Why did the people of the Tower of Babel babble helplessly?

Sumerian epics describe a time when all humans shared a single language until the gods intervened to create a confusion of tongues. When the Jews arrived in Babylon during the Babylonian Exile, they not only heard this story, but found a confusion of languages such as they had never imagined in insular Judah. They also saw the great ziggurat, a tower that seemed to be reaching up towards heaven, and associated this with the profusion of languages. Out of all this evolved the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Babylon).