source: The Rand McNally Atlas of World History

The Bible describes the building of the Tower of Babel and the confounding of human language after the Flood in Gen. 11:1-9. In Gen. 10:5 and 25 we get a date for the event, corresponding to the life of Peleg, a fourth generation descendant of Noah's son Shem. Peleg lived 239 years, from 2357 to 2118 B.C. Could the Tower of Babel have been so recent in human history? Several facts confirm the Bible's date. First, the Bible says the tower was built in the land of Shinar or Babel, which corresponds to ancient Sumeria/Babylonia. There was a collossal tower started in this area, at exactly the time the Bible records. The structure was the Ziggurat at Ur, a city close to the old southern bank of the Euprates river that was the capital of the original Babylonian empire. Historians date this structure (pictured above) at 2250-2233 B.C., in the middle of Peleg's life. Second, Bible commentators, including John Locke, have read Gen.10:8 ("And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.") and Gen.10:10 ("And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel....") to mean that Nimrod was the monarch who ordered the construction of the Tower. This reading corresponds to the "mighty men, which were of old" in Gen. 6:4 that may refer to the kings of the existing Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations at the time of the Flood. The name historians give to the ruler who built the Ziggurat is Ur-Nammu, at least a partial cognate for Nimrod. Finally, theologians have typically considered the confounding of human language at the time of the Tower of Babel to be a miraculous, momentary event. The Bible tells us God did it, but he may well have used natural forces. There is a precedent in recent history for the sudden appearance of a new language from several other, much different languages. Between the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the mid-thirteenth century, modern English appeared, formed from the Old English, Norman French, and Latin. The speed of the development of modern English is, itself, seemingly miraculous. Old English, a loanguage so different from the modern it is completely unintelligible to modern English speakers, completely died out at this time, although French and Latin survived intact. If a similar process occurred when the Tower was built, with the languages that existed before the flood being revived by flood survivors who knew them (i.e. Noah, Shem, Ham, Japeth or their wives) or rediscovered, the language spoken when the Tower began may have died out and become unintelligible as quickly as old English did. Peleg's 239 year life span is longer than the time it took for modern English to evolve and kill Old English.