It is at this point, and only at this point (2:19), that “out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.” The interpretation of this passage is an extremely delicate matter. Clearly we are here in the presence of a motif, common to other religions and mythologies: that of the Nomothete, the Name Giver, the creator of language. Yet it is not at all clear on what basis Adam actually chose the names he gave to the animals. The version in the Vulgate, the source for European culture’s understanding of the passage, does little to resolve this mystery. The Vulgate has Adam call the various animals nominibus suis, which we can translate only as “by their own names.” The King James version does not help us anymore: “Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). Luther’s German translation puts it: “Denn wie der Mensch allerlei lebendige Tiere nennen würde so solten sie heissen. Und der Mensch gab einem jeglichen Vieh und Vogel unter dem Himmel und Tier auf dem Felde seinen Namen.”
Thus Adam might have called the animals “by their own names” in two senses. Either he gave them the names that, by some extralinguistic right, were already due them, or he gave them those names we still use on the basis of a convention initiated by Adam. In other words, the names Adam gave the animals are either the names that each animal intrinsically ought to have been given or simply the names that the Name Giver arbitrarily and ad placitum decided to give them.
From this difficulty, we pass to Genesis 2:23. Here Adam sees Eve for the first time, and here, for the first time, the reader hears Adam’s actual words. In the King James version, Adam is quoted as saying: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman” (in the Vulgate the name is virago, a translation from the Hebrew ishha, the feminine of ish, “man”). If we take Adam’s use of virago together with the fact that, in Genesis 3:20, he calls his wife Eve, meaning “life,” because “she was the mother of all living,” it is evident that we are dealing with names that are not arbitrary but rather—at least etymologically—“right.”
The linguistic theme is taken up once more, this time in a very explicit fashion, in Genesis 11:1. We are told that after the Flood, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” Yet man in his vanity conceived a desire to rival the Lord and thus to erect a tower that would reach up to the heavens. The Lord punishes humanity’s pride and puts a stop to the construction of the tower: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. … Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of the earth” (11:7–9). In the opinion of various Arab authors, the confusion was due to the trauma induced by the sight, no doubt terrifying, of the collapse of the tower. This really changes nothing: the biblical story, as well as the partially divergent accounts of other mythologies, simply serve to establish the fact that different languages exist in the world.
Told in this way, however, the story is still incomplete. We have left out Genesis 10. Here, speaking of the dispersal of the sons of Noah after the Flood, the text states of the sons of Japheth that, “By these [sons] were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations” (10:5). This idea is repeated in similar words for the sons of Ham (10:20) and of Shem (10:31). How are we meant to interpret this evident plurality of languages prior to Babel? The account presented in Genesis 11 is dramatic, able to inspire visual representations, as is shown by the subsequent iconographic tradition. The account in Genesis 10 is, by contrast, less theatrical. It is obvious that tradition focused on the story in which the existence of a plurality of tongues was understood as the tragic consequence of the confusion after Babel and the result of a divine malediction. Where it was not neglected entirely, Genesis 10 was reduced to a sort of footnote, a provincial episode recounting the diffusion of tribal dialects not the multiplication of tongues.
Thus Genesis 11 seems to possess a clear and unequivocal meaning: first there was one language, and then there were—depending on which tradition we follow—seventy or seventy-two. It is this story that served as point of departure for any number of dreams of restoring the language of Adam. Genesis 10, however, has continued to lurk in the background with all its explosive potential still intact, so that at a certain moment somebody suspected that the original Hebrew spoken by Adam was already lost after Noah.
Greek and Roman cultures were not worried about the multiplicity of languages. This indifference was primarily practical and political: Greek koiné first and imperial Latin later ensured a satisfactory universal system of communication from the Mediterranean basin to the British Isles. Further, the two peoples that had invented the language of law identified the structures of their languages with the structures of human reason: Greek man spoke the Language; the rest were Barbarians, that is, in etymological terms, those who stutter, who have no language.
Of course the philosophers knew that even barbarians speak and think. Even so Greek culture did not distinguish between linguistic and mental structures: Aristotle constructed his list of categories setting out from the structures of Greek grammar. Later the Stoics would recognize that although the barbarians used different words they had the same concepts in mind. Nevertheless, the Greek culture continued to think of a universality of the Logos beyond the difference between the various languages.
Conversely, the ancient Greeks debated a problem that Genesis left unsolved, that is, the problem of the relationship between names and things. Plato in the Cratylus discusses the problem of whether words have their source in nature, by direct imitation of things, or in law, by convention. He does not make a definitive choice; indeed, he suggests a third option, that language must reflect the order of ideas. European culture was for a long time directly influenced by Aristotle’s solution: the sounds of the voice are conventional symbols that express a passion of the soul, even though this passion of the soul arises spontaneously as the image of the thing that exists.
When Christianity became a state religion, it was expressed in the Greek of the patristic East and further in the Western Latin. After St. Jerome translated the Old Testament in the fourth century, the need to know Hebrew as a sacred language grew weaker. A typical example of this cultural lack is given by St. Augustine, a man of vast culture and the most important exponent of Christian thought at the end of the empire. Obviously, according to Augustine, the Christian revelation is founded on an Old Testament written in Hebrew and a New Testament known as a Greek text. St. Augustine, however, knew no Hebrew, and his knowledge of Greek was, to say the least, patchy. Hence a somewhat paradoxical situation ensues: the man who set himself the task of interpreting the Scripture in order to discover the true meaning of the Divine Word could read it only in Latin translations. The notion that he ought to consult the Hebrew original never really seems to have entered Augustine’s mind. He did not entirely trust the Jews, nurturing a suspicion that, in their versions, they might have erased all references to the coming of Christ. The only critical procedure he would allow was a comparison of translations in order to find the most likely version. Thus St. Augustine, though the father of hermeneutics, was certainly not destined to become the father of Semitic philology.
Nevertheless, for Augustine, as for nearly all the early Fathers, Hebrew certainly was the primordial language. It was the language spoken before Babel, and after the confusion, it still remained the tongue of the chosen people. Still, Augustine gave no sign of wanting to recover its use. He was at home in Latin, by now the language of the Church and of theology. Some centuries later, Isidore of Seville found it easy to assume that, in any case, there were three sacred languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—because these were the three languages that appeared written above the cross (Etymologiarum ix, 1). With this conclusion, the task of determining the language in which the Lord said “Fiat lux” became more arduous.
If anything, the Fathers were concerned about another linguistic puzzle: the Bible clearly states that God brought before Adam all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the air. What about fish? Did Adam name the
