Bible Linguistics – 4. A language that flows through human history like a drama

Bible Linguistics – 4. A language that flows through human history like a drama

Why did God allow human language? It was to praise God the Creator in one voice. God wiped out the fallen mankind by the flood, and then prospered again through Noah's descendants. However, people fell into pride and tried to challenge God by building a tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel might have been intended to create a high place and evacuate safely again in the event of a flood. Until this tower of Babel was built, mankind was speaking only one language. God confuses language to condemn this human pride. This congestion would have been achieved by different pronunciations and word order for each language. This event contrasts with the incident of the Pentecostal Holy Spirit in Acts 2 in the New Testament. This case is the New Testament version of the gracious reversal of the Old Testament version of the Tower of Babel. In the Pentecostal event, the disciples began speaking in more than 15 different languages. Here, the unification of the divided language in Babel took place. In Babel, humans used language to enhance their honor, but in Mark's attic, the “new” language was used to announce “God's great work”. In Babel, God scattered people by judgment, but in Jerusalem, God scattered people and used them to preach the gospel worldwide.

The Hellenistic period, the middle and old history of the Old and New Testaments, provides a very important clue regarding biblical linguistics. The Hellenistic era is linguistically linking the Tower of Babel and the Pentecostal events. Galatians 4:4 says, "When the time came, God sent his son." Here, "time" is the Greek word "Kronos," meaning a certain period. This "Kronos" is a concept that contrasts with "Kyros," which means "opportunity." Therefore, literally "When the time came" can be translated as "the fullness of time came." The last warning of the Old Testament Malachi says, "Remember the covenant of Sinai (Mal. 4:4)." God is silent for a long period of 400 years after Malachi. This Hellenistic era, commonly referred to as silence, is understood as the period God prepared Jesus Christ. God indeed sent the Messiah over the history of this period. Through this biblical evidence (Isaiah 7:14, etc.) and the development of history (the Greek and Roman periods), God makes the Greek language the world language and uses the Roman Empire to preach Jesus Christ to all nations.

Through this biblical story, we can see that God is using language to proclaim God's righteousness. I've been interested in languages, so I've studied many languages, and I continue to learn languages. It may seem that my current language ability is my own effort, but when I read the story of the Bible, the language ability is entirely a gift from God. It is a gift that is used to reveal the glory of God. This gift may come as a miracle in the absence of human effort, such as the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. When analyzing Corinthians, it is presumed that Paul spoke dozens of languages. It seems that he also received the gift of dialect as a foreign language.

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