Abraham Communicates with Egyptian Pharaoh

I think the Bible just ignored the linguistic problem, unless it aided the plot line (eg Joseph with his brothers in Egypt).

According to the Bible account it was at the Tower of Babel that languages were confounded, and only then did people scatter across the face of the Earth 'according to their nations'. This implies that there would be no kingdom in Egypt until after the Babel incident, meaning that the Egyptians spoke a different language.

But Babel is a myth, and so is Abraham. Abraham (with his wife Sarah and nephew Lot) talk to many foreigners - the Egyptians, the Amorites, the Sodomites, the Hittites, the Philistines, other Canaanites - plus there were foreign servants in Abraham's household. These all had different languages according to the Table of Nations, yet linguistic translation is hardly ever mentioned in the Bible.

The sons of Abraham also talked to Philistines and Canaanites, but perhaps they learnt the language from their father?

But later still, when Joseph was in Egypt, he was quite comfortable talking to Potipher, Potipher's wife, the jailer, the baker, the cupbearer and the Pharaoh. Where did he learn Egyptian? It wasn't a language known to his brothers, so it wasn't used at home or in trade. It must have been a different language because, as already noted, Joseph's brothers couldn't understand it. Yet we are also told those brothers talked to the Egyptian servants, so someone was translating. Its clear that the Bible just largely ignores the presence of these translators or multi/bi-lingualists

Its lack of detail, not evidence of a single language.

Edited by Sidney - 28-Dec-2014 at 07:23

Originally posted by Arthur-Robin possibilities1. "seems to". It may be lack of detail as Sidney said. (Moses wrote 600 years later.)

Other Biblical tradition agrees with this;
Psalms 114:1 = When Israel went out from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,

Edited by Sidney - 28-Dec-2014 at 11:31