Tying our story to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel presumes that there is an historical basis for the Tower of Babel. There is a difference between the historical basis and the theological elaboration of that historical understanding. When Hugh Nibley was explaining this contrast to a correspondent, he noted:
“In reply to my sustained blast of the 17th of this month, you tax me with a “naive and gullible acceptance of the Tower of Babel story.” I knew you would. Most people believe quite naively that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address, but their totally uncritical acceptance of the fact does not prevent it from being true. You may accept any story naively or you may take it critically...
Think back, my good man, to the first act of recorded history. What meets our gaze as the curtain rises? People everywhere building towers. And why are they building towers? To get to heaven. The tower was, to use the Babylonian formula, the markas shame u irsitim, the “binding-place of heaven and earth,” where alone one could establish contact with the upper and lower worlds. That goes not only for Babylonia but also for the whole ancient world, as I have pointed out at merciless length in my recent study on the “Hierocentric State.” The towers were artificial mountains, as any textbook will tell you, and no temple-complex could be without one.” (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites. Bookcraft, 1952, p. 154-5.)
What we have as the historical core of this narrative is the very real construction of man-made temple-mountains in the ancient world. There was one that engendered the story we find in the Bible. Of course the building of the temple is not the controversial aspect of the story. From a modern linguistic perspective, the problem with the story of the Tower of Babel is not the construction of the tower itself, but rather the assignment of the division of languages to that point in time. Historical linguistics cannot trace the history of languages with absolute precision, but there are tools for general time depth and for the comparison of languages among language families. None of the known history of languages can account for a single language splitting into the multitudes of world languages around 2000 BC. Again, Nibley suggests that we need to such simplistic reading of scriptural text:
“The book of Ether, depicting the uprooting and scattering from the tower of a numerous population, shows them going forth not individually but in groups, and not merely family groups but groups of friends and associates: “thy friends and their families, and the friends of Jared and their families” (Ether 1:41). There was no point in having Jared’s language unconfounded if there was to be no one he could talk to, and his brother cried to the Lord that his friends might also retain the language. The same, however, would apply to any other language: If every individual were to speak a tongue all of his own and so go off entirely by himself, the races would have been not merely scattered but quite annihilated. fn We must not fall into the old vice of reading into the scripture things that are not there. There is nothing said in our text about every man suddenly speaking a new language. We are told in the book of Ether that languages were confounded with and by the “confounding” of the people: “Cry unto the Lord,” says Jared (Ether 1:34), “that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words” (italics added). The statement is significant for more than one thing. How can it possibly be said that “we may not understand our words”? Words we cannot understand may be nonsense syllables or may be in some foreign language, but in either case they are not our words. The only way we can fail to understand our own words is to have words that are actually ours change their meaning among us. That is exactly what happens when people, and hence languages, are either “confounded,” that is, mixed up, or scattered. In Ether’s account, the confounding of people is not to be separated from the confounding of their languages; they are, and have always been, one and the same process: the Lord, we are told (Ether 1:35-37), “did not confound the language of Jared; and Jared and his brother were not confounded … and the Lord had compassion upon their friends and their families also, that they were not confounded.” That “confound” as used in the book of Ether is meant to have its true and proper meaning of “to pour together,” “to mix up together,” is clear from the prophecy in Ether 13:8, that “the remnant of the house of Joseph shall be built upon this land; … and they shall no more be confounded,” the word here meaning mixed up with other people, culturally, linguistically, or otherwise.” (Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert/The World of the Jaredites/There Were Jaredites, Bookcraft, 1952, p. 165-6.)
In this reading of the text, the confounding of languages is related to the mixing (confounding) of different populations in the creation of this great tower in Babylon. From such a mixing of people who were attempting to build a temple to the heavens in the worship of false gods, the Lord removed some of his people for his own purposes.
The more historical/scientific understanding of the history of the world requires that we reconsider some of the popular ascriptions made to the language of the Jaredites. For instance, Thomas R. Valetta suggests:
“In the opening scenes of the book of Ether, the reader is presented with a people being driven out of a land, but promised that the Adamic language would not be taken from them.” (Thomas R. Valetta, “Jared and his Brother.” (Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate, Jr., eds., Fourth Nephi through Moroni: From Zion to Destruction [Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1995], 310.)
The ascription of Adamic language to the Jaredites is based on multiple assumptions that cannot even be demonstrated conclusively with the most generous reading of the scriptures. As Nibley has suggested, we must be careful not to read into the scriptures what is not there. First, the idea that the Jaredites spoke Adamic is predicated upon the idea that there was only a single language in the entire world until about 2000 BC. That assumption flies in the face of the best understanding of languages. Secondly, it also absolutely depends upon a particular reading of the story of Ether. When Ether 1:35 says that the Lord did not confound the language of Jared and his brother, this hypothesis makes the assumption that they previously spoke Adamic, and that not confounding the language means that they continued to speak Adamic. The logic of that cannot be demonstrated. Even were we to accept that there was a single instance in which languages were change, the only thing we could say for certain is that Jared and his brother (and their friends) all spoke a language they continued to understand. Since it would have to be true that anyone else whose language changed could also understand themselves and someone else, how would they know that a language had changed? As long as Jared and his brother spoke any language that they could both understand fluently, they would not be confounded.
As a last consideration of Ether, why is it that a record coming from the historical tower would still be couched in terms that make it so similar to the Biblical record? That answer can be found in the multiple translations of Ether, as well as the time-depth from Jared to Ether. We have Ether telling Jared’s story without any indication of original records, and then we have the minimum dual translation of Mosiah and Joseph Smith, both of whom had the Biblical text as a model. Certainly we know that the Biblical model influenced Joseph Smith, and there is no reason to assume that it would not have equally influenced Mosiah’s translation.
History: Since the publication of Hunter and Ferguson’s Ancient America and the Book of Mormon, it has become quite popular to cite the native historian Ixtilixochitl in support of the Book of Mormon accounts. The reason for such popularity is evident in the following citation from Ancient America and the Book of Mormon.
“And [the.Tulteca history tells] how afterwards men, multiplying made a very tall and strong Zacualli, which means the very high tower, in order to shelter themselves in it when the second world should be destroyed.
When things were at their best, their languages were changed and, not understanding each other, they went to different parts of the world;" and the Tultecas, who were as many as seven companions and their wives, who understood their language among themselves, came to these parts, having first crossed large lands and seas, living in caves and undergoing great hardships, until they came to this land, which they found good and fertile for their habitation.
It is the common and general opinion of all the natives of all this Chichimeca land, which is now called new Spain, besides appearing in the demonstration of their pictures, that their ancestors came from Occidental parts, and all of them are now called Tultecas, Aculhuas, Mexicanos; and other nations that are in this land say that they are of the lineage of the Chichimecas, and are proud of it; and the reason is, according as it appears in their histories, that the first king they had was called Chichimecatl, who was the one who brought them to this New World where they settled, who, as can be inferred, came from the great Tartary, and they were of those of the division of Babylon, as it is declared more at length in the history that is written.
And they say that they traveled for 104 years through different parts of the world until they arrived at Huehue Tlapallan their country, which happened in ce Tecpatl, for it had been 520 years since the Deluge had taken place, which are five ages.” (Milton R. Hunter and Thomas Stuart Ferguson. Ancient America and the Book of Mormon. Kolob Book Company. 1950, pp. 24-25.)
It is completely apparent to the novice that this statement provides an important correlation to the Book of Mormon. There is an account that is tied to a tower, called a Zacualli, a reference to the flood, and a reference to a migration across the ocean. Surely this is a remembrance of the events of the Book of Mormon? It is not. While Ixtlilxochitl is a native Aztec, and one of the remaining line of the kings of the Aztecs, while he has access to an important store of Aztec documents, he is a man who is born and educated after the Conquest and under the tutelage of the Spaniards. This description of events has obvious parallels to the authentic native traditions of the creation of the world, but if one is familiar with the versions of the story that are less affected by Christian history, the pieces of Ixtlilxochitl’s narrative are more easily pulled apart.
Ixtlilxochitl is extracting pieces of Biblical history from his Spanish training and mixing them into his native mythological heritage. He is relating events from the Mesoamerican myth commonly known as the legend of the suns, where there were a series of creations and destructions leading to the creation of the present world. In the Mesoamerican mythology, the cycles of creation and destruction are governed by various natural elements that are important to the native conception of the world. Therefore one creation is destroyed by a rain of fire, one by earthquakes, one by violent winds, and one by floods. Of all of these, Ixtlilxochitl’s account focuses only on the flood because there is a parallel in the Biblical text. He has the people saved inside the “zacualli.” The native texts do thypically have someone saved from the flood inside of some type of safety, but typically is a hollow tree, not the tower. Ixtilxochitl’s account shows some affinities to the native mythology, but it has clearly been altered to appear much more Christian. His accounts should not be used to support the Book of Mormon events. (see Brant Gardner. “Reconstructing the Ethnohistory of Myth: A Structural Study of the Aztec ‘Legend of the Suns.” Symbol and Meaning Beyond the Closed Community: Essays in Mesoamerican Ideas. Ed. Gary H. Gossen. Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1986, pp. 19-34).
When Ixtlilxochitl continues with his “history,” he links the people coming from the tower as the people who are descendants of the Chichimeca. This is a people who entered the Mesoamerican scene after the close of the Book of Mormon, so his “history” mixes time periods from Jaredite times with events that are after the destruction of the Nephites. The Toltecs, for instance, are usually given time periods around 900 AD.