The SURPRISING Truth About the Tower of Babel!

the Tower of Babel comes under attack especially in today's culture for those of you who are familiar with what's going on in our culture there is a battle over the Bible and that battle particularly is Raging in Genesis chapters 1 through Genesis chapter 11. of course the events that occurred in the Tower of Babel are in Genesis chapter 11 and then the breakdown of the splitting in Genesis chapter 10 the chapter before that but there are a lot of attacks on the Tower of Babel specifically not just with creation when you go back to Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 right now you also have a tax on the flood there in Genesis chapter six and so and uh Tower of Babel Genesis 10 11 we see attacks there too so what kind of attacks are there one of the big attacks that I see and I'm going to address this uh throughout the rest of this talk is the claim that it's mythology there are people who say it's just a myth you type in Tower Babel on the internet and some of the the first things that pop up is Wikipedia you know the encyclopedia that changes every day that's very anti-christian first thing it says it's an origin myth you look up Encyclopedia Britannica another one of the top hits mythological Tower you know what people are being drilled with this and I guarantee kids are taught this left and right either from their peers or from different uh history books and things like that that they've been taught well there are other attacks one of the big attacks that we see in today's culture is on racism and I actually want to address that and then come back to the claim of Mythology so this issue of races in our culture it's a big one isn't it you know I've been to various parts around the world I've been to Sweden I've been down to South America I've been to Australia here in the United States there's a lot of forms of racism out there I've seen different forms in some of these different places that I was at some of it shocked me and it blows my mind and some of you might be sitting there going wow you know what there is bad racism in our culture you might even think of instances where someone was racist to you or sometimes you may not realize you might have been racist to someone else maybe didn't even know it but you know what we all go back to Adam and Eve so from a big picture how many races of mankind are there one that's tough for us to think about sometime isn't it One race we all go back to one blood we'll go back to Adam and Eve Paul in Acts chapter 17 when he went to the Greeks he made this argument he said he says here and he this is talking of God and he is made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the all the face of the Earth and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of the dwellings one blood welcome back to one man well I'll go back to Adam and Eve we're all related this is a family reunion you guys didn't even know you're related to me and you you're up there like great I'm related to this guy but see if we think from a Biblical viewpoint we start with Adam and Eve they have other sons and daughters in Genesis 5 4. that answers that famous question where it can get his wife that age-old question right well it's a sister it could have been a niece but either way brothers and sisters originally had to marry and that was okay originally it wasn't till the time of Moses that God said No More close in our marriage and we see that in Leviticus chapter 18 for example well at any rate we have the bottleneck at the flood of Noah's day only 18 but no no the descendants of Noah came together and said let's not be scattered let's let's build a tower in a city and let's not be scattered and of course the Lord comes down and if you're going to try to defy God he is going to win and he confuses their language and scatters people to various parts of the world and look we have people that are probably here from all over the world there are people probably watching this from all over the world so what about racism in our culture you know they're everywhere racist acts are everywhere it's sad to see it you can hop on at any given day and type racist acts and there's going to be news items all over the place I do this from time to time and change these slides up but all the time we see these types of things these are hate crimes and it's sad to see this kind of stuff you know we as Christians should be fighting the fight against racism and now I'm assuming that most people who come to the Creation Museum are Christians however we do have a lot of people who come through who are not Christians if you're not here a Christian uh we welcome you here we actually hope you're having a great time but we also hope your challenge particularly to consider the claims of Christ because friends that's what this is all about we're not just here to talk about racism or the flood or Babel or whatever it might be we want to see people wander the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ we want people walking out of here going wow you know what the Bible is trustworthy and because the Bible is trustworthy the message of the Gospel founded in that book is also trustworthy so how does all this relate to Babel well let's go back and actually read the Bible account particularly the the chronological count Genesis 11 1-9 so follow me here now the whole earth had one language in one speech and it came to pass as they journeyed from the East that they found a plane in the land of shinar and they dwelt there then they said to one another come let us make bricks and make them thoroughly they had breakfast Stone of that asphalt order and they said come let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens let us make a name for ourselves lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole Earth but the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built and the Lord said indeed the people are one and they all have one language and this is what they begin to do now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them Genesis 11 7-9 come let us go down and there confused their language that they may not understand one another's speech so the Lord scattered them abroad from the from there over the face of all the Earth and they ceased building the city therefore its name is called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the Earth and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the Earth you see the Lord had given them the command After the flood to be fruitful multiply and fill the Earth if God would let them get away with defying him then then they could get away with anything and he wasn't going to let him get away with that but you know we read this nine verses that's believable why would people suddenly just throw this out as a myth you know why because an evolutionary worldview teaches something different how many of you been taught man evolved Out of Africa from lower creatures we were dumb brutes we had to get smart enough to to stop being hunters and gatherers and wow we got smart enough to plant some of our own crops and start getting some of our own food and wow we got smart enough to make some rudimentary tools and some some rudimentary types of shelters finally we've got smart enough to make some of our own houses and then we got smart enough to make our own civilizations like Indus Valley Mesopotamia or Egypt and places like that if you guys ever heard stuff like that I heard it all the time from a kid all the way up so when you see something like this they automatically want to throw it to mythology but guess what that little evolutionary history that I told you right there guess what not a single ancient historian ever mentioned anything of the sort that is a brand new Rewritten history that's been imposed on Generations cultures all over the world actually kept track of their own history and I want to look at some of that history and see this relates to different people groups different cultures all over the world see that's how this all relates Genesis chapter 10 if you jump back one chapter it gives you know those genealogies nobody likes to read it's got the names you're like oh I hope I don't have to read this one at Bible study you know you guys are all laughing like you know exactly what I'm talking about this is Genesis chapter 10. this is all those names but it's put in a graphic form you have Noah you have his three sons japheth shim and ham and I know this might be difficult for some of you to read back in the back but then you have grandsons down here then you have some great grandsons and some great great grandsons some great great grandson great great great grandsons okay if I got that right but you see all these people came out their families with a new language and I want to look at some of these peoples and I want to look at some of the archeology and I want to show hey this is not a mythological event this is the real history that other history that the evolution has been teaching that is actually the mythological history one of the first things I want to show you is the Tower of Babel Steely it's a rock it's not made of steel but uh this is an incredible archaeological find it's got the Tower of Babylon here I don't know if you can see it it looks like a ziggurat structure and it's got Nebuchadnezzar on here and it's got an inscription and it basically says that this is Nebuchadnezzar standing by this old dilapidated Tower here it was even in his day it still existed and there he was posing with it that's pretty fascinating if you think about it the Tower of Babel site a lot of archaeologists for example Dr Clifford Wilson died a few years back I was a world-renowned archaeologist he says this pool at modern Babylon is over the ruins of an of an early structure that was possibly the original Excuse Me original Tower of Babel if you look at that particular site that site actually fits the description quite well it was in ancient Babylon and uh if you follow the historical account yeah this actually does make a lot of sense Herodotus an ancient historian he was a Greek historian writing about the the 5th Century BC uh he says the tower was still in existence in his time and it had a solid central tower one Stadium Square I I don't know if I can have time to explain all that uh with a second erected on top of it and then a third and then so on up to eight all eight Towers can be climbed by a spiral running along the outside going up uh and their seats about halfway up for those who need to rest on their way up it which I thought was kind of neat which he I guess had the opportunity to walk up it there are reconstructions of this Tower it's called the etymen onky tower and you're I know you guys are impressed that I can pronounce that but the end of monarchy Tower here now this particular reconstruction only has about seven if you count the very top so herodotism you know who actually went up that I think he might be a little bit more accurate If there really is eight Towers if you look down at it from Google Earth you can see the etman onky tower and if you follow this it actually 300 and 300 a stadia was 600 feet so I wonder if that's the way he was counting this you know why by the way he mentioned where but Alexander the Great and the a BC 330s or 330 BC here he actually wanted the tower to be destroyed because it was old lap head falling down having problems so he ordered to have it destroyed because he wanted to rebuild it now what happened with Alexander the Great he had an untimely early death and as a result of that it was torn down the foundation was actually cored out which is why you see the pools of water in there but it was never rebuilt as a result of that and so it passed into the pages of History you know we find cigarettes all over the world don't we you know people scatter go to different parts of the world guess what they take their building project with them we find them some of these type of ziggurats even over here in the Americas you go down to Central America for example but a pyramid is a specialized form of a ziggurat and I thought that's kind of a neat little confirmation of what we see all around the world hey what about all the languages we have about 6 900 spoken languages in the world today it's about 7 000 languages did they all come out of Babel no they didn't let me explain this see languages tend to change you have different language families so 6 900 spoken languages how many people came out of Bible actually if you tap if you tally all this up you have a minimum of about 78 language families that came out of Babel now I say a minimum and there's a reason for it let me back up here for a moment I don't know if Noah Shem ham and japheth came out with a new language it was in the days of peleg I don't know if he got a new language but you have a listing of some other sons and daughters that we find out later on in Genesis chapter 11 so they may have come out with a new language so a minimum of at least 78 language families so you have 78 language Families how do you get to 7 000. well if you know anything about English it tends to change I've been over to England they speak different over in England I don't know if I can get that accent just right take off eh up in Canada Australia good on you mate need I mentioned Tennessee that's a beautiful accent actually where I'm from we have a western Illinois choppy dialect it's going away it's very similar to what Mark Twain used to have I don't speak that way when I'm talking to you but I'll cut into it with some of the old timers when I go home but you see English is constantly changing and here's what you may not realize English is classed as a Germanic language English German Norwegian Austrian they're actually different forms of a German language just look at English going back into the past here you follow this back you go back a thousand years ago look at English you can hardly read that fascinating isn't it that's from a thousand years ago you see languages continue to change even today the Tower of Babel triggered that split those apart and then they continue to go now there are experts who look at different languages ethnologue for example or Vista wide world languages and I know their numbers tend to vary every year and I know sometimes people include constructed languages like Esperanto or even Klingon Klingon is considered a language now for those of you who know a little bit about Star Trek people just exploded with that so you have that sometimes computer languages like basic or Fortran things like that are actually included as languages but you know when you actually look at a lot of these actual language families and so forth typically I've seen numbers anywhere from about 95 to 100 language families Max now like I said those numbers tend to vary a little bit but you know we're right in the ballpark a minimum of 78 you're looking 9 500 we're right in the ballpark this is completely different than an evolutionary world view where all the languages supposedly came from a single grunting ape-like language so as people go to different parts of the world they take their languages they can continue to change they intermix and so forth but you know the one that people ask about what about the Americas you know because it is farther away you know by the time people made it to the Americas a lot of people had lost their written language they're too busy doing other stuff but I have been able to trace certain tribes uh coming in from various areas you got Magog Meshach tubal Tyrus the cyanites put siba jockton and uh you know there's probably several others and I know many people are still studying this subject so I think it's kind of an exciting area of study by the way okay what about the decrease in ages I do want to talk about this because if you think back Adam lived 930 years old Noah live about 950 years old Jared 962 Methuselah 969. Enoch didn't die good for him right but what about this decrease in age you see Enoch here he's translated off that's that's always a fascinating one if you think about that who is the longest lived person in the Bible whose dad outlived him and that's Methuselah's dad Never Dies so he's still going on but but what about this decrease in this decline in ages because you get to a point here where shim outlived great great great great great grandsons and fascinating when you look at this I would suggest this passage has nothing to do with it Genesis 6 3 some people pointed to this and the Lord said my spirit shall not strive with man forever for he is indeed flesh yet his day shall be 120 years this is the in the context of the countdown to the flood so it's a 120 Year countdown to the flood that's what this uh context is at and by the way for a thousand years after this declaration people were living along Beyond 120 years in fact even in our modern day there's been a handful of people out live 120 years so what I would suggest is we need to look at this a little bit different I would de-emphasize diet yes there was a dietary change Adam and his family was allowed to or sorry no and his family were allowed to eat meat after the flood but uh you know there have been people who've been vegetarians they don't live 900 years old so it that you know we look at that increased oxygen environmental changes these might contribute a little bit but by and large based on the studies that we've seen uh this is not allowing people to live those massive ages I would suggest the main factor here is probably genetic bottlenecks at the flood and at the tower battle there might be some anatomical features and so forth as well but if you just look after shim we have three generations here that were on average living about 445 years and then all of a sudden after the events occurred after Babel boom they suddenly dropped down you got three generations here where they were living on average of 236 years so as soon as you start splitting up people split people up as a result of the flood split people up as a result of the Tower of Babel things really changed imagine trying to find a job 125 years experience we required ah and we have 96 I'm still not qualified but there might be more to this if you think of Shem Shem was born before the flood and yet he only lives 600 years so there might be other genetic factors involved in this but this actually relates to ancestor worship by the way how does this relate to ancestor do you realize cultures all over the world have ancestor worship Shinto Japan Greek mythology or Germanic Norse mythology Egyptian mythology Roman mythology and so forth a lot of these are ancestor worship they would worship their ancestors why would they suddenly start worshiping their ancestors all over the world think about this if you have a great great great great great grandfather that's outliving you are you going to look at them different yeah people start looking at their ancestors different if you look at the the Greeks the Greeks said that the gods are their Immortals they still died they just outlived everyone else ah it makes sense people started looking to get them differently because they were outliving everyone else I mean think of that if you saw Shem he still looks like he's a 45 year old and and you're looking like you're about 95 and about to die you're like what's going on that's my great great great great you look at them different and that's I think one of the main reasons for that are there any extra biblical accounts of a language split actually we see them all over the world and I'll just give you a taste of some of these I know we've documented quite a few but uh here's one from Plato he was a Greek writing in his book critius and the days of old the gods remember the gods their ancestors who outlived everyone else but still died had the whole earth distributed among them by allotment for there was no crawling if you could not rightly suppose that the gods did not know what was proper for each of them to have or knowing this that they would seek to procure for themselves by contention that which more properly belong to others so see they even knew that it was actually broken apart the Earth was split apart now of course these gods were not real Gods by any means there's only one God and that is the the Lord and Savior here's another one the Maidu Indians of California says that during preparations for a special burning ceremony when suddenly in the night everybody began to speak a different tongue except that each husband and wife talk the same language fascinating isn't it it's just fascinating but let's not miss Christ at the tower of mammal let's not miss it I could talk for hours on the tower Bible hours on racism and so forth but let's not miss Christ in all this you go back to Genesis 11 7. there's a fascinating uh verse here let us go down and confuse their language who is the US that is a reflection of the Triune God right there that involved Jesus Christ right there and we see a reflection of that language you know going back to Genesis 1 26 we see it in Isaiah as well let us make man in our image that's a reflection of the Triune God right there Jesus was intimately involved in the events that occurred at the Tower of Babel what about this the name Lord used in this account what is that name the name Lord is is Jehovah that is a variation of I am that was used in Exodus 3 14 I am who I am that was a name revealed to Moses Jesus used that name in John 8 58 before Abraham was he said I am the Jews wanted to Stone him because they're like you're claiming to be God well Jesus is God God who stepped into history to become a man consider the mild judgment especially when it wasn't too long after the flood a very violent judgment that judged a very violent group of people but consider Christ what he did Jesus Christ steps into history to become a man to become our relative to die on the cross in our place to be a substitutionary atonement where the infinite Son of God takes the infinite punishment from the infinite father on behalf of our sin the infant's son took that punishment and only he could do it and that was enough to satisfy God's wrath upon sin and that's what makes salvation possible

Channel: Answers in Genesis

Views: 379,567

Keywords: answers in genesis

Id: ZMO0glPdfmA

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023