The Tower of Babel and Mormon Scripture
Original Air Date: 2022-07-14
Overview and Central Thesis
The video explores the conflict between the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and modern scholarship (linguistics, archaeology, and genetics). The central argument is that while most biblical scholars view the Tower of Babel as an etiological myth, the Book of Mormon canonizes it as a literal historical event. This creates a foundational problem for Mormon truth claims: if the Tower of Babel did not literally occur, the history of the Jaredites, the origins of the Nephite interpreters (seer stones), and the translation of the Book of Mormon itself are rendered non-historical 1-3.
The Scholarly Consensus vs. Biblical Narrative
Mike and John outline several reasons why the Tower of Babel story, dated to approximately 2200–2400 BCE (about 100 years after the alleged global flood), is considered mythical rather than historical:
The Book of Mormon’s Dependence on a Literal Babel
The video emphasizes that while other Christian denominations might view Babel as a parable, Mormonism cannot afford that luxury. The Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon describes the Jaredites as a real group of people who departed from the "great tower" at the exact moment the Lord "confounded the language of the people" 12.
Mike argues that Joseph Smith, operating under a 19th-century worldview that viewed the Bible as literal history, "backdated" these events into his scripture 13. By doing so, he cemented a mythical event as the cornerstone of Book of Mormon history.
The "Domino Effect" on Authority and Translation
The most critical argument presented is a logical chain reaction that dismantles Joseph Smith's claims if Babel is proven to be a myth:
4. Conclusion: If the Tower of Babel is not historical, the interpreters cannot be historical. Consequently, Joseph Smith's claim to possess and use ancient physical artifacts delivered by an angel falls apart 16.
As Mike notes, "If the Tower of Babel is mythical... then the Nephite interpreters are also mythical because they rely on a literal Tower of Babel" 3.
Apologetic Responses
The hosts discuss how LDS apologists attempt to reconcile these issues:
Conclusion
The episode concludes that Joseph Smith built the Book of Mormon on the "garbage in, garbage out" principle: by using non-historical biblical stories (Adam and Eve, the Global Flood, and the Tower of Babel) as literal historical foundations, the resulting scripture cannot be historical 21.
To use an analogy found in the transcript, finding the Tower of Babel in the Book of Mormon is like finding a document attributed to Abraham Lincoln wherein he mentions using an iPhone; the presence of an impossible anachronism immediately invalidates the document's claim to historical authenticity 14.
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hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dulin and we are uh you know 10 or so a dozen or so episodes into this amazing series with uh mike from lds discussions on an analysis of uh mormon truth claims we're gonna maybe have 40 or 50 or more of these when we're all done but we're super happy and proud of what we've done so far today we're going to be tackling the tower of babel and mormon scripture and of course we have back with us mike of ldsdiscussions.com hey mike hey everybody you ready for another one mike let's do it all right this is so good so we've talked all about you know book of mormon and we've started talking about the bible uh i you know we just finished an episode about the problems with adam and eve where we basically showed that adam and eve couldn't have been historical literal figures unless and yet the entire all of mormon scripture and prophetic utterances from joseph smith to present um you know and the articles of faith they all rely on a literal adam and eve and if that weren't enough we've we've got the tower of babel that we now have to deal with so where should we begin so we can just begin right go dive right in so yeah now we've done now that we've kind of moved into the biblical scholarship we've done adam and eve i'm showing why that's not a historical story and why that impacts mormonism we've talked about the global flood and so that leads us to the tower of babel and so um again anyone who's watching this or listening probably is aware of the story but the tower of bible is the story in genesis 11. that explains why different civilizations and communities in the ancient world spoke different languages and so um the story is estimated to have happened you know depending on who you're asking about 2400 to 2200 bce and that's about 100 years after the global flood would have occurred and again we talked about this with adam and eve but in global flood secular scholars and i would say most non-secular scholars would consider the tower of babel to be an another ideological myth but the book of mormon again is going to tie this directly into literal history because it ties not just the jared it's coming to the americas but to the records in the book of ether the nephite interpreters and the truth claims of the mormon church and joseph smith as well all tell us that this must be a literal event again that most scholars today would argue without question is just simply not historical in the way it's presented in genesis and if we just want to kind of back up um you know you can imagine you can imagine people sitting around maybe these people don't even know that there are people living in the americas maybe they don't even know that the americas exists yet and they're realizing that there are other civilizations and they're starting to have a language and they're starting to tell stories and write stories down um thousands of years ago and they're like wow oh we bumped into these other people they speak differently than we do how do we oh and now that we've bumped into another group and they have a totally different language like where are all these languages and people's coming from yep and so you come up with a story is that right i mean yeah and again you know we tied this with adam and eve i know where to mount this where you look at the adam and eve story to the bible is similar to how joseph smith is creating origin stories in the book of mormon and this is no different so in the book of mormon you're trying to answer that question of why when the white settlers arrived in america did they find these native americans who had dark skin who behaved differently than them who did agriculture different who lived differently them and you're trying to create the book of mormon creates an origin story for them because the white settlers are trying to figure out why these dark-skinned indians are in this land and how they got there and why they're different and the tower of babel is the same thing like you know my kid um as he's growing up he used to ask like you know if we saw someone in a store that was speaking a different language they might say you know why why couldn't i understand that and then you just explain well they speak spanish or you know they speak polish or they speak you know arabic whatever you know i'm trying to think of a different urdu uh some languages we you know we've heard around here and in biblical times when you come across new civilizations you just assume everyone has this this language right that's just evolved from every person and so you're creating an origin story to explain why there are different people speaking different languages and just with adam and eve and the global flood these stories are mythical they're added into um genesis at the beginning but later so that they um give the communities that these books are being written for that these these texts are being written for um their their origin and their understanding and well um they might not take them as literal history it's a way for them to kind of understand a little bit better and to put it in the mindset of how it frames within a religious uh standpoint yeah and so solidify listeners and viewers in your mind around 2200 to 2400 bce if the mormon you know scriptural timeline is accurate it's got to be around 2200 to 2400 bce right 100 years after the flood and out of the gate we're already starting with with the acknowledgement that that scholars and scientists say this event didn't happen but let's let's suspend judgment and look at the evidence yeah and so this is another one where we just you know if you go into it um you could kind of point out the problems really easily today um but again like i said most biblical scholars agree that the stories of genesis are not historical and were written later um but with the tower of babel we can clearly point to reasons just like we did adam and eve in the in the global flood why it simply cannot be a historical event because there were already a diversity of languages that are established before the tower of babel would have taken place in that 2200 to 2400 bce range so um written records of the sumerian language exist as early as 3 500 bce egyptian as early as 3 300 acadian as early as 2 800 um canaanite and ebola i'm not sure if i'm saying that right around 2400 bce so we're already seeing that there's not one universal language before this time frame anyways and so um written languages evolved after they were spoken for a long time in their community um meaning that the languages were developed long before we have written dates and so um being able to find those written examples above um tell you that they were probably developed a lot earlier as far as oral languages go and um genesis itself confirms that there were other languages before the tower available in genesis chapter 10. um they say by these were the isles of the gentiles divided in their lands everyone after his tongue these are the sons of ham after their families after their tongues these are the sons of shem after their families after their tongues and so you know the tower of babel being this event that's going to confound a single atom endemic language into other ones is is just problematic from the start and a viewer listener without having without knowing anything about biblical criticism or historical criticism or without having watched the david baccavoy episodes of mormon stories they're like wait a minute how could the bible simultaneously talk about you know let's just say adamites or descendants of adam speaking multiple languages and then simultaneously have the tower of babel story which would not allow for languages before the tower of babel but then you have to understand that the bible has genesis has two creation stories that are actually different like the bible is full of self-contradictions and and that's just you have to understand how the bible came to be both the old testament and the new testament to understand that the bible is contradicting itself all the time yeah and that's just that i mean again and this is one of those things we mentioned i mentioned the adam and eve story because i think when you get into biblical criticism and in biblical topics it is a little bit different than talking about like mormonism especially for a lot of people if you if you're a believer and then you start to question some of the unique mormonism stuff and then all of a sudden you get to hear you're like oh crap because this has problems too um but again you're using the same skills you use to to evaluate the truth claims and mormonism but now we're going and i would argue now we have more to work with because at least with the biblical stories we actually do have more of a history of how these developed and um it helps us to get a better understanding of what the initial intentions were when they wrote them yeah and and we should just make this more explicit all of this is in an essay you wrote maybe with some help of others at ldsteccessions.com babel b-a-b-e-l yeah people can kind of look at the footnotes and yeah and there's gonna be more there's obviously more in there this little bit obviously of a shortened version of it but yeah i mean and this is just you know this is a really important thing because again i mentioned in the adam and eve episode that anthony miller is one who kind of turned me on to this but the tower of babel is this will be a shorter episode because it's not as involved as adam and eve in the global flood but it's just as important because of the the way that joseph smith puts it directly into the timeline of the book of mormon and so you can't have a figurative or a mythical tower of babel story and still have the book of mormon be historical and that is just where this stuff gets really problematic because i said earlier with these other topics most churches can find meaning in these stories and still acknowledge and give space for the fact that they might not be like perfect little history with mormonism you just can't do that yeah okay so uh i guess we go to the next slide yep and so actually go back one more um so we've kind of we've kind of hinted on this with some of our topics overall but math is a really big problem when you get into some of these topics and so as we mentioned earlier um with adam and eve in the global flood uh most most biblical scholars agree that the pentateuch was not likely created until somewhere around the sixth and fifth century bce at least composed composed in a way that we have it today um by books of the bible right yeah so so for the book of mormon's purpose would be the first five books of the bible it should be on the brass plates and um you know one of the things about when we get into this a little bit you know moses is you know believed to have been written this or you know scribe to have written this and um he would have lived between like 1391 and 1271 bce but you know again that's so far before these texts are being created that tells you that these were not being written by moses which is another issue with regards to how joseph smith puts that and cements that as his historical um data point um but the point is these are written late and the belief was that the global flood wiped out all human life on earth about a hundred years before this happens outside of those on the ark so we have eight people and that all life descended from noah's family with one single endemic language i mean ever remember under the biblical history every single person on earth is dead except for like these eight people so just imagine you're you're say you're at a holiday event you're at christmas dinner with your family and every person on earth dies except for that thing you're gonna have one language that's just how it goes right and so um using the bible's accounting of the children that came from noah sends the flood in genesis 10. by the time of the tower of babel there were about 70 men born from the lines of noah shem ham and japheth and um even if we were going to assume half of them were women just for ease of doing this there'd be 150 people on the entire earth that would be told are creating this the tower of babel and again it's a math thing 150 people would have to then gather all the supplies mold all of you know the bricks or what you know the cement however they built it and that is impossible and then when we look at the estimates of the world population based on archaeology um they believe that the around 3000 bc either between 14 and 45 million growing to between 27 and 72 million by 2000 bce so um in addition to what we talked about before about the global flood not being a historical event there's a lot of evidence that the world was actually thriving with the diversity of civilizations and languages and yet in the bible we're being told there's about 150 people on the earth at that time and uh in the show notes we'll include links to our global flood episode with simon sutherton a scientist and uh we'll be covering that as well right yeah yeah yeah so and so that there's there's there's gonna be a lot about the flood that you can find on mormon stories and elsewhere and like i said it's all of these things tied together so you've got adam and eve then the global flood and the tower of babel and all three of these stories with the scriptures of mormonism are going to fit together in a way that you have to acknowledge even as a believer and if you do that then yeah like i've said before it's about for me just being intellectually consistent or if you don't want to be intellectually consistent just say i don't care but don't argue you know i mean like don't don't try to push that it's history to kids on a sunday when you know it's not and if you're going to tell the kids on in you know in sunday school that it's not history then you're going to have that you're going to have to have the difficult conversation as to how to make sense of that going forward but again um you know the numbers tell us one that way so many more people lived here than the bible would tell us i mean that's that's not in dispute by any real scientific study and then on the flip side if you want to believe a tower of babel was really built you're dealing with 150 people half half men and half women who are going to have to build this thing and that also just is not going to happen in this time frame yeah and then that all the languages that we have today are going to be yeah exactly and so we it just doesn't make sense but um you know we talked about this before a lot of these stories are influenced by earlier myths and so um a sumerian sumerian myth written about 2100 bce called enmerkar and the lord of errata discusses calling upon the lord to unite the languages again among the people in an assyrian myth dating from the 8th century bc and this will be a lot closer to when this is going to be created which i think is important um they discussed the confounding a ton so i just want to read this to you this is from an assyrian myth uh 8th century bce of him his heart was evil against the father of all the gods was wicked of him his heart was evil babylon brought to subjection and great he confounded their speech babylon brought to subjection and great he confounded their speech their strong place tower all the day they founded to their strong place in the night entirely he made an end in his anger also a word thus he poured out to scatter abroad he said his face he gave this command their counsel was confused the course he broke fixed the sanctuary so again this is going to be written before the tower of babel story is going to be compiled into genesis and it's basically giving this babylonian myth or you know that there was um a confounding of tongues because the people were evil and that they get scattered and so we're going to see this in the tower battle story in genesis which again shows us that just like the book of mormon is pulling from 19th century ideas these early uh stories in genesis are pulling from babylonian myths and that's why i mentioned before as david bach always says without you know babel there'd be no bible that's why because they're pulling so heavily from these stories because these are the stories being told from generation to generation um in these communities and then they're actualizing them to themselves as again dave bachman would say um they're actualizing them to their own communities to give purpose to give meaning to give origin um to them so that they can learn from them and you know grow as a community and again a mormon's going to go wait a minute 2400 comes before 2100 right so the the tower babel people would have written down the tower of babel stuff at 2400 right ece and that that's earlier but again you you just made the point previously that those there's no evidence that those stories were written down until over a thousand years later um that then the tower babel would have allegedly taken place and and uh again if we've got sumerian myths literally written around the time the tower of babel should have happened those are going to trump his you know if you're going to use if you're going to rely on historical methods at all you're going to you're going to conclude that it's much more likely that these sumerians make their way into something written you know six or eight hundred years uh bce that then make it in into the bible it's just it it's it's that's what makes sense yeah and not only that but again we've talked about before and the episodes that with david bacavoy i think illustrated a lot better than obviously i could but yeah so like we were talking about there's a lot of evidence that was written later um there's a lot of evidence uh as i think david black voice said hebrew is the origin of the original text of genesis for the the different sources and so because of that they know hebrew is not a written text i want to say like 1300 bce a written language and so the tower of babel was not written until probably the earliest i mean i'm possible earliest would be like a thousand to 1200 bce something like that and so while i guess you can make the argument that it would have predated the caesarean myth um we have evidence of the caesarean myth being in the 8th century because we have it there is no evidence of the tower of babel story being compiled before that and a lot of evidence to say it was compiled after and so again it's it's kind of like one of those things where we're piling problems on top of problems and so if you want to make that claim it's just you've got a lot of other things you have to answer for in order to make it work and that's where it gets messy but at the same time this follows the pattern that we see with adam and eve and the global flood of borrowing from earlier myths to create an origin story for the people this is being written for okay so uh so what what's next so this was um something that david bockwood actually mentioned on mormon stories when he was with you is which is to say um that the story is likely a babylonian polemic against ziggurat worship and um when he had said that i remember thinking that was a pretty cool thing because it kind of shows that it was a story that was being written for a purpose which was to tell people you know not to view these these ziggurats as like these important things and um so you know i started looking into it and i found out that a lot of scholars believe and i'm not sure if i'm saying this right but adam and menaki was a ziggurat which was dedicated to marduk in the city of babylon and was likely an influence in the tower of babel story and um they said it was famously rebuilt by the sixth century bce neo-babylonian dynasty rulers nabapalassar and nebuchadnezzar too second according to modern scholars such as stephen l harris the biblical story of the tower of babel was likely influenced by edumanaki menaki during the babylonian captivity of the hebrews and the cool thing about this is not only does this match the story of the tower of babel but it also again kind of confirms the dating of genesis because this was famously rebuilt by the 6th century which is around when they think the story is being written and this would be a story that be told during the babylonian captivity which is a lot where a lot of the scholars believe these materials are being kind of compiled and finished and so kind of like we talk about how dna is being is confirming what we know about archaeology this is kind of cool because this story is kind of confirming what they believe about the dating which is why this is a really important data point in trying to understand how the story evolved and why it was written in the first place okay and the ziggurat i just looked up that term in ancient mesopotamia a rectangular stepped tower yeah sometimes surmounted by a temple um ziggurats are first attested in the late third millennium bce and probably inspired the biblical story of the tower of babel yep so it's really important and you know when you see the pictures now i should have included when i feel like an idiot for not doing that but yeah when you look at the picture like yeah that would make sense now to be fair i think the pictures are also based on the you know artists artists picturing uh what that would look like but yeah you know so david bokvoy's point is just awesome because it led to me looking that up which obviously he would have known that but it's just cool because it helps to date it helps to give you um clues on the dating of the text why the text was written and it makes sense it fits and so that's what we talked about earlier about when you talk about history versus kind of having straight faith these are giving you historical data points that again point to the clues as to why they are being written and probably were better understood by the people at that time as to why it was being written you know there's um that's going to tangent but i don't know if it was david bokvoy or if it was someone else um i was listening to and they were saying that you know the story of abraham you know sacrificing his firstborn in a lot of ways was was because back then people some people did sacrifice their firstborn kids in religion and that story is not historical but it was being used as a way to tell people guys stop doing this you don't need to do this and um and that's why i find this stuff like truly fascinating because you're learning a lot not just about the text but about why it was written and how it's serving a purpose in that community at its time and that helps us to understand why it was done but it's also really cool because it helps us to be able to understand what joseph smith is doing um with you know his his scriptures as well even though unfortunately they're not going to hold up well from a historical standpoint which takes us to the next slide yeah how about that for a transition and the tower of babel yeah and so you know for the book of mormon um a non-historical tower of babel presents a huge problem and it's because in the book of mormon um they have the book of ether which is a literal recounting of the tower of babel and so um it says which jared came forth with his brother and their families with some well with some others in their families from the great tower at the time the lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth and according to the word of the lord the people were scattered and the brother of jared being a large and mighty man and a man highly favored of the lord jared his brother said unto him cry unto the lord that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words and it came to pass that the brother of jared did cry unto the lord and the lord had compassion upon jared therefore he did not compound confound the language of jared and jared and his brother were not confounded and so this right here is taking what is an ideological myth and just solidifying it as a historical story there's no way around it and again um you know we'll have um some apologists who will say well you know they the early prophets believe these stories to be true and so they spoke them as true and that that would make sense but this is putting it as a materialistic physical tangible story that without it creates huge problems it's a lot like adam and eve yeah it's exactly like that um and and we're going to talk about this in the very next slide but i'm just going to kind of make the point beforehand about anachronisms if if you if you were to stumble upon a document a writ you know um that that alleged to to have been a document written by abraham lincoln and abraham lincoln mentions in the document in his own handwriting that he grabbed his iphone and used it to call general lee or whatever general grant you immediately know it's false that it's a fraudulent document because it's got an impossibility in the text and i'm not trying to like be ham-fisted here but just like with adam and eve if the tower of babel doesn't happen isn't real if it's just a sumerian myth that got incorporated into the old testament it immediately then calls into question whether the book of mormon from the beginning is a historical document yeah yeah and i mean that's the problem we're just like these overviews are just one after the other it's like you need all of these things to work and it just doesn't and so i'm with the tower of babel um if it's a mythical event as the evidence tells us and then jared's story immediately becomes non-historical but it gets more problematic because if the tower of babel did not happen then the 16 stones that the lord touched were non-historical which means that the two stones that were sealed up to translate the plates of jared were also non-historical those two those same two seer stones were later used as the nephite interpreters which were buried with the gold plates of the book of mormon if the tower of babel is mythical as both history and linguistics tell us then the nephite interpreters are also mythical because they rely on a literal tower of babel and if the nephi interpreters are derived from a mythical story then the entire book of mormon story is derived from a mythical story because the gold plates were buried with the interpreters moroni claimed to translate the records from the brother of jared of a vision of all things from the foundation of the world until the end thereof using these nephite interpreters which he included with the steel plates to be revealed in my own due time and so long story short i have to ask you yeah did you just say that according to joseph smith the urim thummim the two stones for the urim dummy in joseph smith's uh accounting went all the way back to the jaredites coming to america well so jamestown as i understand and i will correct myself if i'm wrong here as i understand this kind of thing we talked with anthony miller about was though the lord touches those 16 stones right and those stones are used for um to translate the plates of jared and then they're passed along and they're used as nephite interpreters and we're told in joseph smith's own words that he gets nephite interpreters with the plates because remember he doesn't use the term uranthama and so i guess it's possible they're different but the the phrasing leads you to believe that they have to be the same because he's calling them nephite interpreters just as they're used in the book of mormon as interpreters for the nephites um so again if i'm wrong i will correct that but everything that i could see tells us that there's this line and now not only that but there kind of needs to be because that line of uh you know being passed down throughout as with a special purpose gives again more credibility to joseph smith when he claims to have them and also you know back dates itself into the text as well to give it a little bit more authority within um the translation process which joseph smith is going to claim as we spoke about you know many episodes it feels like a go now um the spectacles that he uh basically is forced to um agree to because of samuel lawrence going with them to the hill and claiming to see them so all of those things kind of get tied together but again i'll correct myself i'm wrong and i will double check that but when i was doing it the first time i was trying to go through that because of anthony miller's presentation talked about it and it made sense that unless they're going to kind of conflate the terms it would match the line of you know the the interpreters going from all the way from there to being used by the nephites to joseph smith yeah and again this all all these stories affect and infect each other because if we know if we know that the spectacles were just an idea that just was forced to acknowledge and then and then we know that that no one ever saw them really um and that he didn't use them right that that that combined with the fact that um we know the tower of babel never happened so the jaredites never happened so the interpreters never happened that would make sense that that interpreters uh there's no evidence of the interpreters ever being used or witnessed by anyone like all it's like all these different it's like a crime scene where we've got all these different kind of lanes of evidence converging to invalidate each other almost right well yeah and again we're talking about 16 stones um that are touched by god for the jaredites and remember excuse me um in treasure digging we they use stones to to claim to see and to claim all that and so again that again you can make the argument that's also tying back into treasure digging and it also again by saying that god used stones to allow for interpretation gives joseph smith credibility when he's using his own peep slash shear stone and a hat to translate the book of mormon it sounds more biblical because in the book of mormon they're using stones as well and i think that's also why that story goes through where you have the nephite interpreters which are then buried with the with the with the plates of the book of mormon yeah yeah all right yeah and so it's just like i said it's probably it's problem on top of problem and it's hard to to really deal with um and so i think we're on the next level right okay yeah so yeah so basically if the tower available is not historical then joseph smith claiming to obtain the nephite interpreters and use them before obviously switching to his own stone to have becomes impossible so in other words if the tower of babel is not historical as the evidence indicates those nephite interpreters cannot be historical which means joseph smith created the story of the stones as he was familiar with the idea of using stones to see objects and messages from the past with treasure digging and as we mentioned a few minutes ago he also was forced to kind of create the story of the spectacles with the two stones because samuel lawrence went with him to the hill and said he saw them and forced joseph smith to admit he psalm 2 and as we've noted with adam and eve in the global flood the book of mormon's dependence on a literal bible is why we know the book of mormon is not historical before we even get into the issues that you usually see with the ces letter or even the gospel topics essays because all of those the horses and the steel and the barley yeah and it's kind of like we'll get into it down the road but one of the coolest things about your interview with david bakavoy was when you talk about the book of abraham because his whole point is like don't even look at the translation don't worry about the facts assemblies don't worry about the joseph smith getting it all wrong if you look at the text of the book of abraham the text itself tells you it's not an ancient text you don't even have to do that and so it's the same thing here it's like before you even get into the unique mormon stuff you can already tell that this book cannot be historical and once you do that everything else makes a lot more sense like it makes more sense once you understand this to read the book of mormon because when you see all the errors you're like of course there's errors because he's writing this trying to basically back date a lot of the stuff into ancient times so of course he's gonna have errors just as he made heirs with the bible and that's why i think it's really fascinating even though it's also really uncomfortable as a believer to go through it right and so you know we kind of talked about this with the previous uh biblical scholarship areas but to look at the mormon church's stance on the tower of babel um this is a article written in 1998 enzyme by um byu professor donald perry who i think might have been a general authority but i'm not sure but he notes that because of the prophet joseph smith latter-day saints have additional knowledge that comes from the reality of these world-changing historical events for some in the modern world the historicity of the tower of babel story as with the flood is often discounted one modern school of thought considers the account to be nothing more than an artful parable in an old tale the latter-day saints accept the story as it is presented in genesis further we have the second witness of the book of mormon the title page of the book of mormon explains that the book of ether is a record of the people of jared who were scattered at the time the lord confounded the language of the people when they were while they were building a tower to get to heaven the book of ether itself tells that then tells of when jared came forth with his brother and their families with some others and their families from the great tower at the time the lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth and so i mean he's not this is a good way to look at it because this is basically how the church teaches this that this cannot be just a parable a mythical origin story this has to be literal for the book of mormon now he's using circular logic to say the book of mormon proves it to be true and i'm just arguing the other side of it which is to say if it's not true you know he to take his own argument if it's not true the book of mormon can't be either and uh i went ahead and looked up donald perry he's a professor of hebrew bible okay in the department of near eastern languages at byu um it doesn't say anything about him being a general authority he might not be i might be just remembering that but uh you know again this is published in the churches yeah it's in the end right yep prophetesses and revelators oversee the publication of the inside yeah so i don't think this and again i if you said this to um you know a gospel doctrine class or whatever no one's going to argue with you this is or joseph smith you you would not find any prophet cyril revelator from joseph smith to now saying that the tower of babel isn't real you wouldn't that's just it i mean this you know i don't think i'm saying that's nothing controversial so we'll look at some apologetic responses and um this is from uh fair mormon it's written by michael ash and he writes in his introduction there are historical indicators however that suggests that the story is a myth in the scholarly sense um and then he goes on to present the possibility that the book of mormon is not actually citing the tower of babel with the following statement when we shine the light of science and scholarship on the tower of babel we find some interesting things first the word babel comes from a serial babylonian word that means gate of god and is related to a hebrew word that means confusion it appears that the author of the bible account are engaging in some word play to make a particular point about their story it's also interesting to note that the book of ether never mentions babel but simply the great tower and let's just go straight to the next slide actually because that'll kind of do it and so if we look at genesis 11 it says and the lord said behold the people is one and they have all one language and this they do begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do go go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another speech so the lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city that's genesis now let's look at ether jared came forth with his brother and their families with some others and their families from the great tower at the time the lord confounded the language of the people and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth and according to the word of the lord the people were scattered and the brother of jared being a large and mighty man and a man highly favored the lord jared his brother said unto him crying to the lord that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words and so if you look at these two quotes they're too similar i mean to say that there's another tower that's doing the exact same thing it just doesn't make sense and it really doesn't make sense given the fact that we've got the you know the book of mormon introduction stating this this is just something that is coming out of as i've said before these apologetics come out of necessity and so when you throw these out there you got to have some textual evidence for it and the textual evidence here is pretty clear that they're referring to the same event yeah and and this is kind of a meta point but who is michael ash who are these apologists there until a prophet syrian revelator kind of comes down these are just uh these are just sort of professionals paid by the church to come up with theories to pacify people who have doubts or questions but until it's incorporate we know the line of authority we know that prophecies and revelators are the voices of god allegedly in mormonism just because some apologist writes something on a website or in a book until it's it's brought into uh the top church leadership and acknowledged it's just as the mormon temple temple ceremony says the the philosophies of men mingled with scripture right why should we even care well yeah says right well i mean and you know on the flip side why should everyone care what i say and so i you know i i get that because you're right like the thing is what i'm saying here and what michael ash is saying michael ash is not speaking for the church in an official way although i do think that the church is very very good at sending people to apologists um when they run into people with trouble um and like you know i've mentioned my clash before because he's a really nice guy and so i'm not trying to beat up on him in any way he's always been awesome it's just um this argument it doesn't work and so um one of his big arguments in his latest book is that joseph smith is a co-author and you know that's the same type of problem to your point like the church is going to kind of send you these people basically when when only when people are losing faith you know and then they'll send them to people as like a last-ditch effort to get them to stay even if it's not maybe with the same belief they had before um but yeah you know it you know these are the apologetics that are given but the church is not going to come up on a general conference talk and say maybe it's you know they're not going to get into it because it's an area that they just don't want to talk about they do not want to talk about um the historicity of these things with regards to book of mormon because it's not going to work um so yeah i guess that's a long way a long-winded way of saying a lot of the apologetics are are used by the church as a last-ditch effort they're always kind of an arm's length away and they're not official and so until the church really incorporates them in an official way like or a gospel topics essay um it's not as important but i do like to cover them just because of the fact that i think it it does show where the churches um i don't know how to phrase it like the the the the brains inside the church i think that see the writing on the wall they're going and so when you see like michael ash or richard bushman or patrick mason when they start going terrell gibbons when they start going a certain way you know that in a lot of ways the church knows that the writing is on the wall and they're going to have to slowly go there even if it won't go there as fast and so it's important to know what they're saying um but yeah i mean until you know we the earlier slide is is the the church's true stance and this is more like the secondary softer approach and so obviously we got to cover both but yeah i mean this is not the official church dance at all yeah and the book of mormon more importantly the book of mormon the keystone of our religion is just very clear correct yeah and so now if we look at the book of mormon just to kind of go through this about potentially having another tower um not only does the author of the book of mormon use the same language as the bibles we showed in the previous slide but the timing lines up so um it would be hard to claim there's another tower because the timing lines up in both of them so you'd have to have you would think some time elapsed to even claim that there'd be a second tower that would have the same exact you know result from god and more conclusively ether um chapter two makes clear that the jaredites went down into the valley which was northward in the valley and the name of the valley was nimrod being called after the mighty hunter nimrod's kingdom is where the tower of babel was built and in hebrew and christian tradition nimrod is considered the leader of those who built the tower of babel in the land of shinar so even the book of mormon's heading for ether chapter 1 makes it clear it says moroni are bridges the writings of ether ether's genealogy is set forth language of the gerudos is not confounded at the tower of babel the lord promises to lead them to a choice land and to make them and and make them a great nation so it's just to say the book of mormon is telling us exactly what we'd expect which is this is the tower of babel um the heading is telling us that i know the headings and a lot of these were written long after but the point is in no possible way is there textual evidence to suggest there's some second tower this is the one and so if the tower of babel is is myth goes which michael ash kind of admits at the start where you know he says um there are historical indicators however that suggests that the story is a myth and the scholarly sends so if he's willing to say that and then you get to a point where there really is no other way to make a second tower work i mean he's being honest in that in that first statement i'm you know so i applaud him for that but it just shows the problems that this creates for the the text of mormonism when you have mythical events being written into the book of mormon as historical because it tells you that whoever wrote the book of mormon was detached from the time that they claimed to be in if they're writing something down that we know didn't happen yeah and for those of us raised mormon was there ever a question that the tower of babel uh was literal no i mean i was 45 years in the church never once was there any question that literally any story in the old or new testament was anything other than literal yeah there's no way it's just it's just how it is and so um just to you know again kind of cover apologetics a little bit i really want to try to do that in these overviews but um there's not a gospel topics essay or entry on the church's website nor is there much in the way of apologetics um online like on the church's site about the tower of bible so that's why you know we kind of went to to fair on that um and then like i said well there are apologetics about the historicity in general um because of course this this affects more religions than just mormonism most scholars will readily acknowledge the story as an etiological myth um that was designed to give you know meaning and origins to this community and as i've said for the other ones this is not nearly as big a problem for other religions as it is for mormonism yeah and honestly the only reason there's no gospel topics essay on this is because we haven't made a big deal about it like you know whether it's mormon things or mormon stories or ces letter if we were to really if we were to create a billboard in salt lake city on the tower of babel pulling people to an essay point people to enough of these discussions about it voila we would see a gospel topic exactly and that's i mean it's true and it's like even for me when i started diving into this stuff it took a long time before i got here and so i think most people that lose faith in the church are not going to stick around and keep reading this stuff like for me like i said it's fascinating and i was really trying to figure it out and so i came across it by talking to anthony miller but yeah i think you're right like this just isn't a problem that reaches a lot of people but it's so important so it's like it's kind of one of those things that's weird because a lot of times i think you talk about tower of babel and book of mormon i think people's eyes are going to glaze over because at this point it's not as juicy as polygamy or the first vision or you know anachronisms but it's to me it's just as important because it actually in a lot of ways it's not i don't know if an acronym is the right word but it's it's out of place it shouldn't be there and yet it appears and so um yeah building up you can't build a castle on a cloud yeah and if if adam and eve and the tower of babel and the global flood are all clouds if they're all a myth joseph smith makes it all literal he's he's referring he's building an entire book of mormon historical narrative alleged historical narrative on these events being literal yeah which then means the book of mormon isn't literal and of course if you now add that to the archeological anthropological geological linguistic and genetic evidences yeah all of that's telling us the book of mormon isn't literal and we we could have known that just by knowing that adam global flood and tower of babel never happened yeah i mean that's just it and again it's like i know it feels oversimplified but it's true like once you understand that and like i said earlier i think it actually helps in a lot of ways because once you understand that then i think it's easier to start looking at the other problems and understanding where they came from because all of a sudden you can really start to understand that the foundation is based off of just a misunderstanding of biblical history yeah and so we've gotta we actually have a few slides kind of concluding this but you know like i said earlier you can approach this for multiple areas of study just like with adam and eve just put the global flood to know it's not a historical event so you know we can look at the diversity of languages that began long before the tower of babel which we talked about earlier um which tells us that there was not some united endemic language leading up to this um furthermore genesis genesis 10 talks about you know all of the different you know lines speaking in the manner of their tongues um which tells us you know that it probably wasn't even at that point understood that way um and then we can look at the fact that we have other mythical stories that have the same exact thing where you've got the confounding languages the scattering of people um and so like i said the study of linguists linguistics tells us that the idea of a singular language that becomes confused it just doesn't exist and it's like just like the global flood you know with the flood we have all these civilizations that carry on completely undeterred throughout the time of the global flood with linguistics we have languages that continue on completely undeterred un you know you would you would technically see this you would expect to see these huge disruptions where you'd see writings on cave walls or some of these writings we have that were before the tower of babel would have happened and then you would you would see no continuation ever after a certain point but none of that happens and so it tells you that there's not some worldwide event where god is scattering people around the world um you know again there's only about 150 people at that time scattering them around the world giving them different languages it's just there's there's no i mean just they like pick them up and like move them yeah that's like a tornado come and carry them to america and that's another problem because i'm sure from a biblical i think from us i think i think i heard once they said that the scattering was done by like creating creating environmental situations that forced people away from each other and the fact that they can't understand each other they kind of split so you'd spread out that way but yeah i mean that's the problem and that's the problem where you know we talk about the adam and eve episode where there are all of these elements of these stories that you can look at and go yep that's mythical you know what i mean like it just you look at it now if you look at it with a blank slate and you didn't know it was obviously it's hard to not know it's from the bible but you look and you go yeah it reads like a story that you would tell you know like a a a tall tall tale or a fable that you read to a kid to give you an embark a lesson on them it just it doesn't read like history and it's because it's not you know and again yeah go ahead it'd be cool to have an episode with a linguist just to talk about how languages develop and how how long it takes and how that ties to population and you know chronologies because i i think you could probably find that language evolves a lot like genetics there's a code there's a pattern and there's a timeline and there are population numbers that all correspond to the evolution of a language yeah and if you just go to like i don't know like uh chaucer and the canterbury tales and you look at what year that was and then you look at how the english language develops you can kind of see how long it takes for a language to develop right yeah that's just it and you know and that's and that's yeah the comp that you're hit on a good point because that's one of the things that people point to a lot when you talk to um scholars about you when you read scholars who write about this stuff they'll say the complexity is what's missing here you know the book of mormon everyone will say it's such a complex book and when you read it and you look at the different characters they're all very wooden they're all very one-sided they're all very similar nothing advances you know i think john larson made a point in a mormon expressions podcast he's like if you read the book of mormon and you look you remember how many years it covers there's no like huge change like if you look at the history of mankind as we have it you you would know it from a 1 000 year you know time frame the the advancements would just be you know innumerable and in the book of mormon they're just it's not really there and it just shows you that the author while he was good at kind of weaving stories together was not good at evolving characters and evolving what they were dealing with it's it's very kind of one-dimensional and that's really hard for a believer to hear but that is why when people from church talk about how complex the book of mormon is if it was truly that complex you would have people who are not mormon in literature classes teaching it maybe they don't believe it's just to be historical but they'd be teaching about how amazing it was that somebody could create such a complex book you don't see that anywhere because it just isn't that complex unless you're raised to think it is and and that's we've talked about that in a previous episode but it's it's a big pro it's a big problem and and you hit it on the head with the languages it's so complex and none of that complexity is in here and that tells you it's not historical it's a really good way to kind of note that this is being written from the perspective of someone who's trying to create an origin story and not thinking about all the things that would have to happen yeah just like we've had michael cohen to talk about our archaeology and anthropology robert written around to talk about egyptology and then the scientists that simon sutherton's brought on to talk about you know genetics and the global flood and adam and eve we need to have a linguist on mormon stories to talk about both yeah power babel and the book of mormon from a linguist point of view yeah i would definitely like to see that just to see their perspective but yeah and then you know just to kind of conclude we've kind of covered some of the stuff but you know the book of mormon states that the jaredites come from the tower of babel and are only able to maintain the original endemic language after pleading with god and so it cements it as a historical story and they come from the valley of nimrod which is a nod to the bible the similar very similar language with phrasing from genesis and you know just kind of going back to the apologetics is the only reason you would even want to consider a second tower of babel is just because you know the tower of babel is not a historical story and if it's not it creates a massive problem for the book of mormon's historicity it reminds me of when they had to create a second kimora because the first yeah doesn't work it's the exact same thing in the second kimora and then you've got to make the geography really small yeah and all of a sudden you're saying how could we of course genetics disappear and of course genetics get bottlenecked apologists have to make the target smaller and smaller and smaller so that they build expectations so low yeah it's like of course we of course the tower babel didn't exist you know yeah and you know it's one of those things where it's like i i've said this a lot and for me the most important thing to do is to say let's take this stuff at face value and if we take it at face value what does it tell us about the what joseph smith claimed first is what we have today and i think that's the important thing i want to read your quote real quick because i love this one and um it makes me make a fine request we'll do it at the end because it'll be a good way to summarize apologetics at the end um okay but but anyway so um this is a great slide the book of mormon tells us that the jared story comes from 24 plates of records that were translated with nephite interpreters that were touched by the lord following the tower of babel and those same interpreters were claimed by joseph smith to be with the gold plates of the book of mormon the tower of babel is a myth as the evidence tells us and every story that comes from what comes from it cannot be historical and i know um one of the things that a lot of people are going to tell us is that that's too black and white of an approach and i get that so the black and white approach is a tricky one but if the tower of babel is not historical the nephite interpreters that joseph smith claimed to physically possess were never created at any point and that is the point that is of such massive importance because as we've mentioned in some of these episodes joseph smith is making these things material to give meaning to the people around us in the americas right because in america that's where all this is taking place but if he's making something physical you can no longer say that the early prophets believed it was a you know or something like i said earlier they'll say well the early prophets believed it to be a story but you know it was mythical but they believed it because it was told over generations but this makes it physical this is where you start to lose that ability to just say well they believed it but it was metaphorical and that's why it's written into the records this this unfortunately just it ties it down in a way that you can't get away from that yeah without the tower of babel you don't have uh the jaredites you don't have the 24 plates uh you don't have the interpreters uh which means you don't have the book of mormon basically which then calls into question joseph smith and calls in to question the entire foundations of mormonism yeah unless i mean that's just that i know it seems overly simple but i think for it's just like that'd be it's like somebody who were to try to argue i know you've got a document that's got abraham lincoln using an iphone yeah it's overly simplistic to say that that makes the document fraudulent no certain uh certain historical proofs invalidate documents they just do you know yeah well and again yeah and that's the thing and i know i know i've mentioned this a few times and i don't want to beat a dead horse here but it's like one of the things you'll hear is like well you you have to have faith you have to have faith that these stories were either literal or that these prophets believed they were literal and so they wrote them in and again for me and i've said this before on the website i don't know if i said it here but you know this idea and i don't know how to phrase this but faith to me is the belief in things we cannot know we cannot see so tower of babel you can have faith in it from a standpoint if you don't look into it because you just can't know right we can't know there wasn't a tower but the problem is for me faith is not the belief in spite of what we can see so to say that you should still have faith in the tower of babel even though we can show from both a textual standpoint and from a historical standpoint didn't happen i don't think that's still having faith and so i think when that when when you hear people say just put on the shelf and have faith it'll all work out in the end i think that's where you you take that leap from faith to i don't want to say blind obedience but just to ignoring problems that you would not give space to if it was another religion and i think that's where we all have to look within ourselves and say do we really want to know this stuff do we really want to get into it and if we do we're going to have to acknowledge this in some way because you can't just ignore it because it is so importantly foundational to mormonism yeah so here that brings us to your final slide yeah this is the final slide so it's just as we see with um adam and eve in the flood the book of mormon ties itself directly to a literal historical bible which was the predominant belief of the 19th century and so again we've mentioned this before but the 19th century people really believe the bible is a history book and this helps give us a window into the worldview that fueled the ideas of the book of mormon but unfortunately for joseph smith it also creates a lot of testable truth claims that we can evaluate its historicity by such like dna and the native americans adam neve tower babel global flood and so if any of these events are not historical then nothing that comes from them is going to be historical it's you know it's it's like it's the phrase you know like no this isn't i'm not saying that book of mormon is garbage i'm just saying like when you create like a computer program they'll say it's garbage and garbage out you know or you know if good goes in good's gonna come out if bad goes and bad goes out and so it's like if non-historical stuff is going in you're not gonna get historical stuff out it just doesn't work that way and so to me that that really is like the biggest part of the these first three the the adam and eve global flood tower of babel all three of them are just linked as historical events and all three of them are not true in a historical sense that's it like everything that comes from that is not going to be true and in the bible you can make the argument i think it's a fair one to say that they in those times and not necessarily believe that they were writing perfect history they knew these were were stories they viewed history differently then but the 19th century they did view history like we do today and so that's the problem joseph smith is taking what he thought was a literal history and then basically building off of it with basically a sequel to the bible in the book of mormon but because it wasn't historical that entire book is now just it it's it's not historical like it's over from that standpoint and that's like i said not even getting into some of the other areas um such as in the anachronisms and um the dna and the laminates you don't even need to get there to know this isn't a historical book but we'll be covering them as well yeah yeah we've covered dna already and we're going to cover some more of these things just because again like like i said it's like it's layer upon layer upon layer upon layer and i don't you know it's like there there was this thing where people were saying like there's about red flags and in mormonism and it was on twitter and i remember i said like how many red flags do you need before you go this is a problem because it is you know there are going to be times where you're going to come across something and go that doesn't make sense but everything else does but what i'm saying is every single one of these topics we've done you can show that they're not going to make they're not going to add up to what we were told they were and we're now like 12 or 13 episodes in and we've already got that and then we've got all these other ones on the other side it's just there's too many to where you would ever give the same space to any other religion um especially when you're talking about one that is so modern that gives us so many tangible claims to test i mean these are not joseph smith didn't do this a thousand years ago he did this 200 years ago it gives us so much room to be able to test it and unfortunately they're just not coming back and again if you were reading this about scientology jehovah's witness seventh-day adventist and you're a mormon you'd be like oh yeah those guys got it wrong because look you can see it it's just because we're so invested it's hard for us to be willing to say yeah you know what this this probably is not what i thought it was and i saw it somewhere on the internet the other day that if you're wearing rose-colored glasses all red flags just look like flags yeah and it's true i mean and again it's just it's so tough because i remember being there i remember oh my goodness i remember like in 2012 when romney ran and i would hear things on the news i would just i'm like i'm not even going near it and at that point i had already lost the literal belief and so even then i was still too afraid to look and so i have i totally understand why it's so hard as a member to trust someone like me i totally get it i'm just saying that i'm coming at people and saying here's what it is here's a face value i'm not redefining anything do with it what you will whereas apologists are telling you what you're looking at isn't really what you're looking at and and that's what's going to leave me this last quote which i wanted to read is from john hamer who i love and mentioned a few times and he was asked about how fair mormon operates with apologetics and he said generally you can avoid saying well this is a forest if you spend all your time staring at bark through a microscope and telling yourself that the pattern in the bark is similar to the pattern in an elephant's hide and i know it's maybe not the most eloquent but what he's saying is from an apologetic standpoint they will drill down so far that they just completely ignore all the problems around it just to tell you that this one point is something that it's not and he's obviously oversimplifying i just i love that quote because it really does show that sometimes if you as an apologist can get a member to just keep digging down and digging down digging down you'll kind of forget the the bigger picture and and that's why i mentioned needing to look at this in totality and we've done something that we probably thought was impossible we've concluded a mormon story's episode in less than an hour i know give us a round of applause for that one well great job mike this is a really important one uh in the show notes we'll have a link to all the episodes we referenced including uh the tower babel episode or or essay on the ldsdiscussions.com website and what what other what other topics uh should should uh viewers and listeners look forward to coming up well we've got a few more on the bible and how it impacts mormonism so we've got um deutero isaiah which is i would argue the most important um as far as kind of you know being a smoking gun as far as using material that wouldn't have been available um we've got the long ending of mark which is a really good one that'll probably be a shorter one too for those who enjoy these shorter ones uh the one i'm kind of excited about is the sermon on the mount and how it's used in the bible and how that gives us a lot of clues as to the historicity of the book of mormon because that's when i never thought of as a member never thought of even until long after i left as to how important this the sermon on the mount being used as a sermon on the temple so that one's going to be a really fun one that's going to come up in the upcoming weeks as well all right well mike you're a gift to us all i can't thank you enough for your time and your willingness to create this series when we're done if we if we all live over the next 12 months we'll have 40 to 50 of these episodes and we'll probably share them not only as a playlist on youtube but maybe as its own podcast so that people can just kind of from a to z go through the top 50 or so issues with mormon truth claims and get a really solid integrated contextualized education so thank you mike thanks guys all right we'll see you soon bye and uh viewers and listeners thanks so much again for joining us today on mormon stories podcast again i'm john uh check out all these essays at ldsdiscussions.com uh we are so uh grateful for all the donors that make mormon stories possible we couldn't do this without your financial support unfortunately we lose donors every month uh and less than one out of a thousand of our donors and listeners actually donates and so we're always having to scramble to keep the revenue coming in so that we can pay gerardo and jen and brooklyn and jennifer and me and everything else so if you value this content please join with our uh with our honored small group of donors and become a monthly donor you can go to mormonstories.org click on the donate button 10 bucks a month 20 bucks a month 50 bucks a month 100 bucks a month whatever you can afford it's tax deductible in the united states uh we're we're we've been tr financially transparent since day one like all 501c3s are required to do we've done our best to provide even more information than we're required to do financially but most importantly our mission is not to destroy mormonism not to tear down faith of the mormon church it's simply to provide people with informed consent so that they can know uh what it is that they're a part of or might be joining or considering uh and then in addition to informed consent we are all about uh supporting mormons in the faith crisis or transition and then for those who need to leave mormonism to help them end up in a healthy happy place and we're here to help improve the mormon church so the mormon church can just fundamentally be more honest and open with its members so thanks for joining us thanks for your support support us if you don't and uh come back uh soon this week or next or in your feed for just more episodes of mormon stories podcast thanks everybody