The building of the Tower of Babel
and the Dispersion of the Nations at Babel – Genesis 11, 1-9
The whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary. When the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." (They had brick instead of stone and tar instead of mortar.) Then they said, "Come, let's build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the entire earth."
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had started building. And the Lord said, "If as one people all sharing a common language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let's go down and confuse their language so they won't be able to understand each other."
So the Lord scattered them from there across the face of the entire earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why its name was called Babel - because there the Lord confused the language of the entire world, and from there the Lord scattered them across the face of the entire earth.
The historical model for the Tower of Babel is the 91-m-high 'ziggurat' in Babylon. Ziggurat can be translated '`mountain of gods' or the 'high-rising', modern: high-rise or multi-storey building.
The biblical story of tower-building deals with the arrogance (Greek: hybris) of man towards God. The townspeople built a tower whose tip rose to the sky. With this building they wanted to make a name for themselves, and they didn't want to be dispersed to other countries.
Arrogance, because:
1. the building of towns and towns were seen as being hostile to God;
2. towns were seen as places which are restless for God, because originally it
was the God of nomads (rural);
3. God had demanded people increase and spread (not to settle in towns); the
tip of the tower to the sky was seen as an attack on God; making a name of
oneself (becoming important) was the biggest arrogance.
(In the New Testament, in Revelation 17, the town Babylon
is called 'the great prostitude Babylon'.)
In this story people didn't fulfil God's will by striving towards the sky, and by putting a sign with their feasibility-delusion. They wanted to proceed into God's height, and so deride God.
As a punishment for this God confused their language, and then he dispersed them on earth which brought their community to an end. (In the New Testament,
Acts of the Apostles 2, this is abolished by the faith in Jesus - Whit wonder/miracle).
In the present use of the language the story of the building of the tower is a symbol for permanent striving to aim high, for unlimited efficiency and achievements, and for progress.
Today symbolic buildings for this are the cooling towers of nuclear power stations f. i.
With this striving man intervenes more and more into the creation until resources run out. With the increase of knowledge, such as gene research man has found the composition and building material for life. Man searches with the aim of creating human beings (cloning) or producing human organs for transplantations.
Thinking about the biblical story of creation raises many (till now) unanswered questions, such as: Will eternal life be possible through knowledge? Doesn't man try to be a creator like God Is the statement (Gen. 1) "Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness .", urges development of creation by man, through good creation activities? Will man succeed in using his knowledge for good and evil, and so fight misuse of creation and knowledge, and to fulfil the order of creation?
Progress, can mean going towards or away from something.
The story of creation (Gen1, 31) gives us hope because it is written that : "God saw all that he had made - and it was very good!"
