Introduction

As one reads the Account in Genesis of Adam walking and talking with God, one cannot but wonder what language they spoke.

It is too easy to dismiss the account as pure myth because of our unfamiliarity with trees which impart knowledge and life. We don't have experience with talking serpents. Even so, it has been believed by many that Hebrew was the original language. We might even suggest that there is evidence that the New Testament writers believed the same. The ancient memory concerning the language of Hebrew is: words derive their meaning from the combined meaning of the individual letters.

Isaac Mozenston has been researching the event at Babel where the one language was scrambled into the various languages of the nations. He uses similar consonant patterns found in many language and observes that it appears that Hebrew was scrambled to form other languages rather than each of the languages being a whole new creation. Much of his work is promising to demonstrate such scrambling, but his attempts to define the meaning of the individual letters falls flat.

Mozenston ignores the fact that the nations with new languages retained their pagan beliefs, while the ones who retained a written language continued to wrestle with God. We should not expect that working back from the 'pagan' languages would produce the pure Adamic language. We expect such efforts to be scrambled.