Why do we find it so hard to understand one another? And is the multitude of languages a curse or a gift? The Tower of Babel, nine verses long, written in all likelihood by captives who sat in the shadow of the real tower of Babylon. Plus the discovery of the language families, deaf children who invented a language out of nothing, and a counter-image that turns everything around.

Topics: Genesis 11, Etemenanki (the real ziggurat of Babylon), language counts and language death, William Jones and the Indo-European family, Nicaraguan Sign Language, how language shapes perception, Dunbar's number, machine translation, and Pentecost as the counter-image to Babel.

Sources and notes: Genesis 11:1-9 (one language, the plain of Shinar, brick and tar, "let us make ourselves a name", "nothing will be impossible for them", the confusion, the scattering), retold freely; short quotations follow the public-domain World English Bible. Word play: Hebrew balal = to confuse; Akkadian Bab-ili = "gate of God". Brick and bitumen as building materials in Mesopotamia: archaeologically established. Etemenanki, ziggurat in Babylon ("House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth"): foundation roughly 91 metres per side, excavated by Robert Koldewey from 1913; the height of 91 metres from a cuneiform tablet is widely doubted, estimates 60 to 90 metres; rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II, the same king who deported the Judeans; Etemenanki as the model for the Babel story is a well-founded hypothesis, not proof. Language counts: around 7,000 living languages (Ethnologue lists a good 7,100); about 44 percent endangered; the rate of loss is disputed. William Jones, lecture of 1786 in Calcutta: kinship of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin; the Indo-European proto-language is a reconstruction. Origin of language: unresolved; FOXP2 is one involved gene, not "the language gene"; the Linguistic Society of Paris banned papers on the subject in 1866. Nicaraguan Sign Language: children independently developed a fully-fledged sign language after the first deaf schools opened (late 1970s onward). Language shapes perception (weak Sapir-Whorf thesis): Guugu Yimithirr uses compass directions instead of left and right. Dunbar's number (about 150 stable relationships): disputed, marked as such. Encyclical side note: Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical (spring 2026) on artificial intelligence uses the image of the Tower of Babel; the public objection from parts of the tech industry is rendered without names. Pentecost (Acts 2): everyone hears in his own language, as the counter-image to Babel.

Conceived by a human, narrated with the support of AI. Old stories. New knowledge.