On the Origins or the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language

Nimrod, rebellion

he wished to act, desiring it. According to his name, he resisted divine power to the ruin of us all, and devised that tower to avoid the flood of waters, where divine providence shows that mortals rely on their own senses in vain if they rashly undertake anything contrary to the decree of nature. When the report of such an infamous deed, so memorable, reached the storytellers of Greece, they invented that Gygantomachia War of the Giants, with a thin rumor of mountains piled upon mountains, to depose Jupiter himself from his seat. The names of the giants were fabricated for them by the same reasoning I have brought forward. That Jupiter himself scattered the mass indicates nothing other than the punishment which God inflicted in the confusion of tongues, where the condition of man toward man began to be harsher than that of the brutes and animals devoid of reason, which understand one another by a certain natural instinct. The natural language changed there, as did the first gift granted by God, the parent of the nature of things. The name of the בבל tower and the imperfect work was Babel, which signifies confusion, coming quite close to the Gallic voice. For we use the word "babillare" for babbling. The work, incomplete by divine vengeance, was finished not by Ninus or Semiramis, as all the historians of the Greeks falsely believed and left in writing, but by Nebuchadnezzar, who in the ninth year of Astyages, king of the Medes, led away the captive Jews. Josephus recites some of his marvelous works in the first book against the grammarian Apion, from Berosus, the historiographer of the Chaldeans, to whose opinion I would certainly subscribe more readily than to the whole crowd of Greeks. The entire region took the name of Babylon from such a celebrated city among all authors. Otherwise, it was called the land of Shinar and Chaldea. To Mizraim himself, to whom we said Egypt fell, was born a son, Ludim or Lud, from whom comes Lydia—not that region of Asia Minor, or as they call it today, Anatolia—but a city in Petraean Arabia, so turned because of the usage of the Greek language, the vau Hebrew letter v/w (ו) into the upsilon (υ). For thus we find in many words the vau turned into upsilon, as in Ludim (לודים) becoming Lydioi (λύδιοι), and kur (כור) becoming kyros (κύρος) for fine linen cloth, and Tsur (צור) becoming Tyros (τύρος), a city of the Palestinian sea