language changes after a catastrophe. These things are, of course, not Scripture -- but they are memories of cultures which Scripture may help us understand a little bit.
As chapter 11 continues, we see again a genealogical list. This time, as in chapter 5, with the ages given. These lists seem such a bore to people, but there are some fascinating details in them. As John mentioned, the ages are one.
Most people recognize the sudden drop in life expectancies after the Flood. Most people don't see the sudden drop by the same 50% after the time of Peleg! Lives of about 800-900 years seem common before the Flood. But immediately after we see a drop by about 50%. Shem lives longer than the next three generations, but still nowhere near as long as Noah or the other antediluvians. The next three generatons after Shem were all about 400 years when they died. And then we have another sudden drop. Whereas Eber, Peleg's father, had lived 464 years, on par with his father and grandfather, Peleg only lives 239 years. His son, Reu, also 239 years. Reu's son lived to 230, and from there the ages start a steady decline until Abraham is said to have lived to a good old age at 175 and then Moses at 'only' 120!
Something happened during Peleg's time. Peleg's catastrophe was NOT the same as the Babel catastrophe, but followed about 300 years or less later. In Peleg's time the continents were truly divided. The word used for 'earth' there in the Hebrew ALWAYS means a geographical area, whether it be by nation, city, land mass, or the entire earth. It is never used to reference people apart from the land.
The radioactive heating which had triggered the Flood of Noah's day had caused the interior of the earth to become molten, with a sort of watery/magma layer underneath the crust which was like oil on a road. Memories, again, from cultures around the world seem to point to this time as a time of a rather massive meteorite bombardment. The New Zealand Maoris have a legend about the moon getting a 'dirty face' -- in other words, they saw a change in appearance on the face of the moon, and they associated the change with falling rocks. These stories are, of course, not biblical, but we can't discount them, either. These people are not making up stories for the sake of campfire enjoyment -- they are passing down memories of what their ancestors experienced, albeit memories dressed up in mythologies.
But we have legends and mythologies all over the world of 'wars' between the 'gods' of the earth and sea and sky. When we tease the mythological elements away from them, what we may be seeing are memories of a few more major catastrophes after the Flood.
The massive meteorite craters in the Caribbean, Canada, and even Arizona as well as other places, may date from this time. If so, then their hits all on the one side of the world means they hit fast and hard. If we coordinate this with the biblical mention of Peleg, then with the slippery layer under our crust, we can see that the Bible may be very accurate in stating that, indeed, at this time the land, or the earth, was divided. The great Atlantic rift was unzipping, pulling the eastern and western hemispheres apart. Evidence for the rapidity and recentness of this event may be found in the mountains along the entire west of both Americas, as they 'wrinkled' or uplifted in massive chunks at this time. It may also be found in the Pacific "Ring of Fire" -- the ring of volcanic activity circling the Pacific Ocean. It should also be noted that the second most active place volcanically and tectonically in the world is in the Middle East, where the Jordan Rift Valley, which stretches, actually, into the heart of Africa, was formed either during the Bable or Peleg catastrophes (I tend toward the former for reasons that would take too long here!).
Why does the Flood get so much prominence when the other catastrophes don't? Because the Flood was God's judgment on the entire world. The later catastrophes, as awful as they were, were secondary to that. But David writes of a time when the "hills skipped like lambs and the mountains like rams." This is not your average earthquake, folks! Job also mentions this type of thing.
So what about the genetics? I think the loss of the vapor canopy had a lot to do with the decreased ages, but there was something else, and I'm not sure what. The loss of the vapor canopy would not have caused those sudden jumps of 50% decreased age expectancy two times. Something like the vapor canopy being destroyed and us losing our UV protection would have produced a more gradual drop in average age expectancies.
I think that what may have happened is something to do with something -- perhaps in the atmosphere and toxic -- which acted as a mutagent (something producing a mutation) knocking out our ability to repair a part of the chromosomes which allows them to allow cells to continue dividing for many,many times, thus prolonging the life of a person. These little things on the chromosomes are called 'telomeres', and we lose them bit by bit whenever the cell they are in divides. It requires the enzyme 'telomerase' to add new telomeres, and we do not have the ability to manufacture telomerase.
But cancer cells do. That's interesting, eh?
We may have lost the genetic information to produce telomerase at some time due to something in those catastrophes. THAT loss WOULD produce an immediate and permanent shortened life span among people. And it seemed to have happened not only during the Flood, but whatever was left was knocked out at the time of Peleg.
This is pure conjecture, OK? But it seems to coordinate what geneticists are finding out and what may have happened to the human race as recorded in the Bible.
It may have been something else altogether -- but SOMETHING did a quick knockout of something genetically to the human race twice from what we can see in the Bible.
I TOLD y'all they are running through Genesis too fast! Look at the size of these monster posts. I apologise for that. Isn't it nice to have a little icon you can press to get rid of all this and get on to what may be more interesting to you?
God bless
