Was there one language before Babel, when Genesis 10 already lists nations by their tongues?

Hard question · Creation, the flood and the patriarchs · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate

The passages

The objection

Genesis 10 lists the descendants of Noah’s three sons and three times says they were divided by their “tongues” (10:5, 20, 31). Then Genesis 11 begins, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech”, and only at Babel are the languages confused. Critics ask how there could be many languages in chapter 10 and only one in chapter 11.

The answer

Genesis does not always tell events in the order they happened. Chapter 10 is a table of nations. It follows each of Noah’s sons down to the peoples descended from him, as they were later found in their own lands with their own languages, and that takes it well past Babel. Chapter 11 then steps back to tell how the one family of Noah came to be divided by language in the first place. The table gives the result; the story of Babel gives the cause.

The table itself points to Babel. It says of Peleg that “in his days was the earth divided” (10:25), which Keil and many others take of the division of mankind at Babel. It closes, “by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood” (10:32), and the very next verse begins the account of how that division came about: the LORD confounded their language and “scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth” (11:8). The scattered families of chapter 11 are the nations of chapter 10. Gill saw this on 10:5: the sharing out of the lands is told there by anticipation, since it was made by languages and so came after the confusion of tongues.

Telling first the overview and then the detail is how Genesis often works. Chapter 2 returns to the sixth day of chapter 1 to tell of the man and the woman, and here the story of Babel, set just before the line of Shem resumes (11:10), explains the world that chapter 10 has already described.

Babel leads on to Abraham

Gary Vaterlaus (Answers in Genesis), citing Keith Krell, notes that placing Babel after the table of nations also sets the story of the scattered nations just before the line of Shem that leads to Abraham (11:10–26).

Two sources

Many critical scholars assign the table of nations and the story of Babel to different sources with different ideas of how languages arose. Even on that view, the editor who placed the note on Peleg in chapter 10 and the story of the scattering straight after it evidently read the two together.

Still open

When Babel happened is not certain. Older writers such as Ainsworth (quoted by Adam Clarke) linked it with Peleg’s birth, which the figures of Genesis 11:10–16 put about a century after the flood; others think the division in Peleg’s day may mean something else, such as a dividing of land.

From the classic commentators

this shows, that what is said concerning the division of countries to the sons of Japheth is by way of anticipation; and that, though thus related, was not done till after the confusion of languages, since the partition was made according to the different languages of menJohn Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Genesis 10:5 (1746–1763)