King James the Fourth of Scotland carried out a similar experiment around the
year 1500 and the children were reported to have spontaneously started speaking
Hebrew, confirming the king’s belief that Hebrew had indeed been the language of the
Garden of Eden. It is unfortunate that all other cases of children who have been
discovered living in isolation, without coming into contact with human speech, tend
not to confirm the results of these types of divine-source experiments. Very young
children living without access to human language in their early years grow up with no
language at all. This was true of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron in France, discovered
near the end of the eighteenth century, and also of Genie, an American child whose
special life circumstances came to light in the 1970s (see Chapter 12). From this type
of evidence, there is no “spontaneous” language. If human language did emanate
from a divine source, we have no way of reconstructing that original language,
especially given the events in a place called Babel, “because the Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth,” as described in Genesis (11: 9).