by james_woods 88 Replies latest watchtower bible
There couldnt have been more than 150 to 200 hundred people alive, even an overlapping generation from the flood.
(They started out with only three breeding couples - The Shemitic pair having a track record of fertility problems)
Even on Pitcairn island after over 100 years the population was still below 200, with most of them being descended for Fletcher Christian.
HB
Um...it may just be me, but since this is a story that showed God didn't want us speaking one language, wouldn't it be a blasphemy to learn the languages of others? I mean, if we all decided we wanted Spanish to be the common language worldwide, wouldn't we be capable of anything like God feared in that story?
We don't have one language now and we're able to build underground laboratories that smash atoms until all that's left is God's fingerprints.
I know the Society would pick and choose which stories they deem to be useful in creating doctrine and this would be counterproductive to their culty movement, but I firmly believe that according to "Inspired" scripture, even being bilingual shows an effort to overcome the power of God.
I'm no Christian or Witness, so I'm gladly tri-lingual. But those db's who translated the NWT were supposedly multi-lingual, so they cannot have missed God telling them He doesn't want them knowing what each other was saying.
...imho...
In the Talmud (the Jewish collection of traditions and rabbinical discussions), this story makes more sense. It's a not-so-subtle attempt to elevate the religion, language, and culture of the early Hebrews and the Jews who followed over everyone else. The background for this is basically that Hebrew is the true language of God, and he spoke this to Adam. Everyone up to the Tower of Babel incident spoke Hebrew. The real reason for the confusion of the languages was to cast out those who rejected God and isolate them into their own lingual groups and from the true believers who were still to speak Hebrew. Many of the descendants of Shem (Abraham and his family), who was Noah's faithful son, were of this group. The Talmud claims that Shem (who lived 400 years after the Flood and was alive during much of Abraham's life) was actually Melchizedek, the "high priest" and King of Salem (Jerusalem) who bestowed upon Abraham his blessing and passed the knowledge down to him. He also supposedly handed down Adam's garments made by God after he discovered he was naked, and taken by Noah onto the ark. The Tower of Babel story is an obviously embellished account designed to explain the Jews' exclusive connection to God through their language and culture. Alexander the Great found the remains of a huge structure in Babylon, so the tower part of it is likely true. But the real reasoning behind the confusion of the languages was only hinted at in Genesis.
I really wish people wouldn't raise topics like this.
It just makes me feel so ashamed that for over 60 years I actually believed this twaddle.
George
Hey James, this is one of my favorite accounts of the Bible and I believe it to contain deep truths about humanity and it's place in the celstial scheme. It's important to keep in mind the events that come before Genesis 11 to understand what it's trying to exlplain. Here are the main story elements up until Genesis 11
God, throughout Genesis, has a clear adversary that has a measure of control over his creation from the start, this is a paramount piece of the story especially in regards to who the humans are being controled by during the construction of the Tower of Babel.
The first "cycle", we'll call it the Adamic Cycle, ended in total desolation because of certain groups of humans having more power than others. Genesis 6:4 describes the process of which the spiritual sons of God interface with mankind.
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
The Nephilim are just normal humans who are being aided by spirits who gain spiritual strength and information and use it to amass power. They are the chosen elect of the Dark Lord who are used to create an evil empire. Notice that the scripture says that the Nephilim were on the earth after the days of the flood as well. The Dark Lord will always have his human knights of renown as long he exists. You could call Alexander the Great a Nephilim or even Genghis Khan. Anyone who amasses power through some sort of force without moral restraint is a candidate for being an Agent of Darkness.
However, God has his players in the game too and he also has the power to destroy the world when evil has taken over. Some sort of failsafe to the game. In the story there are only 8 people alive on earth after the Great Flood and not until they increased in number did the Dark Lord get to choose his Agents of Darkness once again.
In order to understand what's happening in Genesis 11 you have to have a good grasp on the game that YHWH and the Serpent are playing and their characters in the story. There is a pre-established ruleset which both seem required to abide by. Such as YHWH can't destroy the world until all hope is lost and the Serpent can't completely corrupt everybody.
The humans of the story are fresh kicked out of the Garden of Eden. The kicker was when the humans changed from tribes to civilizations through the Cain Abel allegory. At that point the Dark One could have agents who were in control of large groups of people who were all susceptible to corruption through will of power or security. This has always been the Serpent's weapon of choice: MIND CONTROL.
So, in order to not let the Serpent take over the creation and win the game, he slows the process down by confusing the languages. Making the Serpent's job harder because he not only had to choose new Agents, but he had to deal with them warring each other as well. The Dark Side isn't stronger, it's just more seductive as Yoda would say, but the Dark Side would disagree with him. They would say the Jedi are the weak ones and they showed them why in the Lucas Saga. Evil always gets to bat first for some reason. Chaos -> Order
-Sab
This is precisely why I have lowered my expectations for the quality of the reasoning abilities of organized "Bible-based" religions. If their foundation - the Bible - is absolute twaddle, how can they be any different?
I have to laugh when earnest individuals torturously try to show through chapter and verse how "harmonious" the Bible is and therefore claim it is religions such as the Watchtower that have distorted Biblical harmony. Umm, no. The Bible is a fascinating, infuriating distortion all by and in itself.
BTW, if God has left humans to their own devices so that they can prove there is no human rule by confusing their ability to communicate and allowing Satan to pervasively influence them?
Even as an active JW I could never answer the following question: How does that prove humans cannot provide effective rulership when the playing field is tilted against them to begin with (through Satanic influence)? Then I woke up: I might as well ask those sorts of questions about the nonsensical traditional fairy stories (e.g., Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, Little red Riding Hood) for all the good those questions will ever do.
The Hebrew text is not meant to be taken literally. Only those who reject an education in college or who can't be bothered to research the past several thousand years of Judeo-Christian theology try to make it sound like it is supposed to be a literal historical account.
In fact, the first 11 chapters of Genesis contain the legendary history of Jewish nation. It isn't seen or made to be seen as literal history in any sense. That's why when you read it like history it sounds illogical. No one reads The Legend of Paul Revere as if its details are meant to be taken literal. And like that legend, it is not that the story has no historical basis (just as Paul Revere was a real person, and the legendary events in the poem took place, just not as detailed in the story), but the object is meant to be the lesson or moral of the story.
The story of the Tower of Babel is written in the format of a humorous anecdote. What it is really telling us is that human nature tends to be self-centered, that we as humans tend to think we can do great without any divine assistance, in fact without any god to guide and teach us. We can even get to the point of deifying our own reasoning and our own achievements.
In the story this is symbolized by all humanity working on a ziggurat (the Jews were poking fun at their heathen neighbors), believing they have made a tower so high that they would become famous. But God has to make an effort to "go down" and look at the folks and their tiny achievement. The story ends with God causing their languages to be changed so they cannot cooperate.
In fact, this probably is not explaining how different languages came about. This, like the story of Adam and Eve, is often misinterpreted by first blush and other elementary read-throughs of the text see in this type of storytelling as giving a definitive answer on "how" something "came to be." In fact, this type of mythology is about "what state we are in" or in other words explains a basic truth about society: humans cannot cooperate together for good because we are self-centered; we believe that our way is the best way. It also highlights that even if we all spoke the same language, humans can get so proud as to throw God aside and deify themselves and event their own "godless" government (the reason a King is involved in the story). Such attempts are always futile, the moral of the story says, because our self-centered behavior and thinking that our view is superior to others prevents us from "speaking the same language." This causes our hopes of unification, separate from God, to be useless and crumble, no matter how much we might seem to achieve at first.
Because people keep insisting that the Watchtower has it right to demand that the Scriptures be read the opposite way that the Jews and Christians intended them to be (and still do, according to most outside of the Watchtower) and like those blinded Jehovah's Witnesses agree to accept their interpretation over all others that the Bible has to be historical or false, the story looks unhinged.
Doing so just proves the point of the original intention of the story: if we try to do things the way God does not intend, substituting what we think is right, we end up with a whole lot of babel!
It's not the story that's unhinged. It's the mind of those who keep trying to squeeze non-JW literature into the mindset of the Watchtower's Governing Body.
All Islam really is when you get down to it, is a hijacked (pardon the irony) form of Judaism that borrows all of the Jewish prophets and even takes Jesus along for the ride. It insists that the true blessing of God was passed from Abraham to Ishmael, and not Isaac, thus giving the Arab race more legitimacy. However, they can point to no descendent of Ishmael other than Mohammed who was a prophet. All these Abrahamic religions are really ethnocentric creeds that promote supremacy of one group over another.
Many very good points are presented here.
What got me to thinking about this subject was the rather unusual light that it places god in:
1) God was jealous, and/or fearful of human accomplishments.
2) God actively attempts to prevent or shortcut human technical progress.
It almost makes this god-image look like a kid stirring up an ant-hill just for the heck of it.
