tower of babel

Back when I was teaching English, I was looking for a way to integrate my lessons better with the gospel, to find a more holistic approach than the cheap tack-ons that most Christian schools use in the curricula.

It occurred to me at one point that language is what makes us fundamentally stamped in God's image. John describes Christ as Logos, the divine Word with the power of creation and the authority to give reality form.

In other words, as with God, language isn't something we do, it's what we are. Because I'm primarily an English speaker, I have any number of preconceptions about love, God, faith, sin, the weather and time stamped into my mind. It's a tremendous exercise for me to break away from the definitions we have of those concepts in English and imagine them as they are presented in a non-English language.

We could take the word "god" for example. There's no real analog to that word in Hindi, so we substitute "Brahma" because that's the closest thing, but it's still a poor choice. In Hindi, "Brahma" is the sum of all things; God as an individual entity does not exist, but is found in and through all the world. Similarly, our concept of "sin" fails to find an adequate corresponding term in Hindi, where their term for "sin" refers to breaking the caste order.

Because I'm an English speaker, I also have a difficult time understanding why Spanish has estar and ser. Both infinitives translate as "to be," although with different applications. A Spanish speaker has no problem getting the difference, and can't understand why we use "to be" as a catch-all for both ser and estar.

It strikes me that what God was doing at the Tower of Babel essentially was breaking humanity up into different ethno-linguistic groups, each with a different way of relating to him so that we could learn from another to appreciate and worship him in new and different ways. It also had the effect of breaking up the spread of our sin, since ideas now must be translated from one language to the next and we cannot all rebel together as in the days of Nimrod.

Of course, it also makes it more difficult for us to understand one another, since the curse wasn't a one-time event, but something new that was levied on the human condition so that our languages always are changing and mutating, and even within our own language we lose some degree of discourse with the past as words like gandermooning disappear and other words, like let, take on completely different, if not opposite, meanings from what they once had.