[We have written an earlier post on this chapter, asking the question:
So what’s wrong with building a high tower?:
More questions that need to be asked are:
- what is wrong with unity, harmony, working together, making a name for a people-group who want to build a tower?
- Isn’t that what Elohiym required of the people he formed for generations out of three patriarchs?
- Did He not want them to be unified, harmoniously working with each other, to establish themselves in a land He had chosen for them?
- If that divine agenda was alright for Israel, why the divine displeasure with the tower builders?
General commentary here is from Pentateuch and Haftorah’s, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz; translation Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses, additional commentary indicated by “EF” and “RA” for Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses.—Admin1.]
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Genesis/Bereshith 11
THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE DIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES
One explanation (of this chapter) is that it continues the theme of the preceding section that indicates that the Divine ideal was One Humanity united by one universal language. In view of the division of mankind by diversity of tongue, which has ever been a source of misunderstanding, hostility and war, this chapter answers the question how the original Divinely-ordained unity of language, that indispensable link for the unity of mankind, was lost. Only a great transgression—-an enterprise colossal in its insolent ziggurats, the Mesopotamian temple-towers, rising to an immense height oas if intended to scale Heaven.
The building of the greatest of these towers was associated with Babylon, the centre of ancient luxury and power. The Rabbis assert that the builders of this Tower of Babel wished to storm the heavens in order to wage war against the Deity; and ‘as the highest stage in an Asyrian or Babylon ziggurat was surmounted by a shrine of the Deity, there is perhaps less fancifulness in these words than is often suspected’ (Ryle). Jewish legend tells of the godlessness and inhumanity of these tower-builders. If, in the course of the construction of the Tower, a man fell down and met his death, none paid heed to it; but if a brick fell down and broke into fragments, they were grieved and even shed tears—a graphic summing up of heathen civilization, ancient or modern. Such an enterprise provoked Divine punishment; and that insolence and power were broken by lasting division occasioned by diversity of language.
Quite a different interpretation of this chapter is given by Ibn Ezra: ‘The purpose of the builders was simply to prevent their becoming separated, and to secure their dwelling together. But as this purpose was contrary to the design of Providence (IX,1; I,28) that the whole earth would be inhabited, it was frustrated. the expression ‘with its top in heaven’ must accordingly be interpreted that that tower was to be of very great height, so that it would be visible at a considerable distance and become a rallying point to all people.
[RA] 1-9. The story of the Tower of Babel transforms the Mesopotamian ziggurat, built with bricks (in contrast to Canaanite stone structures) and one of the wonders of ancient technology, into a monotheistic fable. Although there is a long exegetical tradition that imagines the building of the Tower as an attempt to scale the heights of heaven, the text does not really suggest that. “Its top in the heavens” is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers, and to make or leave a “name” for oneself by erecting a lasting monument is a recurrent notion in ancient Hebrew culture. The polemic thrust of the story is against urbanism and the overweening confidence of humanity in the feats of technology. This polemic, in turn, is lined up with the stories of the tree of life and the Nephilim in which humankind is seen aspiring to transcend the limits of its creaturely condition. As in those earlier moments, one glimpses here the vestiges of a mythological background in which God addresses an unspecified celestial entourage in the first-person plural as He considers how to respond to man’s presumption.
1 Now all the earth was of one language an one set-of-words.
one speech. Better, ‘few words’. i.e. they had but a small vocabulary (Malbim).
[EF] language. Lit. “lip.”
2 And it was when they migrated to the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
plain. The territory of Babylon consisted of an almost unbroken plain.
Shinar. X,10.. It is more and more coming to be regarded as the cradle of the earliest civilization.
[EF] a valley in the land of Shinar. The Hebrew for “valley” might also mean “plain,” as was recognized as long ago as Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century. That would fit the Mesopotamian setting better.
3 They said, each man to his neighbor: Come now! Let us bake bricks and let us burn them well-burnt! So for them brick-stone was like building-stone, and raw-bitumen was for them like red-mortar.brick. In Babylon, clay-bricks were the material for building.
burn them thoroughly. Bricks were usually sun-dried; but in order to make these more durable, they were put through a process of burning by fire.
slime. Bitumen.
[EF] so . . . brick-stone . . .: An explanation of Mesopotamian building techniques for the Hebrew audience. The text plays on sound (levena . . le-aven, hemer . . . la-homer); raw-bitumen: Asphalt, used for making cement.
[RA] Come, let us. As many commentators have noted, the story exhibits an intricate antithetical symmetry that embodies the idea of “man proposes, God disposes.” The builders say, “Come let us bake bricks,” God says, “Come, let us go down” they are concerned “lest we be scattered,” and God responds by scattering them. The story is an extreme example of the stylistic predisposition of biblical narrative to exploit interechoing words and to work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary. The word “language” occurs five times in this brief text as does the phrase “all the earth” (and the “land” of Shinar is the same Hebrew word as that for earth). The prose turns language itself into a game of mirrors.
bake bricks and burn them hard. A literal rendering of the Hebrew would be something like “brick bricks and burn for a burning.” This fusion of words reflects the striking tendency of the story as a whole to make words flow into each other. “Bitumen,” eimar, becomes omer, “mortar.” The reiterated “there,” sham, is the first syllable of shamayim, “heavens,” as well as an odd echo of shem, “name.” Meaning in language, as the biblical writer realized long before the influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is made possible through differences between terms in the linguistic system. Here difference is subverted in the very style of the story, with the blurring of lexical boundaries culminating in God’s confounding of tongues. The Hebrew balal, to “mix” or “confuse,” represented in this translation by “baffle” and “babble,” is a polemic pun on the Akkadian “Babel,” which might actually mean “gate of the god.” As for the phonetic kinship of babble and balal, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1966) notes that a word like “babble” occurs in a wide spectrum of languages from Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit to Norwegian, and prudently concludes, “of echoic origin; probably not of continuous derivation but recoined from common experience.”
4 And they said: Come-now! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth!with its top in heaven. An exaggerated statement; Deut. I,28, ‘the cities are great and fortified up to heaven.’
a name. If they all dwelt together, they would be powerful and become renowned.
[EF] make . . . a name: That is, make sure that we and our works will endure.
Image from thefunambulist.net
5 But YHWH came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building.
came down. So again XVIII,21. An anthropomorphic expression. The Rabbis deduce from this the rule that a judge should never condemn an offender without first seeing for himself both him and the nature of the offence.
6 YHWH said: Here, (they are) one people with one language for them all, and this is merely the first of their doings— now there will be no barrier for them in all that they scheme to do!begin to do. At this early stage in human history, men are led to combine by an unworthy motive. If their design is not frustrated, they might employ their united strength for outrageous purposes. All human effort is both futile and empty, if dictated by self-exaltation, and divorced from acknowledgement of God.
7 Come-now! Let u go down and there let us baffle their language, so that no man will understand the language of his neighbor.let us go down. The plural of Majesty, as in I,26.
8 So YHWH scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they had to stop building the city.
9 Therefore its name was called Bavel/Babble, for there YHWH baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there, YHWH scattered them over the face of all the earth.Babel. This is an instance of popular etymology based on resemblance of sound and is frequently found in Scripture. The Assyrian name for Babel means ‘Gate of God.’