WHAT'S WITH THE STORY OF BABEL?

Deborah Stoll continues her project to read the Bible cover to cover:

So the flood waters have abated, and we now find ourselves deep in the valley of Shinar, where a brand new people are living together in a brand new world, washed clean by God Himself.

The people of Shinar decide to build a city for fear of being “scattered all over the world". Tales of strange lands and twisted tongues clearly haunted these people, who became so anxious about the world beyond what they knew that they toiled feverishly to preserve their way of life. They thought a tower would keep them safe.   

And the Lord said, "If, as one people, with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach."

God initially seems to be praising his people for their industriousness, but that wouldn't explain His next take: “Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” 

And so we have the story of Babel, another case in which God plays sadist to human fallibility. The self-proclaimed creator of these folks does little to understand their fears, nor does He try to abate them. (This is the patriarch of the therapist's couch, for sure.) Instead He brings on the punishment, without warning, confounding their speech and sending them across the face of the earth. Presto: their deepest, darkest fears realised. Thanks God.

I just can't make sense of this. Is Babel a cautionary tale about xenophobia? Is it meant to capture God’s own diva-like arrogance, His desire to keep towers from entering His personal space? Or is it simply a folksy way of explaining why people are so scattered across the globe, and speak so many different languages?

I am not religious, but I'm finding it challenging to read the Bible without trying to comprehend God's actions. Given that so many people look to this book to guide the ethics of their own lives, I find myself struggling to interpret the God character as a heroic one.

So I've finally settled on an interpretation of Babel that just so happens to reinforce my own cultural omnivorousness and wanderlust: perhaps God looked down on the homogenous, fearful people of Shinar and found them boring. He saw that His clean new world was too simple, too lifeless, so He scattered everyone to make them more interesting.

I'm not so sure that a story about an ill-fated tower can explain what's so amazing about our many colours, races, languages and species. But really, how can anyone explain the way Sabah, Malaysia alone has more than 20 indigenous tribes and some 80 languages or dialects? Or the fact that for every person alive there are roughly 1,000 pounds of living termites? Or that the Milky Way has something like 68 suns for each one of us? How awesome! How terrifying!

Unlike those Shinar milquetoasts, I'm thrilled by the unknown. Wrestling with this story has me craving the delicious feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. So I'll settle for the next best thing: a walk around my neighbourhood. If you’ve ever spent time in Los Angeles's Koreatown, then you know it is a very strange land indeed.

~ DEBORAH STOLL

 

Picture credit:  "Tower of Babel", Pieter Bruegel

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Babel and George Steiner

April 15, 2009 - 14:02 — Visitor (not verified)

This interpretation has been suggested before by George Steiner.

Babel as a risk to human freedom rather than to divine power

April 15, 2009 - 23:14 — Visitor (not verified)

"I just can't make sense of this. Is Babel a cautionary tale about xenophobia? Is it meant to capture God’s own diva-like arrogance, His desire to keep towers from entering His personal space?"

I think that what text reflects is not so much God's wariness of intrusion from below, as human wariness of oppression from above. This account makes more sense if seen as shaped by the views of Israelites as former nomads wary of city dwellers.

This caution about cities has at least two aspects: discomfort with the heterodox (and exotic, as suggested by "xenophobic") ways of city dwellers, but also resistance to the top-down government and enforced labor (whether by slavery or the more limited corvee) of large city-states in Mesopotamia and Egypt. (See, e.g., the Conservative Jewish translation of the Torah, Etz Hayim, at pp. 58-59.) In a way, the Israelites may have been the first Populists: culturally conservative, but resistant to oppressive central authority.

Whatever its original divine or human intent, this Jewish Constitution has proved to be remarkably supple as its citizens dispersed across nations, cultures and eras.

Whole Bible or New Testament?

April 16, 2009 - 14:38 — Visitor (not verified)

Stoll´s towering ambition (no pun!) is laudable. But I think somewhat useless, given her current comments. It would perhaps appeal to a greater public if she would make a point of reading and commenting the New Testament, which basically surpassed the God of the Old Testament with the God of Love of the New, despite that many passages still remain obscure.
The fact that it is hard for believers and non-believers alike to grapple with the hard-to-fathom stories of the Old Bible is no news. I am curious as to the comments Stoll would have on the four gospels and Act fo the Apostles.
Good journey!

Babel in context

April 24, 2009 - 07:46 — Doug Pruner (not verified)

Ms Stoll:
In the beginning (as someone once said) God created the heavens and the earth.
Why?
(Psalm 115:16) As regards the heavens, to Jehovah the heavens belong, But the earth he has given to the sons of men.

For what purpose?
(Genesis 1:28) Further, God blessed them and God said to them: “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving upon the earth.”

Notice that man was to "fill the earth", not 'gather in cities'. Later, when it became necessary to cleanse (not destroy) the earth, God used an inescapable, world-wide flood. After it ended, he gave man an assurance, and repeated his original command.
(Genesis 8:21-22) And Jehovah began to smell a restful odor, and so Jehovah said in his heart: “Never again shall I call down evil upon the ground on man’s account, because the inclination of the heart of man is bad from his youth up; and never again shall I deal every living thing a blow just as I have done. For all the days the earth continues, seed sowing and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, will never cease.”
(Genesis 9:1) And God went on to bless Noah and his sons and to say to them: “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth."

Yet some remembered the Flood but distrusted God.
(Genesis 11:2-4) And it came about that in their journeying eastward they eventually discovered a valley plain in the land of Shinar, and they took up dwelling there. And they began to say, each one to the other: “Come on! Let us make bricks and bake them with a burning process.” [Making them waterproof, BTW.] ... They now said: “Come on! Let us build ourselves a city and also a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a celebrated name for ourselves, for fear we may be scattered over all the surface of the earth.”

They distrusted God to do what was best for his creation; in effect, denying his sovereignty over them. A similar offense in human life is called treason, and is often subject to the death penalty.

"Deborah Stoll continues her project to read the Bible cover to cover"
Do you allow yourself to skip ahead? If so, try Psalm 37:29. What do you think of it?
Doug

Well, one cannot begin to

May 5, 2009 - 13:13 — Visitor (not verified)

Well, one cannot begin to understand this God person, as presented by his own followers anyway, but one thing is for sure, as a translator I am greatful for that Babel episode. We few could outwit Him and defy His will that people do not communicate have found it profitabe. Yet, these days more and people seem to be learning not two but several languages--with consequent loss of work for me and, one would expect, increase of His rage.