What was this pre-flood language and did it continue to exist after the confusion of tongues? Did God judge all who existed then so as to change their language? As mentioned before, Jewish tradition says that Eber did not cooperate in the building of the tower of Babel and that therefore he and his immediate descendants were spared from having their language changed. [In support of this we may consider that it is remarkable that names in the Bible have meanings, and those meaning are given as part of the revelation of Scripture. The name of the first man, Adam, comes from the word for earth, Adamah, because ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground’ (Genesis 2:7). Is Adam not in fact the name he was given by God, but a new name in a new language? If Hebrew was a new language created by God at the time of Babel, did the new Hebrew name for Adam have the same meaning in that new language as before – ‘earth’, or ‘red earth’? Was this new language constructed by God in such a way that all the old names given before Babel whose meaning are explained in Scripture found themselves to be related to words in that new language which explained their meanings? Adam called his wife Eve ‘because she was the mother of all living’ (Genesis 3:20). He did this because she was the first woman and from her would come all subsequent humanity so that she could be said to be the mother of all. But the name Eve is appropriate because it is derived from a Hebrew word meaning ‘to live’. Was there a previous language before Babel which also had the name Eve, or some other name which we no longer know, and in that language also, the word ‘to live’ resembled that other name so that the name could be derived from that word meaning ‘to live’? If all this is true, then Hebrew, which has so many of these word resemblances which explain names in the Hebrew language, was constructed by God as a new language in which all the new names have the same meaning as before. God is certainly able to do this, but has he in fact done it? And if those new names have not been changed but are the same sounds as in the proto-language before Babel, then a newly created Hebrew somehow has words in its language which still bear the same relation to these same-sounding names. We should note that even in the case of names being taken up by other languages, there are sound similarities to these Hebrew words that have found their way into those other languages. So as mentioned above, the Greeks incorporated the name of Japheth into their language as Japetos. That name in Greek has no meaning, and to find its meaning, one would need to go back to its language of origin, Hebrew, where it means ‘expansion’. If Hebrew is not the true language of origin but a replacement language, how is the meaning of all these pre-flood names supplied by the Hebrew language alone? There is one name that certainly cannot have changed: the name of God, Jehovah, and yet that name has meaning in Hebrew and no other language that we know of. Did God invent a new language, Hebrew, in which his name had the same meaning as it had before, but that meaning was attached to a completely different sounding name? Surely Hebrew is the language that was originally given to Adam.
This is about 1,560 years after creation; Babel occurs another hundred years down the line. After the flood, there were eight people. What was the population of the earth by the time of Babel? If the calculations that you read are at all reliable, the fastest rate of growth possible in human society from eight souls over a hundred years would bring them to something less than 2,000 people. That is assuming that every couple had children, and there was an average of five or six children per couple, and very few in that period of a hundred years died. 2,000 would be an absolute maximum, and the real figure was maybe somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000. So the population is quite small by our standards today by the time of the building of the tower and the city of Babel.