A Tower in the Sky: Genesis 11.1-9

Believe it or not, we’re finally in the home stretch of this series on the first eleven chapters of Genesis, which cover what we might call biblical pre-history. Today we have one final story that traffics in mythological or legendary imagery: the story of the Tower of Babel.

Integrated Summary

While without any direct known parallels in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature, this story shows an intimate knowledge of Mesopotamian technology and culture. And it takes what was likely an at-the-time unfinished Babylonian temple complex as an object lesson in the folly of a human unity at odds with God’s created intent. By seeking to build a tower to the sky for their own glory and reputation, humanity was usurping not only a glory owed to God alone, but also getting in the way of the glory and reputation God had set out for them in creation: to be God’s regents upon and around the Earth. And so God foils their plans, scattering them around the world. The text also offers us a critique of centralizing power and reminds us that unity and scattering, like all aspects of human experience, are neither good nor bad in and of themselves, but can be either depending on how they are oriented.

Text

[11.1] Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. [2] And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. [3] 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. [4] 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.’ [5] The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. [6] And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and 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. [7] Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ [8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. [9] 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. (NRSV)

This text is arranged in a chiastic structure, in which the story radiates out from the centre, in this case, God’s descent. Note how humanity’s goals are described in the first half and are then undone in the second:

11.1-2: Humanity united in language and settles together in Shinar

11.3-4: Humanity’s will for glory and unity around a central place

11.5: YHWH comes down

11.6-7: YHWH resolves to disrupt humanity’s unity and glory

11.8-9: YHWH scatters humanity and confuses their language

While all of the Genesis 1-11 materials show features of literary intention in how they are crafted, none comes close to this one (Carr, Sarna (1989) 81).* It follows the form of Neo-Assyrian imperial building narratives, which heightens the narrative irony of the story (Carr). And, this story about language and its confusion is full of wordplay lost in translation, such as the ironic connection of sham ‘there’ and shem ‘name, reputation’, and the sound symbolism of nblm ‘bricks,’ bll ‘confusion,’ and bbl ‘Babylon’ (Carr, Sarna (1989) 81).

Experience

Since I’ve been spending so much intensive time in Genesis the past few weeks, and following the overall narrative so much more closely that I generally do, this passage stuck out to me as being a bit out of place. Genesis 10 had zoomed out and got me thinking about the wider world of Israel, its neighbours and enemies, from Tarshish in the west to the great cities of Mesopotamia in the east, from the Black Sea in the north to the land of Cush in the south. And now we’re back to a story of all humanity being in one place and working together, with no sign of the division that has marked primeval humanity thus far. In this way it reminds me of the story of the ‘sons of god and the daughters of men’ from Genesis 6.1-4, and I wonder at its placement here after the flood and the enmity among Noah’s sons.

But looking at the story itself, it’s one I’ve always enjoyed. I love the ‘human folly’ aspect of it, imagining humans barely out of the stone age trying to build a tower that reaches to heaven for no reason other than their pride.

And, as someone who is familiar with ancient modes of Christian thought, I can’t help but read this story in light of Pentecost, where the linguistic divisions created here are superseded by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Encounter

This story gains some of its mythological feeling by its lack of human characters. We’re just not told about individual humans working together, but about an undifferentiated humanity working with common purpose. The only real character here is YHWH. Just as we saw in Genesis 6.1-4, we see here YHWH concerned about not humanity’s moral or ethical behaviour, but its surpassing its natural boundaries. Here it is humanity’s collective power that is the concern. If I think about this theologically, it makes sense — God is God and humanity is not, after all; and an all-powerful sinful humanity is a very dangerous thing indeed (just think of the threat of nuclear war and human-induced climate change) — but in the context of the story, it makes YHWH come across as a bit small and petty. Who is God, after all, to be afraid of little old humanity? And, how do we harmonize this story with the broader themes of the Bible about the desirability of unity?

Explore

This first look at the text has opened up a few lines of exploration:

• How does the text connect to Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) culture and literature?
• How does the story fit into the broader story of Genesis 1-11?
• What is the ‘sin’ God is concerned about here?
• What does the resolution of the story tell us about God and God’s desires for humanity?

The Tower of Babel and ANE Culture

As all of the scholarship I consulted in this series notes, this is a curious story. On the one hand, it has no direct parallel in ANE literature; but on the other hand it shows an intimate knowledge of various aspects of Mesopotamian culture, including a pretty perfect description of fired-brick construction technologies unknown in Israel, use of conventional Akkadian descriptors for tall buildings, and following well-attested literary forms of Assyrian monumental building accounts (Carr, Sarna (1989) 80). It also stands out among the other stories of Genesis 1-11 by being set in a specific place, and among ANE primeval stories by being set in a  known foreign location (Carr).

This setting the great and ancient — even in biblical times — city of Babylon (the traditional English translation of ‘Babel’ highlights the wordplay in the story at the expense of the fact that the same place name is elsewhere always translated as Babylon (Carr)). Berossus’s flood story also has the survivors settling in Babylon, suggesting the existence of some cultural precedent for this idea (Sarna (1966) 69). Yet while the story is certainly not positively disposed to Babylon, it doesn’t include any of the anti-Babylonian rhetoric we see in other parts of the Old Testament (and neither is it used in any of those polemical passages). This has led to the proposition that the story dates to the later monarchy period in Israel’s history, when Babylon was at a low ebb of its power and its northern neighbour Assyria was a rising threat (Carr). This context is also suggested by the story following the form building accounts from the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 911-609 BCE), a period which also saw the strongest expressed link between building projects and the kind of personal reputation we see as a motivating factor in this story (Carr).

The tower envisioned is most certainly a ziggurat, a step pyramid structure used in ANE temple architecture (Sarna (1966) 70 and (1989) 82). These were built on the floodplains of Mesopotamia as an artificial sacred mountain, with their base firmly planted on earth and their tops stretching high in the air (up to around seven stories tall — a height rarely surpassed until the 1800s) (Sarna (1989) 82). The descriptor in Genesis of the tower “with its top in the heavens” is a direct translation of a fixed Akkadian description of such buildings (Carr, Sarna (1989) 82). There is some suggestion in the scholarship that during this time, the temple of Marduk was either in disrepair or an unfinished state, making it an ideal example of human folly in trying to surpass normal limitations (Carr).

Babel in Genesis

As noted above, the Babel story fits awkwardly within the narrative of Genesis. The whole of Chapter 10 presents a kind of map explaining how the nations of the world came to be, and now suddenly we find ourselves back in a situation where all humanity is one, not only living together, but working with a common cause in a way not seen since the garden. How does this work?

Throughout this series, we’ve seen that the varied materials in Genesis 1-11 generally express two different perspectives and literary voices, an earlier ‘Yahwist’ (J) perspective which uses the divine name, employs anthropomorphic ways of talking about God, ‘zooms in’ on specifics, and expresses more pessimism about the human condition, and a later ‘Priestly’ (P) perspective which uses the generic word for God, is less anthropomorphic and more generally ‘grander’ in its descriptions of God, ‘zooms out’ to a bigger perspective, and presents a more hopeful understanding of humanity (Carr). This story connects well with the J materials — stories like the garden, Cain and Abel, and the ‘sons of god and the daughters of men’ — but is out of step with much of the P content, especially the table of nations from the previous chapter. In order to make the internal chronology of Genesis work, we have to think of this as a flashback to some point directly after the flood. That said, after having spent the past few weeks deep in the weeds with these stories, I’m more tempted to think of these chapters as an anthology of thematically-linked materials that have been stitched together with little thought given to questions of narrative continuity.

The point, then, is that it may be more fruitful to think of how the story fits in with the themes of Genesis 1-11 than its overarching narrative.

The Problem of the Tower

There’s a history of interpreting this story as an attempt by lowly humanity “to storm heaven in insolent rebellion against God” (Sarna (1966) 72). But there is nothing in the story itself to suggest this. Rather, the motivation of united humanity here is to create a strong enough reputation, and political and cultural centre, to prevent them from dispersing around the world (11.4). While we might like this vision of humanity working together with common cause, the problem is that this motivation works against God’s repeated blessing that humanity disperse and cover the whole earth (1.28, 9.1, cf. 10.32) (Sarna (1966) 72, Brueggemann). Moreover, the humans’ plans involve making for themselves and for their own benefit things that were culturally understood to be God’s prerogative alone (Carr): It’s no coincidence that God’s promise to Abraham to make him “a great name” appears right at the start of the next chapter (12.2). Likewise, ziggurats were exclusively built as temple complexes — they were for the gods’ use and glory, not the people’s. It’s not the desire for a reputation or monumental architecture that’s the problem in the story, it’s that they were seeking these things apart from God, and inhibiting the fulfillment of God’s blessing in the process (Carr, Brueggemann).

So, just as we’ve seen in previous stories, the issue at play here is not moral or ethical, but theological. Once again, humanity is asserting itself beyond the limits of the relationship with God for which it was created (Carr). And that’s the problem God needs to address, yet again.

The God Who Scatters

The story ends by God upending the human plan and creating the exact conditions that plan had been developed to prevent (Carr): The humans are unable to communicate with each other and end up dispersing around the world. Again we see the contrast between Chapter 10, where the fulfillment of God’s desire for humanity to fill the earth is described in natural terms, and 11, where it happens only through divine intervention.

As Carr notes, God’s prevention of the tower’s completion reinforces a spacial boundary between humanity and God, just as the temporal boundary (i.e. mortality) was reinforced in 6.3; and this is the final time in Genesis we get a divine deliberation about protecting these boundaries (Carr). But what might this say about God? Does God not come across as defensive and jealous of divine prerogatives here?

Brueggemann provides what I think is the most helpful framing of the question. “There are two kinds of unity,” he explains. The first is a human-centred, selfish, unity apart from God, and grounded in centralized power. The second is a divinely-centred, other-oriented unity in communion with God. So, it’s not humanity working together in common cause that’s the problem in the story, but the fact that this common cause is self-serving and opposes God’s will for humanity to bear the image and likeness of God throughout all the Earth.

Challenge

One of the things I appreciate most about Bible stories is how they cut across our social, cultural, and political divides. This story is a great example of this, as it has been used in recent years in defense of both left-leaning postcolonial and anti-imperialistic theologies and of right-leaning anti-government and libertarian theologies. It’s certainly tempting to read this as an anti-imperialist text: After all, it’s a story about Babylon, the great enemy of much of the biblical tradition, and how its self-importance and centralizing, ‘vacuuming’ up of the world, its peoples and its resources, are brought to nothing by God. This rejection of centralizing power results in the scattering of peoples, and with it, the proliferation of diverse languages and cultures. And yet, as tempting as an anti-imperial reading is, this story lacks the clear anti-Babylonian rhetoric we see elsewhere in the Bible (and these are rarely subtle!), and neither is it referenced in any of those anti-Babylonian texts (Carr). Likewise, while the story definitely offers a sharp critique of centralization of power, its focus is still on people groups, not on individuals, and it’s impossible to make libertarianism fit in with the broader ethic of the Bible, in which the love of neighbour is so prominent.

Brueggemann’s framing of the two kinds of unity again proves helpful here. What the text opposes is not humanity working together, but a broken humanity working together for self-serving purposes, seeking for itself what is God’s to provide, and living outside of divinely mandated relationships (Brueggemann). And there is no doubt that empire, whether political, cultural, or economic, reflects just this kind of self-serving attitude, ‘vacuuming’ up the world, its peoples and resources and suppressing cultural diversity (Carr). This was in fact the central purpose of Exile in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires: an intentional policy designed to suppress local cultures and turn people into good imperial citizens.

But the opposite of this misguided unity is not the disunited, ‘every man for himself’, attitude of libertarianism, but rather a unity grounded in love of God and love of neighbour. As the Scriptures are very clear and repeat time and time again in genre after genre, the whole of God’s law and desires for the world is summarized in these two points (see Deuteronomy 10.12-13, Micah 6.1-8, Ecclesiastes 12.13, and Matthew 5.1-12). And one can only love one’s neighbour by accepting the ways they uniquely manifest the image of God in the world.

From a Christian point of view, another crucial image is Pentecost, which early Christians understood to be an undoing of Babel. That miracle of unity did not involve everyone speaking the same language, but everyone hearing the message in their own language. In this way we might say that internationalism, in which the peoples of the world work together without a power centre, rather than multinationalism is reflected of God’s will for the world.

Expand

Here, at what is basically the end of biblical pre-history, we have a strange but incredibly rich story. Just like Adam and Eve reaching for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the sons of god mating with the daughters of men, yet again we see a situation in which humanity is reaching beyond its created limitations. And yet again, we see God acting preemptively to ensure those created limits are maintained. The result here is the scattering of the peoples around the earth, not as punishment, but as fulfillment of humanity’s created destiny.

In doing this, it offers a message to us that cuts through today’s political and cultural divides. For it reminds us that unity is just as ambivalent as any other aspect of human experience. It can be either good or evil depending on how it is conceived and lived out. To give Brueggemann the last word here:

Either unity or scatteredness has the possibility of being either obedient or disobedient. The issue is whether the world shall be organized for God’s purposes of joy, delight, freedom, doxology, and caring. Such a world must partake of the unity God wills and the scattering God envisions. (Brueggemann)

 

* Please see the series bibliography for details