Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel story in Genesis says humanity once spoke a single language, and that God suddenly “confused” human speech, creating different languages and scattering people across the world.

But linguists can reconstruct older ancestral languages and trace how language families split apart over time. Latin gradually became Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and others. Proto-Germanic developed into English, German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, etc. The same process can be demonstrated across many language families.

Languages diverge as populations separate, migrate, mix with other groups, and accumulate changes over generations. We can now reconstruct many of those changes backward through thousands of years.

So what’s up with the Tower of Babel story?