The Tower of Babel - Parable or Fact

Originally posted by C.C.Benjamin
Haslune:
If it is a cargo-cult response, it means they must have seen a tower.

They already had towers at that period.
en.wikipedia.org...

The oldest date to 4,000-5,000 BC...there may undoubtedly be dirt platforms older than that:
en.wikipedia.org...

Think Pocahontus' response to seeing London times a thousand: a massive sky-scraper would be awe-inspiring if you had just mastered agriculture, and lived in a mud hut.

...but they didn't. They lived in sophisticated cities with monuments and temples and palaces and had extensive trade networks that reached into China and Europe.

To mention a few points where the article falls short in its research on history:

* the Polynesian account of the flood comes only after they were Christianized.

* likewise the Mexican account.

* Sumerian doesn't mention the Tower of Babel in the religious "mixing of languages" context.

Theory 1
The city of Babylon was inhabited with descendants from Noah and the great flood, where, they believed, the Gods had all but wiped out life on Earth.

The writer fails to even consult Wikipedia, which would have told them that many cities existed before Babylon -- that it was not the oldest one around. Further, the writer would have found that Egypt and Sumeria and Phoenecia and China all had developed writing (as had other civilizations) and they all show language diversity.

Theory 2 is religious, so I won't comment other than to say it's a uniquely Old Testament view. In other religions, people visited the high god or gods and nobody got struck down for it.

Theory 3
Some have taken the statement that the tower of Babel was constructed to reach the heavens as a literal concept - ie a construct that housed, or was itself, a type of spacecraft which could literally reach the heavens.

Okay... the thing was made of mud bricks that melted if the rains got too heavy. It's hardly airtight. Makes a bad hangar.

Theory 4
Some have theorised that the tower was a communications device - to either communicate with other humans around the globe who escaped the flood

Again, they didn't do basic homework. There wasn't a global flood, and there are some problems with the "communicate with gods/humans" if nobody else had those things and at the time, mud brick and donkeys were high tech.

Theory 5
The tower housed, or was itself, a weapon of mass destruction

...but only if you could get everyone to stand inside and then arrange for a very very very heavy rain.

Theory 7
The tower was a commercial trading centre within the heart of the ancient city - a shrine to commercialism over spirituality.

But it's specifically said to be religious in nature. Again, the researcher hasn't done homework on the extensive markets found in the cities.

The linguistic speculation is just... just... unbelievably bad. I'm taking linguistics this semester, and what's summarized there is a brief rehash of about two articles from some very poor sources.

An article was published in the Telegraph in May 2008 which described how Roger Highfield, the Telegraph's Science Editor, participated in an experiment in which the speech area of his brain temporarily disabled by a process of “transcranial magnetic stimulation”

The area of the brain identified to be responsible for speech, speech tone and recognition is named after the man who discovered it - Broca's area.

Broca's area is not the only area involved in this -- linguistic processing takes place (we now know) in many areas and in both hemispheres. Volcano studies show that the Earth's magnetic force field has been the same for billions of years. And one "blast" to the brain only produced a temporary effect. After that, the man spoke and wrote English.

I don't mean to make light of your honest questions, but the researcher was rather biased in writing the article and didn't do what a good writer does -- do your homework on ALL the latest findings, whether or not you like the focus of the site.