And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.
Daniel 1:2
"Whether an occurrence in an Egyptian text of šngr or a similar occurrence in an Amarna letter of Sa-an-ha-ar refer to the biblical Shin‘ar, i.e. Lower Babylonia, is disputed, the Hebrew is nevertheless clear, even if extra-biblical references are not.
According to Genesis 11:2 the confusion of languages occurred in “the land of Shin‘ar”, also mentioned in Genesis 10:10 and 14:1. That this name refers to Lower Mesopotamia is undoubted: the association with other known cities of that region in Genesis 10:10, and the destination of Shin‘ar for the Jewish exiles in Daniel 1:2, make the identification certain.
What is important is the event. It is here proposed that the confusion of languages was a supernatural act of God which created a whole array of unrelated but highly complex languages; namely, the very languages cited and discussed above, which all appear at the same time, i.e. the second half of the third millennium BC. Contrary to what one sometimes reads in commentaries on Genesis, these disparate languages were not a natural development from a single original over time, but a sudden, supernaturally induced change in the linguistic landscape with a resultant polyglot of languages. This is precisely what we find when we study ancient languages and their geographical distribution.
One final comment is necessary here: according to Genesis 10:5, 20, 31 the Japhethites, the Hamites, and the Semites spread abroad with their respective families and languages. These language groups fall into the familiar three streams: Japhetic or Indo-European, Hamitic or Afro- Asian, and Semitic—but these are not necessarily ethnic designations. One important subgroup here is, of course, the Canaanites, who populated the seaboard of the Eastern Mediterranean and whose various subdivisions are those of the Jebusite, Amorite, etc., the ethnic groups we find in Canaan at the time of the conquest.
Now all these groups spoke variations of Canaanite, a Semitic language akin to Hebrew, which explains why the Israelites were able to converse with the Gibeonites, according to Joshua 9:6–7. However, these various peoples descended from Ham (not Shem); nevertheless they adopted Semitic languages early on as they settled in the Levant and Palestine.
What is here contended is that the Tower of Babel event produced this array of disparate but highly complex languages, which remained spoken languages for several centuries, but that they eventually died out: some sooner (e.g. Sumerian and Hattian), some later (e.g. Hurrian and Etruscan). Meanwhile, others persist, or at least their linguistic descendants do: Uralic, Altaic, and Sino-Asian groups. Meanwhile, from antiquity, the main threefold language streams of Japhetic, Hamitic, and Semitic consolidated into the Indo-European, Afro-Asian, and Semitic families." CMI
Daniel 1:2
"Whether an occurrence in an Egyptian text of šngr or a similar occurrence in an Amarna letter of Sa-an-ha-ar refer to the biblical Shin‘ar, i.e. Lower Babylonia, is disputed, the Hebrew is nevertheless clear, even if extra-biblical references are not.
According to Genesis 11:2 the confusion of languages occurred in “the land of Shin‘ar”, also mentioned in Genesis 10:10 and 14:1. That this name refers to Lower Mesopotamia is undoubted: the association with other known cities of that region in Genesis 10:10, and the destination of Shin‘ar for the Jewish exiles in Daniel 1:2, make the identification certain.
What is important is the event. It is here proposed that the confusion of languages was a supernatural act of God which created a whole array of unrelated but highly complex languages; namely, the very languages cited and discussed above, which all appear at the same time, i.e. the second half of the third millennium BC. Contrary to what one sometimes reads in commentaries on Genesis, these disparate languages were not a natural development from a single original over time, but a sudden, supernaturally induced change in the linguistic landscape with a resultant polyglot of languages. This is precisely what we find when we study ancient languages and their geographical distribution.
Now all these groups spoke variations of Canaanite, a Semitic language akin to Hebrew, which explains why the Israelites were able to converse with the Gibeonites, according to Joshua 9:6–7. However, these various peoples descended from Ham (not Shem); nevertheless they adopted Semitic languages early on as they settled in the Levant and Palestine.
What is here contended is that the Tower of Babel event produced this array of disparate but highly complex languages, which remained spoken languages for several centuries, but that they eventually died out: some sooner (e.g. Sumerian and Hattian), some later (e.g. Hurrian and Etruscan). Meanwhile, others persist, or at least their linguistic descendants do: Uralic, Altaic, and Sino-Asian groups. Meanwhile, from antiquity, the main threefold language streams of Japhetic, Hamitic, and Semitic consolidated into the Indo-European, Afro-Asian, and Semitic families." CMI
