One day Bill went to Joe and asked him the most curious question. Bill asked "what do you think is beyond the clouds?" Joe answered back "I don't know, brother. I've never put much thought into it but now that you ask I am quite curious as well." Bill responded, " Do you think that the great heavens of our god lie beyond the clouds"? After spending much time conversing over the subject the two men decided to get opinions from the townsmen. The men went amongst the remaining townsmen and questioned them as to what is behind the clouds and if they would be willing to build a tower to explore. After all of this interrogating the two brothers went to the town meeting that was being held and asked if the townspeople would help them build a tower on top of their house to explore the further reaches of the sky beyond the clouds. A strong majority of the people agreed to the task and began collecting material to build the tower with. To build the tower the people used brick that was burned to harden it and slime was used as a mortar to weld the bricks together.
After a few months the tower was built nearly a mile high. God then came down to check on his people and saw the partially built tower and decided that there was no way they would see his home without his admittance through the front gates. On one of the best days of construction Bill and Joe stepped back to view the tower being built and decided it was a beautiful creation. As the two were talking, God was sitting on top of the tower and threw tiny rocks off the top but only hard enough to get his point across. The rocks struck both of the men, as they were working, on top of the head and they began talking a strange language to one another. One by one God threw rocks at each worker until he had hit each and every worker. Now there were hundreds of languages being spoken and no one spoke the same language. Construction of the tower came to a halt and everyone was very confused and decided to move to various places around the world and begin their own countries.
Author's Note
I chose this story because I thought I could tell a new story from a completely different vantage point to create an interesting post. My goal was to create a new reasoning for why there are different languages in the world and why they are scattered throughout the world. Also my goal is to add more personalization to the story by adding in characters with attributes closer to today's type of people and how they would talk and act. The reading this story came from was "The Tower of Babel." In the original story, God confused the people of Babylon so that they would not be capable of working together to make the great tower to reach the heavens. In creating this story, I thought it would be better to create some type of reasoning for why everyone could not speak the same and also why they ventured off into different parts of the country. Most people know that origin of the original story but do not question its accuracy. Many of these stories were passed along by word of mouth and had variations in their accuracy. Knowing that this story is most likely completely inaccurate I felt like it would be a fun variation the original to explain some happenings early in our history.
Bibliography
The King James Bible, Book of Genesis 10-11
I really enjoyed reading your story! I enjoyed your attention to detail and the descriptions given in the story. I think that the dialogue that was added was a good addition as it gave a deeper perspective to your story. You did a really good job making sure that your reader could follow what was going on. It was a very well structured writing and I was able to bring the story together at the end and was able to understand the birth of different languages. Great job!
ReplyDeleteThis story was great!! Once I got done I paused and let it soak in. I really like the way you write and how you chose to put in the detail. My stories tend to be "wordy" so I like how you got down to the point with good detail.
ReplyDeleteHi Tylor!
ReplyDeleteI chose to read your Portfolio story as my free choice this week. The title first caught my attention. Then I was interested because I did this unit too, as well as write my story on the Tower of Babel, and added it to my portfolio! So curiosity took over and I had to see your version of the story. My first hurdle was getting to it. The link would not allow me to access the story from the Portfolio. So because I knew roughly what week this unit was, I found it on week 2 storytelling.
I absolutely love how you have told the story of how so many languages came about, and really like how well you told it without being overly descriptive and lengthy. Very well done! I think you may want to look at the capitalization of the word god, because sometimes you capitalize it in your story and sometimes you don't.
Overall, I love what you did, great story, fun to read. I do not see much else that I could offer as a suggestion for making any improvements.