He can shatter walls with trumpet blasts. He can turn rivers to blood and slay firstborn sons. If you’ve read the first eight or nine books of the Old Testament, you know that the book’s deity has a lot of ways of taking down a city. Why, in the midst of a productive and linguistically unified period of human history – a history far more harmonious than the decadent epoch that prompted the biblical flood back in Chapter 8 – why would the Old Testament God attack the descendants of Noah who were laying bricks and trying to make a home for themselves in Babel? But what does it mean? Why is the Tower of Babel the Old Testament? And why – I’ve always thought this is particularly odd – why does the Old Testament God seem apprehensive in Chapter 11 of Genesis? You’d think that – being omnipotent and all – he wouldn’t be in the least bit threatened by the descendants of Noah joining forces and building a city together.
It’s printed near the front of perhaps a billion bibles as I record this, as terse and dark and inscrutable as it’s always been. Spectacular, but not much like Etemenanki, the real Ziggurat of Babylon.įor at least 2,500 years, we have been reading this story. Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting of the famous tower (1563). The city is thereafter called Babel, which is a pun in Hebrew – balal in biblical Hebrew means “to confuse.” With its once unified language confused, and its great construction projects forestalled by divine command, Babel – in the Book of Genesis, at least – falters, and the rest of Chapter 11 proceeds by getting back to the main narrative subject – the ancient forefathers of the Israelites. The Old Testament God then scatters the population, the city and its tower stop being constructed, and suddenly we can no longer understand one another’s speech. The Old Testament God sees the city, and particularly the tower, and experiences something – maybe jealousy, or wrath, or even fear. We build an imposing city of bricks, and a vast tower. Whether you’ve heard this narrative in the beginning of Genesis, Chapter 11 before, or you’re just hearing it here for the first time, the events of the story are on one level quite clear and easy to understand. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, adn they have all one language and this is only the beginning of what they will do nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. And as migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. Here’s the opening of Genesis, Chapter 11. Let’s hear a translation of this story – this is the NRSV translation, published in the New Oxford Annotated Bible.
It’s a short story – short enough for us to retell the whole thing here. Amidst all of these more colorful and more dramatic episodes, the brief history of the Tower of Babel and what happened to it is a minor narrative excursion – a digression amidst Genesis’ general focus on the forebears and descendants of the patriarch Abraham. The nine little verses about this tower are less memorable than the lurid tale of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Lot, the tragedy of Cain and Abel, the story of Joseph and the dreams of the Pharaoh, and of course the initial narrative involving Adam, Eve, and their expulsion from Eden. In all of the 50 chapters of Genesis, amidst the gigantic saga of humankind’s creation all the way to the scattering of the twelve tribes of Israel, the story of the Tower of Babel is easy to forget. In the Book of Genesis, after the Old Testament God floods the whole world, and Noah, and his ark, and his family survive, we hear the story of a certain mysterious tower. Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. The Tower of Babel Cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent, 3100-500 BCE
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