Bible in general (Archive 1)

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Bible Question: In Genesis we read in chp. 2:19-20 the first words of Adam in naming the animals...what was the language he used for communication? Later he and Eve spoke...what language did they speak?

Bible Answer: Without doubt, dear gubber, you've posed an intriguing question! The Bible gives us no hint whatever about the language of our progenitors, Adam and Eve, but it at the same time makes it quite clear that they had the ability to communicate -- with God their Creator, with the serpent their adversary, and with each other. Linguistics offers us little real help. It surmises that the first means of communication was oral, but did not consist of language as we know it today. They call it, for want of anything else to call it, paralanguage -- voice sounds like grunts, hisses, giggles, etc. used in conjunction with various gestures (body language). From these beginnigs eventually came a more sophisticated form of oral language and, later still, various written forms. But this is, I re-emphasize, merely linguistic theory. It does not square with the Genesis account of Adam and Eve..... But perhaps we can be somewhat more enlightened by the Old Testament account of the time when there was one world language. Nimrod ruined it all by building a tower to reach heaven. But God stepped in and made the workmen speak different languages. So the Tower of Babel was never finished..... Now is it far-fetched to believe that the same God who could confound the language at the building site of the tower (by, in effect, creating new languages) would have any problem with endowing Adam and Eve with language skills when He created them? The Spirit of God performed nothing short of of a linguistic miracle on the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts. This God who by the might of His word spoke the heavens and the earth into existence, ex nihilo, could surely have empowered, and did empower I believe, His first children with the gift of speech. We don't know what the name of the language was, or even whether God assigned a name to it, but we must conclude that it encompassed far more and was considerably more advanced than the gutteral grunts and growns that are popularly -- but unbiblically -- assigned to the language of the so-called cave man. The vocabularly must have been indeed quite rich and extensive. After all, God gave Adam the job of naming the animals -- a task requiring a great deal more than assorted grunts! --Hank