The Bible in the News: Post-Babel Babble

011

This coming May, I will be part of a scholarly team making presentations for BAS at its annual event in Montreat, NC. The name of this town, just outside of Asheville, is made up of the words “mountain” and “retreat.”

This type of word fusion, which is common in languages from Arabic to Tibetan, is known as a portmanteau, a French term for a kind of suitcase. The erudition of this column’s author is at least as deep as Wikipedia, from which we learn that the first use of this linguistic expression is in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

In just these few sentences, we’ve seen references to American, French and British contexts, in addition to an A–Z (or at least A–T) list of other languages. A veritable Tower of Babel indeed! What, you might be asking, do recent writers in the popular press say about this less-than-venerable not-quite-sky scraper of Biblical vintage (Genesis 11)?

There are frequent references to the post-Tower diversity of tongues that has come to characterize the world or specific segments of it. Thus, a correspondent for the Irish Times tallies “approximately 6,500 living languages [that] co-exist in the post-Babel world of today.”

Wait a minute! As calculated by a letter writer to The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, “There are more than 6,900 languages recognized worldwide, including 275 in Australia.” This has me pondering what the total would be if we added in “unrecognized” or “unrecognizable” languages, such as those uttered by our now nine-month-old twin grandchildren!

There are some societies where, we learn, differences in language are not due to geography but to gender. Thus, “the Biblical Tower of Babel seems to have been replicated in Ubang community of Cross River State [in Nigeria] where men and women speak in different tongues.” As a result, “men call yam kitong while in the women’s dialect it is called irue.” Why? The Chief could only surmise that “the mystery was beyond human explanation, declaring that it was a natural trait whose origin their forefathers were unable to unravel” (all of this is recounted in Abuja’s Leadership).

From the yam fields (do yams grow in fields?) to the fields of dreams (i.e., the baseball diamond), our trusty chroniclers of sports report that the “Yankees Try to Head Off a Tower of Babel on Field” and that “Baseball Looks at Rule to Make Mound Less a Tower of Babel” (both stories appeared in the International New York Times). The latter centers on “interpreters in Japan and South Korea [who] have long participated in mound conferences with pitchers who do not speak the same language as their managers or coaches.” How do you say spitball in these tongues?

Many languages, many possible misunderstandings—real or imagined. As reported in the West Australian of Perth, “Women were employed in large numbers by [early] department stores. One critic of the stores accused them of being towers of Babel which were immoral as they seduced women into buying products and neglecting their families.”

The offending Biblical edifice was, after all, a tower and not a single-story structure. This realization leads to another common theme in the popular press: Put succinctly, as in this headline from The Times of London, “Tall Buildings Got Off to a Poor Start with the Tower of Babel, but the Sky Really Is No Limit Now.”

Height is not the only factor in modern (or ancient) towers of Babel. So London’s Sunday Telegraph headlines a story in this way: “Justice, the EU and Its £415m Gilded Tower of Babel.” The story describes “a modern-day Tower of Babel. Stretching 24 storeys into the air, the twin golden skyscrapers—the tallest in Luxembourg—were built to house more than 1,000 translators and interpreters.” So fixed was the reporter of this story on the exorbitant costs of constructing and operating this mammoth mega-structure that he appears to have overlooked the irony of housing troops of translators in buildings that remind us of the Biblical construction whose very existence led to the need for translators in the beginning (well, to be precise, in Genesis 11, not Genesis 1!).

And then there’s this statement from the Salt Lake Tribune that may well seem reliably relevant to many readers of this column: “Reading religion surveys can seem like confronting the Tower of Babel: stacked questions, confusing terms, unscientific methodology.”

I would not even pretend competence as a judge of religion surveys as a genre. But I can guarantee that my presentations at Montreat in May will feature only unstacked questions, nonconfusing terms and no unscientific methodology. As I guess you know, there’s only one way to make sure I live up to these promises!

This coming May, I will be part of a scholarly team making presentations for BAS at its annual event in Montreat, NC. The name of this town, just outside of Asheville, is made up of the words “mountain” and “retreat.”