[Bêthberry]

Well, let me come to the party late but still with good wishes for a happy fete day, Legate.

Really intriguing link there, alatar. Thanks for posting the story about earlier interpretations.

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Frankly, Tolkien loved words too much to plop in a rather simplistic fable to explain away such a rich and evocative branch of learning; or to put it another way, weren't languages, in fact, the wellspring of all his works?

Well, for a fable, the story has permeated a great deal of contemporary society; witness Babel fish and the movie of the same name, although the theme of Man's presumptuous pride and agression against God is less referenced these days, the confusion rather than the tower gaining prominence. Still, the Tower of Babel does incorporate the aspect of false belief which also hovers around the Sodom and Gamorrah tale. The tower was built upon the demand of Nimrod, kind of Babylon, and of course was part of the great city itself, a site of false, rival belief. This aspect is also found in the story of Sodom and Gamorrah: Lot had, after all, turned away from Abraham's land and journeyed east; he was a stranger in Sodom himself and perhaps tainted by its ways. And Numenor is a story about a falling away from true belief in a monotheistic god in favour of a false pretender.

But, yes, I do think that Tolkien rather relished the confusion of languages.

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

But there are some things which simply are not following the original intention of the story in any way. . . . one important thing is to take care and consider where the original story aims. . . . but the only thing I want to point out is that the original readers, the ones to whom the story was narrated as to the first listeners, did NOT ask, because they considered some things as clear and they also saw some things clearer than us because of their circumstances. It's always easier to understand a contemporary book than a book even from let's say two hundred years ago,

Well, I suppose I would say that original intention for the original readers--listeners really, as all the Pentateuch began as Oral Law--comes down to us through a long line of redactors, starting with the change over two generations between the Prophets and the Scholars, way back centuries before the Second Temple fell, 70 CE and that's a very intersting switch in the nature of those whose inheritance it was to preserve the Law. And, if that original intention was so clear, how come the theme of disobedience and willful refusal to follow God's way had to be hammered home so often, and how come there's such a rich tradition of interpretation and analysis? I suppose this question is very similar to alatar's line about "missed it by this much."

There's also an argument to be made that it is more difficult to understand a contemporary book than one written two hundred years ago, as more is involved in interpretation than just the very important aspect of literal definition. Look at how easily LotR has been given several contradictory readings and how for some it is a reactionary tome and for others a very modern, forward looking book. And look at Tolkien's own Foreword where he gives a very stark 'interpretation' of the story had it truly had parallels with World War II. To continue with the hoom, harooms, it's very easy to miss the forest for the trees.

Yet, for all this, I think we have different points of view about intention and original meaning, which will likely never meet.

Originally Posted by Legate

"all the whole earth", actually. These are the words by which the text starts. And that would definitely include women. Patriarchal society or not, all the nations are included, and that includes women. If nothing else, then it's clear enough that it's not like that men would be speaking different languages but women would still have the same language, so they must have been included in the event too. And all the logic speaks for it, as I said before.
(In any case, what would be the point of asking this I am not sure.)

Well, just for the sake of discussion as this is really getting tangential to the topic, I'm not sure where exactly the story of the Tower of Babel "starts" in the Hebrew, because the chapter and verse numbers are an invention of Christian exegesis. And I'm just a little bit intrigued by the fact that, of all the historical contexts and interpretations offerred of Babel on Wikipedia, only an apocryphal one, from the pseudepigrapha, The Third Apocalypse of Baruch, actually mentions women by word, with a rather stark story about the cruelty of the Tower's instigators: Wiki on Babel. But the treatment of queens is part of Tolkien's story of Numenor.

How did this get started?