The literal belief that the world’s linguistic variety originated with the tower of Babylon is contrary to the known facts about the origin and history of languages.

While Genesis is dated to c.2200 BC by biblical literalists, we have museums full of examples of writing from multiple languages that are much earlier, eg; Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite and Egyptian. Not to mention the reconstructed Proto-Uralic, Proto-Afroasiatic, Proto-Indo-European etc, which all predate “the tower of Babel” by thousands and thousands of years.

The Tower of Babylon is one of humankind’s early attempts to explain the variety of languages spoken across the earth. Thousands of years later, philologists and linguists studied the natural evolution of language. Language probably emerged 50,000–150,000 years ago, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa during the Middle Stone Age, roughly contemporaneous with the speciation of Homo sapiens.

It also worth noting that in the biblical introduction of the Tower of Babylon, in Genesis 11:1, it is said that everyone on Earth spoke the same language, but this is inconsistent with the biblical description itself of the post-Noahic world described in Genesis 10:5, where it is said that the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth gave rise to different nations, each with their own language.