NOM

For Come Follow Me, Lesson 33, Aug 17-23, 2020, Helaman 1-6

If I wanted to encourage thought and try to understand devout believers better, I might ask:
“Do you think the Tower of Babel story really happened?”

See the Things to consider for this lesson.

And, here’s a list of some other observations about this lesson’s reading.

Enjoy!
A-Bom

Well, the author could have just thought the Tower of Babel story really happened. (And as with all such stories, was made afraid of disobeying without ever considering whether such a being deserved obedience.) But really, the early chronology of the Book of Mormon, not just the reliability of this verse, depends critically on the Tower of Babel story actually having happened. So... oops.

As a believer, this was a moderately heavy thing on my shelf. I figured someone had made a bad assumption, or there had been a big mistake or a misunderstanding, but I assumed the mistake had happened 2000 years too early.

This is a great post and one that's been on my mind for a while now.

I had a good back and forth about this recently with someone else who has since left and does podcasting (Anthony Miller) and he laid it out so well.

There is absolutely no way the Book of Mormon can stand without a literal Tower of Babel, and there's absolutely no way the Tower of Babel is a literal story based on the evolutuion and continuation of languages.

I haven't yet dug into the apologetics on the ToB as much as Adam and Eve, but so far the few I've read seem to really avoid the issue and say that readers can make a determination as to how literal they want to believe it to be... but the fact is without a literal Tower of Babel the Book of Mormon crumbles instantly.

The one apologetic I heard is that, just like the global flood, is that the confounding of languages was a very local event for just those involved. Again, that just does not match with the Biblical story or the way it's been taught since.

I would love to hear more on the Tower of Babel if anyone else has studied it - I've been wanting to look at how often the ToB was referenced by early prophets or if that story was another late addition like Adam and Eve...

Great post, annotated!

Thanks to A-BOM for another great post. Literal Bible/LDS chronology was probably the first big item on my shelf. For a while I made it work by telling myself, "well, maybe the flood was 2250 B.C. or maybe it was 3,000 B.C. or even earlier. But then I realized the BOM chronology places it around 2250 B.C., without question. That's just preposterous as far as I can tell. Not only are there pyramids and an Egyptian chronology that contradicts the "literal" flood story. There are writings on temple walls, and cuniform on clay tablets that date to before, concurrent with, and shortly after the supposed 2250 B.C. flood, plus the geological, biological (including DNA), linguistic, and many other scientific fields that concur to tell us the universal flood is myth.

There is a continuous tree ring chronology that goes back over 9000 years uninterrupted by a global flood.