19. Sharing the Language!

19. Sharing the Language! “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”Genesis 11:9 Meanwhile, Nimrod, after sending off his son Hwanung, found no way to soothe the sadness and emptiness caused by his longing for him. Moreover, thinking of Hwanung, who left stubbornly without listening to his words, made him feel not only resentful but also began to harbor animosity towards Hwanung and his ideas. To alleviate these feelings, he became more tyrannical and started engaging in more absurd activities. After usurping Assyria, Nimrod, who had been quiet for a while, abolished the worship of God in Assyria after Hwanung left, and began to worship idols, oppress loyal subjects, and employ deceitful people. The people, unaware that Assur had been assassinated and that Nimrod was acting as Assur, were greatly perplexed by the sudden change in Assur’s appearance. To divert the people’s attention, Nimrod waged frequent wars to expand Assur’s territory, moved the capital from Asur to Nineveh, and made it the capital of all nations, threatening the kings of all nations to gather under Nimrod. To maintain his power, Nimrod proposed to the kings of all nations:“Let us build a tower that reaches the heavens in Babylon, unite all tribes, oppose God, and create a world of our own.” Fearing Nimrod’s wrath, the kings of the smaller nations fully supported his words, and everyone joined Nimrod’s rebellion against God, executing the absurd idea of building the Tower of Babel to reach God.Until then, the language passed down from Noah’s flood and his family was one, and dialects had not yet developed. Therefore, people from various countries came together to build the Tower of Babel without any significant issues, and the construction proceeded smoothly. They devised a new method for building the tower by mixing clay with water to make bricks of a suitable shape, and later, they fired the bricks to create even more durable building materials. To firmly stack these bricks, they used mud to bind them together, and after firing the bricks, they used stronger bitumen to bind the bricks, making the construction of the Tower of Babel even more solid and high. The purpose of building the Tower of Babel was to prove that there was no God by looking down on the world from a high place and to create an environment where people could live collectively in one place, preventing anyone from leaving like Hwanung, thereby strengthening their rule. Seeing this, God said, “Indeed, the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.” God then judged Nimrod’s nation building the Tower of Babel. In His wrath, He confused their language so that they could not understand one another’s speech. As a result, the construction of the Tower of Babel could not proceed, and it was eventually abandoned and naturally collapsed. The people working on it were scattered in all directions. Surprisingly, when this happened in Assyria, where Hwanung had left, the Dodang tribe in the east, who were of the same ethnicity, also experienced a change in their language. Consequently, the Dodang and Sem tribes could no longer communicate with each other, and they too could not live together in that land. Dodang, saddened, had no choice but to part with Hwanung and led the descendants of Japheth and Ham to leave Asadal in search of another land. Hwanung, worried, selected some people from the Sem tribe and sent them with Dodang, led by their chief Soho. The Dodang and Soho groups settled in the Hongshan region of Liaoxi, establishing the Hongshan culture. At that time, a branch of the Sem tribe, the Yemek people, left Canaan, passed through Central Asia, and arrived in Liaoxi. The Dodang tribe yielded the land to their elder family and entered the central plains. This was because they had already learned the etiquette of yielding through Hwanung. Around that time, Abraham in Canaan also told his nephew Lot to choose the land first, saying, “If you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I will go to the left.” Lot chose the plains visible from the mountains, and Abraham lived in the mountains. Soon, Sodom and Gomorrah in the plains were engulfed in war and eventually destroyed by fire from God due to their corruption. However, Abraham, who always remembered God and lived in the mountains, received great blessings from God. Soho’s group left only a minimum number of people in Hongshan and traveled with Dodang to the central plains. Dodang also yielded the eastern part of the central plains to Soho and settled in the rough western part of the central plains, in Huashan of Shanxi, living in caves and becoming the Western Earth people. Soho’s descendants lived in Shandong and Henan south of the Yangtze River and were called the Dongyi people by the Chinese. Soho’s tomb still exists in Shandong, and it resembles the ziggurats of Sumer in a pyramid shape. These Dongyi people later established the Yin dynasty, and their descendants, such as Confucius and Zhuge Liang, led their era. Dodang, throughout his life, worshipped God and taught the descendants of the Dongyi people the rituals and teachings of offering sacrifices to God, which they received from the Western Earth people. This Dodang is called King Yao in the historical records of the central plains. The name Dodang is originally a Chinese character representation of the word Dedan, recorded in Genesis 10:7 as the son of Cush, who became the ancestor of the Chinese people.