Yesterday, I heard a discussion about the Genesis 11 story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, God realizes that the people of the world are building a tower to reach the heavens. God, probably liking the peace and quiet, grew concerned. In The Message translation, God said, “One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next–they’ll stop at nothing!”
Then, Genesis tells us, God gave the people of the earth many different languages and scattered them all over the planet.
That has always seemed to me an example of a bad decision on God’s part. Imagine if, instead of creating division between us and reinforcing the idea that we are not alike and shouldn’t even occupy the same corner of the planet, we all spoke a common language and felt we were, indeed, “one people.” Someone yesterday said maybe this story from Genesis 11 is an indication that God likes diversity, which is an idea that appeals to me. I just wish, sometimes, that God would say things straight out.
Then comes the synchronicity. I’m reading a really fun book, poemcrazy, by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. Chapter 45, which I reached during lunch today, talks about the poetic power of language. She sites words such as balbriggan, willliwaw, palimpsest. Then she writes that the word havasu (as in Lake Havasu, I presume) means “sky-water” in both Navajo and Turkish.
Wow. What are the chances of that? We all know how similar certain words are in certain languages, especially when the people who speak those languages are close geographically. But Navajo and Turkish! That’s quite a geographic range.
I don’t know what this means or how it came about. I make note of it only because I find it fascinating.
And maybe because it says to me that perhaps we don’t really speak different languages after all. We only think we do. And if we listen or look closely enough, we’ll find the places where God made us one people…and left us that way.
