This is an excerpt from a book in progress.
As work on the Tower of Babel begins, not many generations have passed since the ark landed (perhaps three).[1] The people are “of one language, and of one speech”, and God’s corporate caretaking of humanity is far from over. Antediluvian wickedness and the Flood are still in living memory, and the Babelites, as we may call them, are still burdened by sins. They declare that they wish to make “a name” (or reputation) for themselves because they wish not to be “scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”[2] It seems that humanity is one tribe, a single corporate body—and they want to stay that way.
Some readers scan the verses and fail to see any issues; so let us explain. Indeed, was it a sin for humanity to want to stay unified? Perhaps not. But the Babelites exhibit the fundamental sin of pride, as they seek to make “a name” for themselves. Worse, they seek to build “a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”.[3] This constitutes, as commentators observe, the hubristic desire to place themselves on an equal footing with God. This becomes the original and paradigmatic example of corporate hubris. Later kings will be very proud and not infrequently punished for it. Nebuchadnezzar is perhaps the best example, as when he says, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?” A voice from heaven immediately declares that he will go temporarily insane, and he does. Maybe more relevant is the hubristic pride of the king of Tyre—often thought to be a representation of Satan—who said, “I am a God, I sit in the seat of God”. The Lord responds by saying strangers “shall bring thee down to the pit.” Such pride and hubris seem to be spurring the Babelites on to the Original Sin all over again: recall that it was the serpent that told Eve that by eating the fruit, “ye shall be as gods”.[4]
On this reading, the trouble that precipitates God’s action is neither a desire to remain unified, nor that an ambitious kingdom might actually succeed in challenging him. The latter is a common and understandable reading. The text seems to support it: “And the Lord said, Behold…now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”[5] But to understand the real trouble, we need only ask: In what way do the Babelites need to be “restrained”?
Recall what we just said about corporate justice in the Bible. In the broader context of the Bible narrative, clearly, the Lord would be concerned that a single city, unified and without any competitor, would descend inevitably into the very same sort of corruption that led to the Flood. Would such a prideful and unholy regime fall into corporate wickedness? Perhaps. Would the children of such a regime ever be able to rise out of such inevitable wickedness? Perhaps not. Yet God promised that there would never again be a world-destroying Flood; hence we may view the dispersion at Babel as a necessary precaution. In other words, the Lord saw to it that man would be divided into multiple tribes, so that he would have multiple, independent opportunities to foster justice and stymie injustice.
If this is the reason for the scattering, the story may be viewed as a kind of origin story, now of the division of an initially unified, monolingual people into the multilingual “nations.” But skeptics might interpret this as a “just-so story” for the origin of ethnic groups and languages. Secular anthropologists and linguists will naturally find the Tower story a mere myth. The division of related people into different tribes is one of the essential topics that anthropology studies. Similarly, the divisions of languages has been documented and is fairly well understood, and it does not require an act of God. Nevertheless, in keeping with the first approach to making Scripture consistent with science, we may note that there is a perfectly sensible way to interpret the story so that it does not conflict with historical anthropology and linguistics.
To begin with, the Tower story supplies very few details of interest to an anthropologist or linguist. That is, the text does not state how God and his agents brought about the confusion of languages and the division of the people. We can imagine ways such a thing might have come about that are perfectly consistent with science. For example, perhaps the events of Genesis 11 actually take place over several generations, in which different clans come to compete for dominance. We might speculate that competition might have led Babelites to develop different in-group argots—a well-documented phenomenon—so that they could speak within a clan without being understood by the others. Such competition, caused by the very same prideful hubris that led to the building of the Tower, might have led to the collapse of the project, internecine warfare, and the physical division of the people. But again, this is speculative. The Lord might have shepherded the events, in various ways, that led naturally to the scattering.
The story has inherent plausibility insofar as the fall and scattering of empires has been a permanent feature of history. The Tower story may be viewed as an archetype of God’s opposition to prideful empire-building by would-be god-kings, such as the later Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors. A key theme of the Bible is that the concentration of unchecked power outside of his sovereign authority is always a force for evil. It always leads to corporate disaster, and it is always eventually be reined in by his corporate justice.
To strengthen this point, it will help to show how the Tower story prefigures the attitudes God takes toward wicked cities: this is yet another Biblical pattern. From the first named city, founded by the first murderer, Cain, cities are associated in the Bible with evil.
We read that “the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly”; so they were destroyed. The fortified cities of the Canaanites were full of “every abomination to the Lord”; thus the Hebrews were tasked with clearing them of all their inhabitants. They did not do so entirely, and their “abominations” did not disappear. In Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of the Hebrews, one could “behold the great tumults [or chaos] in the midst thereof, and the oppressed in the midst thereof.” Samaria would soon enough be conquered by the Assyrians, whose capital was Nineveh—another bad city, against which Jonah famously prophesied, because “their wickedness is come up before” the Lord. Not much later, Jerusalem itself, once “the faithful city”, had “become an harlot” and a place of “murderers.” Jerusalem was conquered in turn by Babylon, “the land of graven images” that is “mad upon their idols.” Babylon thereafter would become the very image or prototype of the wicked city, so that Peter could say he was writing from “The church that is at Babylon,” meaning Rome. The same name is applied by John in the book of Revelation to the great power center at the end of the age, which would, like the others, fall: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils”.[6]
In this way, a great deal of the Bible narrative involves God threatening or meting out corporate punishment against wicked cities and their prideful leaders. His corporate justice displays yet another Biblical pattern: The Lord takes responsibility for, and “shepherds,” whole tribes or nations. The story of the Bible is, to a great extent, historical and political. It is corporate justice that drives his actions; his prophets seek to correct whole nations, often through their wicked leaders. The notion then would be that the Babel story introduces a divine policy: Attempts to unite people in massive empires will ultimately be stymied and lead to unintended divisions. The pattern is amply illustrated by the Bible’s historical books, and has continued on similarly throughout world history. One thinks of the result of Alexander’s short-lived empire, the division of the Roman Empire into West and East, the dissolution of much of the British Empire, and so forth.[7]
The divine hostility to godless empires might seem like a needless side-issue, until we see that it is central to the entire biblical narrative. Let me give a preview: In the next sections of the Bible narrative, God will make a covenant with Abraham, promising to make him the founder of a great nation, through which all the nations will be blessed. The Lord also comes out early against kings, which he regards as a rebellion of the people against him. He has Moses warn the Israelites that they would eventually fall into the same idolatry as the nations around them. Then, under their own kings, even the Israelites will not be able to avoid the moral hazards inherent in the accumulation of power apart from God. In the end, they become every bit as corrupt as the worst empires. Thus, just as the Babelites are scattered, so the Israelites will be scattered. In the New Covenant extended to Jew and Gentile alike, God abandons the earthly Israel, declaring instead that the Kingdom of God is within you and that the people ought to come together not under an empire but in “congregations” of his faithful, regardless of nation. And such congregations truly should be unified. An earthly Kingdom of God will arrive, but not until end times, with Jesus returning as its one true and eternal king. An eternal city will not, like Babel, rise up to heaven, but instead descend down from it.[8]
In summary, the story of the Tower of Babel is the archetype of how God deals with corporate injustice perpetrated by those with divine ambitions. It illustrates how God shepherds whole peoples in keeping with his requirements for corporate justice, preventing the unchecked concentration of power that inevitably leads to corruption and oppression.
[1] Perhaps three. Some commentators speculate that the “mighty hunter” Nimrod started the Tower, since “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel”; and he was Noah’s great-grandson, if no generations were skipped in the list of generations in Genesis 10.
[2] Genesis 11:1, 4.
[3] Genesis 11:4 again.
[4] Daniel 4:30; Ezekiel 28:2, 8; Genesis 3:5.
[5] Genesis 11:6.
[6] Cain’s city: Genesis 4:17. Sodom’s wickedness: Genesis 13:13. The Canaanite cities indicted: Deuteronomy 12:31, 7:2, and Judges 2:2-3. Samaria’s corruption: Amos 3:9. Nineveh’s wickedness: Jonah 1:2. Jerusalem as “the faithful city” turned corrupt: Isaiah 1:21. Babylon as “the land of graven images”: Jeremiah 50:38. Babylon as archetype of the wicked city: 1 Peter 5:13. Fallen: Revelation 18:2.
[7] One theme of writing about the history of empires is that in the later stages of empire, corrupt rulers place their own wealth and pleasure ahead of the interests of the people. See, for example, Timothy H. Parsons, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (Oxford University Press, 2012).
[8] The Abrahamic covenant: Genesis 12:1-3, 17:1-8, 22:15-18. Opposition to kings: Deuteronomy 17:14-20; 1 Samuel 8:6-7, 10-18. Moses’ warning of Israel’s idolatry: Deuteronomy 31:16-18. The moral hazards of power under kings: 1 Kings 11:1-8; 2 Chronicles 26:16-21. God’s abandonment of earthly Israel: Hosea 1:9; Matthew 21:43. The Kingdom of God is within you: Luke 17:20-21. Congregations of the faithful: Matthew 18:20; Acts 2:42-47. Jesus as eternal king: Isaiah 9:6-7; Revelation 19:11-16. The eternal city descending from heaven: Revelation 21:2-3, 10.
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