Adam and EveAnswered

Did God give Adam and Eve language at the moment of their creation, and was it Hebrew?

They were created as fully-formed adults and from day 1 Genesis records them as speaking. Do you think their language was Hebrew?

Answer

Yes, Adam and Eve were infused with the ability to speak and understand a human language from the first moment of their existence. But that language was not Hebrew. Hebrew came later, through the line of Eber, after the flood and the confusion of tongues at Babel. Yes, they had language immediately, and they had to. Look at what happens in the first two chapters. God speaks to Adam and gives him a prohibition, and Adam understands it. Adam names the animals. Eve is addressed by the serpent and answers him, quoting God's command back to him. None of that works unless both of them already possessed a language and understood it perfectly the moment they existed. This follows from how they were made. Adam and Eve did not grow up the way children born after them do. A child spends years acquiring speech by imitation. Adam and Eve were created as adults, and along with adult bodies they received infused knowledge, which includes knowledge of the language they were going to speak. The Genesis account shows the same thing in other areas. When God brings the animals to Adam to be named, that is not a taxonomy exam, it is God, intrigued with the creature He has just made, wanting to see Adam use his intelligence and creativity, just as God used His own in making the universe. Adam's naming of the animals shows that he is modeling himself on the image of God in which he was made. A man with no language cannot do that. Likewise, Adam and Eve already knew the difference between good and evil intellectually before they ever came to the tree; that is why the prohibition was intelligible to them in the first place, and why what the tree offered was experiential knowledge of evil, not the bare concept of it. The devil's role tells you the same thing from the other direction. When the serpent speaks to Eve, he speaks in a language she understands. He would have had the power to copy that language in order to communicate with them. So whatever language was in the Garden, it was a real, functioning tongue used by God, by the two human beings, and by the tempter. Now, what was it? We do not know, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. People ask me in what language God said "Let there be light," or whether it was the language of the angels. I have no way to tell you. Scripture does not say, and I am not in the business of filling gaps Scripture leaves open. But I can tell you what it was not, and that is Hebrew. Hebrew is a post-flood language. The languages of the world as we know them were created at the Tower of Babel. Genesis 11 records God confusing the speech of men because they refused to spread out and fill the earth as He had commanded in Genesis 1:28 and again in Genesis 9:1-7. The Hebrew verb in Genesis 11:7 is balal, which normally means to mix, as in mixing oil into flour. The implication is that God altered the speech faculties of the whole population, but did it in such a way as to produce select groups that shared a language with each other while not understanding the vast majority of everyone else. That is why the place is called Babel, and it is where we get the word babbling. Out of that dispersal, a man named Eber carried one of those languages away with him, exactly as everyone else did, and the Hebrews take their name from him. That is most likely the beginning of the Hebrew language. It is not the language Adam and Eve spoke. People resist this because they assume the language of Scripture must be the language of Eden. It does not follow. God inspired Moses to write in the Hebrew of his own day, and that is a matter of God accommodating His revelation to the people receiving it, not evidence about what was spoken in the Garden. Hebrew is a holy language because of what was written in it. It is not the primordial tongue. So: language at the first instant, yes, by infusion, not by learning. Hebrew, no. And the actual identity of the Edenic tongue is one of those things we will have to wait and ask about.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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