Babel: The Mother Culture?

Yes, any relatively advanced technology requires an infrastructure to produce it, to supply the raw materials, to provide for the division of labor needed to produce technicians with the required expertise.If nothing else, if the result of Babel was that people were spread out and forced to live in small communities, they wouldn't even have the manpower necessary to construct large buildings. And without any practicing these arts, they could easily be forgotten.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

That is related to one of the things I wonder about Genesis literalism, namely why we assume all these events took place in the Middle East.I mean, since the flood was global, that seems to indicate that the entire earth was inhabited. So there is no reason to believe that Noah lived in the same geographical region as Adam and Eve.Furthermore, the ark was floating around for about a year; wherever it started out, it could have been set down anywhere. So there is no reason to believe that the ark started or ended up in the same geographical region.Finally, I can see why Babel could be in roughtly in the same place as the ark's resting place -- when I was a literalist I was taught that one of the sins of the Babel-people was that they refused to disperse and replenish the entire earth. But then the people were dispersed during the confusion of tongues -- why should we believe that the ancestors of the Hebrews were the people who stayed put? It could be that they were one of the groups that were moved a long distance -- so Babel may be no where near the present Middle East.So, Eden could have been anywhere, Noah could have lived anywere, the ark could have rested (and Babel could have been located) anywhere. Is there really something magical about the Middle East that the most significant events in human history took place there?Edited by Chiroptera, : ">" is not proper punctuation.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

Well, yes, most of us agree. The story of Babel, like the story of the Flood, like the Genesis story of creation, like the Exodus, like the stories of King David, like the stories of the life and resurrection of Jesus, are best considered as allegories to illustrate important spiritual truths.However, there are people who insist that the events in Genesis are literal history, including the story of Babel. No one is necessarily dismissing that the story of Babel is a metaphor for an important truth. What most of us are arguing is precisely how assuming that the tower of Babel was an actual historical event poses some problems with what we know about reality.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

Hey, nem.Most of this is off-topic -- I merely wrote my post to indicate that we may not even know where Babel was located, a question which itself may be only tangentially related to the OP -- so I won't waste much more bandwidth on this.I will just take one of your statements as an example of the problems with the post:

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It [the ark] ended up on Mt. Ararat, which is in modern-day Turkey.

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Now I know for a fact that most literalists, or at least most of what passes for scholarship in literalist circles, do not believe that the mountain that happens to be named Ararat in Turkey is the same Ararat mentioned in Genesis. Certainly we were so cautioned when I was a literalist.And that is what I find problematic in this post. It seems that the interpretations are simplistic even by literalist standards.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

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Also, how is it OT?

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I wasn't accusing you of being off-topic, nem, just pointing out that my post was barely on topic, and that a lot of this (like the location of Eden) could very well drift off-topic.-

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Then how did places and physical identifiers, such as, but not limited to, Ninevah, Ur, the Euphrates and the Tigris come to associate 'themselves' as the beginning of civilization?

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Were any of these mentioned before the events of, say, the Flood? I mean, some of them were used as place identifiers, like saying that Navajo moved to Arizona from Canada in the 17th century even though Arizona and Canada, as political entities, did not exist at that time.Yes, I realize the Euphrates and the Tigris were mentioned as giving the location of Eden. However, it was pointed out to me when I was a literalist by a literalist pastor that these rivers would have been obliterated by the Flood. Remember that in standard creationism, the Flood dumped a mile thick layer of sediments in Arizona through which the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon; furthermore, some creationists even believe that the high mountains themselves formed during the Flood. A lot of geography changed. The geology of the region containing the modern Eurphrates and Tigris are themselves Mesozoic in age; standard creationism would identify this as Flood sediments.-

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Surely, they had actual places in mind.

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I'm sure they did. And, in fact, that is part of my point. Genesis makes more sense as a collection of creation myths where consistency was not considered an important issue by a people who did not realize how much bigger the world is than the region with which they were familiar.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

And if, like me sometimes, you are not clever enough to make up a new subtitle, you can always make the subtitle blank.Carry on.

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Enki and Enlil

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What rascals. Weren't they the ones that flooded the earth, too?

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus