Re: OT: babel and english

>John Cowan wrote:
>Trying to find an explanation of the Babel story in the domain of history
>rather than poetry (broadly conceived) is like trying to figure out just
>what astronomical object might have been the Star of Bethlehem: a good
>party game, but not sober history.
I agree.   Sometimes, modern people tend to see myths as defective
scientific theories, in which gods are theoretical constructs (as "forces"
are today), and mythical narratives are empirical accounts that physics and
archaeology have rendered obsolete.

But in ancient times, creating "just-so" stories to explain flat-out
mysteries like the origin of linguistic diversity may have been more
art-form than science.    Sure enough, accounts of the Tower of Babel and
the Garden of Eden are far more significant as literature than they are as
literal accounts.   Taken literally, these stories are little more than tall
tales.   Taken as literature, they convey significant ideas about humanity's
relationship to God.   To this day, thousands of years after the Bible was
written, people still discuss the spiritual nature of the Fall, and the
presumptuousness of playing God.

The ancient Israelites didn't have much science at all;   laws and
literature were what they did best.   Before we speculate about what
objective phenomena prompted the ancients to "explain" linguistic diversity
with a myth, we should consider the possibility that the men of letters who
preserved the myths were doing nothing more empirical or scientific than
writing good books.

Jim G.