As soon as Noah had disembarked, he proceeded to plant a vineyard, and
began to be a husbandman; and when the grapes were ripe he made wine and
drank of it to excess; cursed his grandson, blessed Shem and Japheth, and
after that lived for three hundred and fifty years. What he did during
these three hundred and fifty years, we are not told. We never hear of
him again. For three hundred and fifty years he lived among his sons,
and daughters, and their descendants. He must have been a venerable man.
He was the man to whom God had made known his intention of drowning the
world. By his efforts, the human race had been saved. He must have been
acquainted with Methuselah for six hundred years, and Methuselah was
about two hundred and forty years old, when Adam died. Noah must himself
have known the history of mankind, and must have been an object of
almost infinite interest; and yet for three hundred and fifty years he
is neither directly nor indirectly mentioned. When Noah died, Abraham
must have been more than fifty years old; and Shem, the son of Noah,
lived for several hundred years after the death of Abraham; and yet he
is never mentioned. Noah when he died, was the oldest man in the whole
world by about five hundred years; and everybody living at the time of
his death knew that they were indebted to him, and yet no account is
given of his burial. No monument was raised to mark the spot. This,
however, is no more wonderful than the fact that no account is given of
the death of Adam or of Eve, nor of the place of their burial. This may
all be accounted for by the fact that the language of man was confounded
at the building of the tower of Babel, whereby all tradition may have
been lost, so that even the sons of Noah could not give an account of
their voyage in the ark; and, consequently, some one had to be directly
inspired to tell the story, after new languages had been formed.
It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were
taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that
it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of
exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to
his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells
and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few
sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the
mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many
centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing
complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by
a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of
observation and experience.
Does anybody believe that God directly taught a language to Adam and
Eve, or that he so made them that they, by intuition spoke Hebrew, or
some language capable of conveying to each other their thoughts? How did
the serpent learn the same language? Did God teach it to him, or did he
happen to overhear God, when he was teaching Adam and Eve? We are told
in the second chapter of Genesis that God caused all the animals to pass
before Adam to see what he would call them. We cannot infer from this
that God named the animals and informed Adam what to call them. Adam
named them himself. Where did he get his words? We cannot imagine a man
just made out of dust, without the experience of a moment, having the
power to put his thoughts in language. In the first place, we cannot
conceive of his having any thoughts until he has combined, through
experience and observation, the impressions that nature had made upon
him through the medium of his senses. We cannot imagine of his knowing
anything, in the first instance, about different degrees of heat, nor
about darkness, if he was made in the day-time, nor about light, if
created at night, until the next morning. Before a man can have what we
call thoughts, he must have had a little experience. Something must have
happened to him before he can have a thought, and before he can express
himself in language. Language is a growth, not a gift. We account now
for the diversity of language by the fact that tribes and nations have
had different experiences, different wants, different surroundings, and,
one result of all these differences is, among other things, a difference
in language. Nothing can be more absurd than to account for the
different languages of the world by saying that the original language
was confounded at the tower of Babel.
According to the Bible, up to the time of the building of that tower,
the whole earth was of one language and of one speech, and would have so
remained until the present time had not an effort been made to build
a tower whose top should reach into heaven. Can any one imagine what
objection God would have to the building of such a tower? And how could
the confusion of tongues prevent its construction? How could language
be confounded? It could be confounded only by the destruction of memory.
Did God destroy the memory of mankind at that time, and if so, how?
Did he paralyze that portion of the brain presiding over the organs
of articulation, so that they could not speak the words, although they
remembered them clearly, or did he so touch the brain that they
could not hear? Will some theologian, versed in the machinery of the
miraculous, tell us in what way God confounded the language of mankind?
Why would the confounding of the language make them separate? Why would
they not stay together until they could understand each other? People
will not separate, from weakness. When in trouble they come together
and desire the assistance of each other. Why, in this instance, did they
separate? What particular ones would naturally come together if nobody
understood the language of any other person? Would it not have been just
as hard to agree when and where to go, without any language to express
the agreement, as to go on with the building of the tower?
Is it possible that any one now believes that the whole world would be
of one speech had the language not been confounded at Babel? Do we not
know that every word was suggested in some way by the experience of men?
Do we not know that words are continually dying, and continually being
born; that every language has its cradle and its cemetery--its buds, its
blossoms, its fruits and its withered leaves? Man has loved, enjoyed,
hated, suffered and hoped, and all words have been born of these
experiences.
Why did "the Lord come down to see the city and the tower"? Could he
not see them from where he lived or from where he was? Where did he come
down from? Did he come in the daytime, or in the night? We are taught
now that God is everywhere; that he inhabits immensity; that he is in
every atom, and in every star. If this is true, why did he "come down to
see the city and the tower?" Will some theologian explain this?
After all, is it not much easier and altogether more reasonable to say
that Moses was mistaken, that he knew little of the science of language,
and that he guessed a great deal more than he investigated?