Question

All of us started with Adam and we are all descendants of Adam, and yet there are many different races around the world.  My question has to do with the origin of different races and also language.  I think language was at the Tower of Babel, that God dispersed into different languages.  Did everybody speak the same language up to that time?  And is that true with races also?

Answer

The whole earth was one language; it says that in Genesis 11.  I think, basically once they were scattered all over the earth then, of course, various ethnic groups began to develop.  But you have to go even back before that, in Genesis, chapter 9, where the Lord took the three Sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth, and I can just quickly refresh your thinking on that, I think. 

Genesis (just a brief answer) 9:25, "He said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.  And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.  God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."  He took the three sons, Canaan will be a servile people, Shem would be the blessed people--the Semitic people out of which comes the Arabs and the Jews and so forth.  And Japheth would be the colonizing people who would enlarge, mostly going into Europe.  So here even from the sons of Noah--God begins to separate out the races. 

Now, as to how it is that they took on physically distinct characteristics that is because that's the way the Lord began to create them.  The Tower of Babel only contributed to that, as they were scattered to different places there is a certain amount of adaptability.  Black people are black because they came from a place where they needed that, as opposed to Scandinavian people, very white--you know, and so forth.  So the Lord in the process of development of the races, allowed them to adjust and adapt to that particular thing.  Frankly, some of it there are no answers to it except that God in his sovereignty designed it that way.  But you go back to Genesis 9, with God sorting out the three sons and separating them apart and then Genesis 11, where He scatters them all over the world and they begin to identify themselves as unique ethnic groups with their own language, and develop their own characteristics.