Tongues, Confusion of

The confusion of tongues at Babel is the divine intervention by which the originally unified human language was fragmented into many languages, dispersing across the earth the peoples who had gathered on the plain of Shinar to build a city and tower "with its top in the heavens" (Gen. 11:1-9). God's stated reason was to prevent the unchecked fulfillment of human ambition: "Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them." The word Babel became synonymous with confusion and incomprehensibility.

The event functions in the biblical narrative as the explanation for the diversity of human languages and the dispersal of nations described in Genesis 10's Table of Nations — the two accounts being complementary rather than contradictory. Christian interpreters from the NT period onward have read Pentecost (Acts 2:1-11), where the disciples spoke in the native languages of diaspora Jews from many nations, as a partial reversal of Babel's linguistic and social fragmentation, anticipating an eschatological unity of all peoples before God.