Acts 2:4 says that when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples at Pentecost, they “began to speak with other tongues”. This may seem like an odd, and possibly unnecessary miracle, but I believe it served a very specific purpose. And that purpose was not strictly so that the Hellenistic Jews from other lands who were there in Jerusalem for the Feast of Weeks could understand the disciples. They almost certainly all spoke Aramaic or Latin, so they probably could have understood each other without the miracle. But does this event remind you of something?
In Genesis 11 we find the story of the Tower of Babel, where a group of people led by Nimrod decided to build a ziggurat, or tower for God to come down to earth. Shockingly, it worked! God did come down and was displeased, so verse 7 say he confused their language. In other words, people started to speak in tongues.
The Tower of Babel was a prideful act of man, causing God to intervene through a miracle of tongues to cause confusion. Pentecost was a blessing for the faithful where God used the gift of tongues to bring people together. In other words, Pentecost was a symbolic reversal of Babel. It was God saying He would give His church whatever it needed to reach the world.
One last note: The “tongues” were actual known languages, not what we typically think of speaking in tongues to mean today. That’s why people from so many different lands were able to understand, because they heard their own language being spoken. That’s equally true for Babel as it is for Pentecost.
