H894

• {"n":"Genesis 11:9","s":"Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the LORD did there confound. A pun that mocks the city's own name for itself.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-11-9","r":"Genesis 11:9","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads Babel and confounded or confused, correctly translating both, but with no way to show that the connection between them is a pun rather than an actual derivation, since Babel is simply carried over as a name in English."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine a city calling itself **Gateway**, and a rival nation nicknaming it **Gatecrash**, close enough in sound to land the joke, and different enough in meaning to be an insult. That is exactly the move Genesis makes with Babel and the Hebrew word for confuse."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"In Akkadian, the city's own language, Babel is bab-ilu, gate of god, the name Babylon proudly gave itself as the meeting place of heaven and earth. Genesis instead connects the name to the unrelated Hebrew root balal, to confuse or mix up, close enough in sound to register as deliberate wordplay, not a genuine etymology. The Hebrew narrator takes Babylon's own grand self-description and replaces it with mockery, using the empire's most famous city as the counter-example to the naming device used positively for Peleg and Noah earlier in the same block of chapters."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English Babel is simply a transliterated proper name carrying no built-in meaning either way, so an English reader cannot hear either the Akkadian gate of god the city claimed for itself or the Hebrew confusion the narrator substitutes for it."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When Genesis renames a place or a person with a pun rather than an etymology, ask what the original, often foreign, name was claiming, and read the Hebrew pun as a deliberate answer to that claim rather than a neutral linguistic note."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Confounded is the settled sense of balal in every version. The polemical edge, that this pun specifically answers and undercuts Babylon's own proud self-naming, is a matter of reading Genesis against its ancient Near Eastern background, not a textual question translation alone can resolve."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05d1\u05b8\u05bc\u05dc\u05b7\u05dc balal (with \u05d1\u05b8\u05bc\u05d1\u05b6\u05dc Bavel, cf. Akkadian bab-ilu) \u00b7 H1101 \/ H894"}],"src":["Akkadian bab-ilu, gate of god, as Babylon's own self-designation","balal, to confuse, as the Hebrew root behind the pun on Bavel","The same naming-pun device used positively at Genesis 5:29 (Noah) and 10:25 (Peleg)"]}