Tuesday, November 14, 2017

The Babel story is about the dangers of uniformity

From Christian Century-

The Tower of Babel story is among the best known and most frequently cited stories in the Torah. And yet most of the conventional interpretations of the narrative are, I think, mistaken.

Genesis 11 is not a simple morality tale about a human attempt to storm the heavens and displace God. Nor, conversely, is it a primitive allegory about an insecure deity who is so threatened by human achievement that God needs to wreak havoc on the best-laid human plans. The narrative is also not placed where it is in the Torah in order to explain the vast multiplicity of human languages. Nor is it a lament about some lost primeval unity. The story of Babel is, I would suggest, about something else: the importance of individuals and the horrors of totalitarianism.

The fact that the nine verses that make up the narrative are often de­scribed as the “Tower of Babel” story is misleading, since the crime of the builders at Babel is not their desire to build a tower. “A tower with its top in the sky” (Gen. 11:4) is not, in and of itself, any kind of assault on God’s authority. The term is, rather, simply a biblical Hebrew expression for a very tall building, what we would similarly call a “skyscraper”—it does not actually scrape the sky; it is just extremely tall.


More here-

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/the-babel-story-is-about-dangers-uniformity

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