WORD STUDY – LANGUAGE – שׁפה
Genesis 11:1 “And the whole earth was of one language and one צפ
Look closely at Genesis 11:1: “the whole earth was of one “language and one speech.” Would not language and speech be the same thing? Why is this story even included in the Bible? What spiritual value is there to read that the whole earth was of one language and one speech.
Once again prophets are predicting the end or the start of the end of days will commence this Saturday with some sort of astrological sign. Plus the planet Nibiru or Planet X will pass by the earth this Saturday, so some say, and wreck havoc on the earth. Harvey, Irma and Maria as well as the earthquake in Mexico will be small potatoes compared to what will happen September 23 according to these prophets.
Most Christians really believe we are living in the last days and if that is the case, then these question concerning Genesis 11:1 are going to become very significant. At least in my thinking. Because I believe in the last days God is going to reveal the depth of the Hebrew language through the Jewish people and in that depth, when read in a Christian context, the knowledge that Daniel sealed up in Daniel 12:4 will be revealed.
So what was this language before God mixed it up in the Tower of Babel? The word in Hebrew for language is sapah which means language, lip, or exalted language. The word for speech is devar. There are two words in Hebrew for speech, ‘amar and devar, yet both are a little different. ‘Amar is every day speech, things you say without giving it much thought. Then there is devar which are words spoken from the heart. Speech that is very significant.
The Tower of Babel was built 100 years after the flood. Prior to the flood it appears Adam lived about 100 years before this event. What made Adam different than all the animals was that he was created in the image of God. He was given an imagination like God had to create the world and man was told to be fruitful and multiply. This does not mean just reproduce, it means that but also means to continue creating things using the material that God created. Actually, God only created the heaven and the earth, everything else he called into being. Using His imagination, He imagined a tree and caused the atoms and molecules to form a tree.
God gave different gifts to different people to work together to create. Building the Tower of Babel was one such work. It unified the people as God intended only it unified them against Him. So God scrambled their language.
So what was the original language at the Tower of Babel? Was it Hebrew, Aramaic or some ancient form that we really know nothing about. Yet without a common language, whatever it was, the Tower of Babel could not and was not built.
Some Bible scholars call the language spoken up to the Tower of Babel Edenic. Edenic, contained the building blocks to all languages that exist today. I wonder, pure speculation, could it have been Hebrew? Here’s my theory, well not my theory but one I read from ancient orthodox rabbis.
After the Tower of Babel people began to diversify due to their language barrier and they started to do something interesting. They soon developed a means of writing their language. It was very primitive at first. They used pictures to write, then the cuneiform developed which was a little more sophisticated. This lead to various scripts. However, these scripts were shared by all the different languages, including Hebrew. Different languages and dialects shared similar script, as English, German, French, Spanish, etc. would do.
There is something being taught and embraced among evangelical Christians known as Ancient Hebrew or Paleo Hebrew. This, however, involves the script that was shared by languages as the Phoenicians, the Assyrians and the Canaanites. Eventually by the time of Ezra, Hebrew adopted a script known as the Ketav Ashurit or the Assyrian script or best known as the square script used in Israel today. What is curious is that only Hebrew and the Chaldean Aramaic share this sophisticated script. Oddly, no other language shares this script. That is really strange linguistically speaking. The reason given by the sages is that it was developed by Ezra and his scribes to set apart the Hebrew language. You see, Hebrew, as other Semitic languages was a picture language. Many of the pictures in the Paleo script were of pagan origin such as the Aleph which was an ox or bulls head picturing the god Apis.
What I find very disturbing to me about this is that Christians are searching for some hidden message in the Hebrew letters using these pictures. If a word has an Aleph in it they say that there is something about headship or leadership embodied in this word, because that letter originated with the picture of an ox head. Such Christians without realizing it are denying the truth of the Tower of Babel story and even the flood, for they are saying like the evolutionist that man evolved from an ape and his language evolved from the grunts of chatter of apes and that there was no single language prior to the Tower of Babel.
Linguistic evolutionist, as they are called, are evolutionist. They deny that there was a worldwide flood, a Tower of Babel where languages where mixed up and most important of all they deny that the world had only one global language up to the time of the Tower of Babel.
The Bible, however, teaches that there was only one global language and from that all other languages sprouted. Actually, this thought is held by many linguists even from the Soviet Union where most are atheist. It is held by a growing number of scholars and by esoteric rabbis. This language for want of an offensive word is called Edenic. In private these scholars, however, will call it Hebrew or Aramaic and that at the time of Ezra the script it was given its unique form called Ketav Ashurit or what we know as the square script, the Hebrew alphabet as we know it today.
Note in this square script the Aleph is pictured not as an ox or bulls head, but as a Yod, Vav, Yod (the name of God). If I call the origin of the Aleph an ox head, I fear I will have to take my place among the Darwinian Evolutionist, and that I cannot and will not do.
Thus, I find my only other alternative is to side with many rabbis who believe the square script really existed from the beginning of time and was the script that God used to write the ten commandments. When the people sinned with the golden calf, God withdrew this sacred script and it was replaced with the script familiar to the people, the Paleo script. Then at the time of Ezra when the people returned to the land and were now speaking Aramaic, God returned the original square script to the people where each letter spoke about something concerning the nature of God, our relationship to God and His relationship to us. This is because the Hebrew language was becoming a dead language and God returned the original script to preserve the messages found in the original Hebrew language.
The whole earth was of one saphah and one devar. Saphah and devar tell us that they all spoke the same dialect. There were no accents, no Scottish brogue, no Southern drawl. And if we follow this line of thinking that the language they spoke was really Hebrew each spoke the Hebrew language precisely as God created it. This has led many Jews, particularly the kabbalist who believes that if you speak certain Hebrew words or the names of God exactly the way the original Hebrew was spoken you could perform miracles. However, I believe something else. Whatever power lies within words spoken precisely as God created it was enough for God to take it away from the inhabitants of earth and leave it only to a chosen few known as the Hebrews. Shem shared 50 years of life with Abraham and would have passed the secrets of this language on to Abraham who passed it on to the next generation and the next and had the Christian church not persecuted the Jews for 2,000 years maybe we would be sharing in these secrets today under the power of the Holy Spirit.
But then maybe those secrets or knowledge Daniel was commanded to seal until the end of time (Daniel 12:4) is hidden in the original Hebrew language and as we Christian draw closer to the Jewish community and they share their knowledge of the language with us and we apply them to our Christian context, perhaps these secrets sealed up by Daniel will emerge. Just a crazy theory, that’s all.
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