Could any theologians explain why God would do this?
Not a Theologian but I will give it a shot.
The world had just (a few hundred years before) been destroyed except for eight people because, to quote:
“And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. ” Gen 6:13
There is a theory that before the flood there was a very advance culture on earth, which is logical if you considered a few points.
1.) The world that they lived in was a very gentle as far climate.
2.) The people who lived there were much closer to genetic perfection
3.) They lived an extremely long time. If you are going to live 900 years you might take 200 to study how the grass grows. What is time to you? You have plenty of it.
4.) Everyone spoke the same language and so the free exchange of ideas was no problem at all.
After the flood some steps were taken to prevent this from continuing. The life span was shortened to an average of 70-80 years. The world became a much tougher place to live making survival hard. The water canopy was gone raising the amount of genetic mutation and decease on earth. And speech was confused preventing the free exchange of ideas.
This was meant to slow us down so that we would not destroy the earth before our ethics reach parity with our intelligence. Before the flood we reached a level of pure communal evil that we have not reached since, to the point only one person was considered worth saving out of the whole bunch. The rest of the family was saved because of him.
a.cricket