The Babel Narrative and a Common Language
The Tower of Babel narrative presents quite an interesting account from the perspective of historical linguistics; however, before any type of analysis can begin, a working definition of a few ambiguous terms must be defined.
Perhaps the most important term needing a more concise definition is “the whole world”. One must try and put into context and perspective the concept of what would have been considered “the whole world” to the original redactor(s) of the Babel narrative.
The answer is rather simple and straightforward: to a person or people living in what we know call the Middle East several thousand years ago, the "whole world" would have been just that; a small part of what we now call the Middle East.
The concept of a larger world existing beyond the lands these people inhabited (and those they were already familiar with) just didn’t exist. Their entire ‘world’ was confined to a relatively small area of the Levant. It is quite possible that lands even on the far borders of the Mediterranean were completely unknown to them.
The same holds true for the expression “all mankind”. Again, this term was confined to only known people, tribes and nations.
In taking the narrative into historical context therefore, the expressions “the whole world” and “all of mankind” must be understood to refer to a very small part of what we today call the Middle East.
Now that we have a better understanding of just what was meant by these two expressions, we can examine what language or languages would have been spoken in that area several thousand years ago.
Was there, or could there indeed have been a common language spoken by “all mankind”?! This is certainly an intriguing question!
The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes – however, it must also be understood in context of the aforementioned definitions.
It is recognized that almost all languages of what are today the Middle East and parts of North Africa derive from one parent tongue: Proto Afro-Asiatic.
This proto-language, due to several factors including the migration and isolation of people from each other, split off into several dialects, one of which was what is called Proto-Semitic; the parent tongue of all Semitic languages. The general consensus seems to be that Proto-Semitic had its ultimate origins in Arabia, Mesopotamia or perhaps even Africa and spread westward. The timeframe for this split is still somewhat debated today, but the general consensus is about BCE.
Proto-Semitic subsequently splintered off and developed into the various Semitic languages found in the ancient Middle East. This again was due to several factors including the migration of peoples and the general isolation of these peoples from one another over time. This process was not immediate; it took several hundred years for P-Semitic to develop into multiple separate languages.
It should be noted that in ancient times, there were quite a few Semitic languages. It was a good-sized language family. Unfortunately, only a small handful of these have survived into modern times.
Turning back to the Babel narrative, and taking into context the concept of “the whole world” as discussed above; It is quite reasonable to conclude that the common language referred to in the Babel narrative as “spoken by all mankind” was, in fact, what we know today as Proto-Semitic.
What is fascinating is that even back then it was recognized that there must have been at one time some parent language, some “common tongue” for the various languages people encountered in their “world”. The (somewhat) mutual intelligibility between these languages, or at the very least the similarity in cognate vocabulary, surely must have been recognized.
As just one example, the word for 'god' is essentially the same word in Hebrew "el" as it is in Arabic "allah" as it is in Assyrian and Babylonian (a/k/a Akkadian) "ilu", Phoenician 'l, and Ugaritic 'il. Surely people even back then would have recognized the similarity and further realized they all must have come from the same source language, some ‘parent tongue’, some “one language spoken by all mankind”. In the case of our example, the Proto Semitic *'il.
This concept of recognizing the similarity in current languages and postulating that they all must have derived from a common parent tongue seems to have been preserved in the oral tradition of these people via the Babel narrative.
To these people however, the reasons for the various related languages they encountered would not have been known. They would have no concept of the ‘hows and whys’ of the splintering off of the parent tongue, Proto-Semitic; they just knew there seemed to have been one parent language at one time, and now there were several distinct (but related) languages.