Tackling Tradition (Part 9) The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11:1–9 (ESV): Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 

This statement telegraphs that this is a fictional story.   Some people might object to the very notion that this story is fictional. That ought not to be controversial.  Job is most certainly an epic fiction.  It’s doubtful that after the Fall, there was only one language on the Earth, & the fact that the Creation Narrative has the marks of a fictional story does not preclude Adam & Eve being real people who lived in an environment like the one Genesis described. 

For the record, I think Adam & Eve were real historical people & am a Young Earth Creationist - but that doesn’t mean I find agreement with everything that Macroevolutionists might expect Ken Ham & Ray Comfort to believe & teach. 

It is worth noting that the overly literal interpretation of Genesis 1 - 11, is a byproduct of both theologically conservative Christians & others with respect to their overall desire to polemically prevail against Skeptics & Macro-minded Evolutionists in their ongoing debates about the historicity of Genesis, the existence of Adam & Eve, the Flood, etc. Such an overly literal POV both results in & stems from a few basic considerations relative to reading the text grammatically & historically In other words, we ought to ask ourselves a few questions at the outset of it. First, what is the author’s or authors’ intent?  Is the writer’s main point that Adam & Eve, not long after their exile from Eden had 2 sons, or is it something more in line with respect to the writer’s own interests/intent?

It really doesn’t matter if the history of the text of Genesis 1 - 11 as we know it was written by Moses & handed down until the date of the final draft & edit that resulted in a Hebrew or Greek version of the text that looks like our extant textual tradition.  Nor does it matter if the text was put together in a manner more analogous to the Documentary Hypothesis &/or if the editors added material not in the text tradition that was available to them as the ur - text.  In both instances, the author/authors/editor(s) is / are writing occasioned material.  That is to say, one of the characteristics of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures is that these texts come to us because both God (the source of inspiration) & man (the instrument God deployed) saw a need & was moved to respond.  

Under both a single author theory of authorship (Mosaic Authorship) & a composition &/or Exilic or Post Exilic Editorial / Author(s) & Editor theory of authorship, the life situations of the 2 sets of original audiences are quite similar.  On a theory of Mosaic Authorship, the author’s intent in writing Genesis is, in part, to teach/remind the children of Israel that the Promised Land belongs to them by way of Divine Right that is anchored from Sinai / Jordan all the way back to Abraham, Noah, & Adam & Eve.  Likewise if the text as we know it was codified via an editorial process either among & for an Exilic or Post - Exilic audience, the need is the same, insofar as both the generations God delivered from Egypt & migrated to Israel & the generation preparing to return, was in the process of returning home to Jerusalem & Israel. 

Notice the emphasis on patriation & repatriation in this section of the story the Pentateuch tells.  This is probably an indication that the original receiving audience was either the 2 Mosaic generations who were on their way to take hold & take back the land promised to them by God, or, alternatively, the receiving audience was still in exile, yet very close to returning to Israel or had recently returned. 

I personally favor an Editorial model in which they very likely had bits & pieces of text (some larger than others) which were carefully & meticulously examined, edited, & eventually codified into something that either is the Hebrew w/Aramaic ur-text translated, preserved, & paracleted into what we know as the Septuagint or something very close to it. 

What is God’s interest in the Tower of Babel being historical in order to be true?  Scrolls in the ancient world were labor intensive to produce.  Ancient Israel isn’t an environment conducive to writing detailed historical material of the sort we find in a modern library.  Therefore, rather that demand the Hebrew nation make papyri from plants (thereby building & maintaining, over time, a polis-sized library), God instead made the deliberate, delivering choice to move the authors & editors to write very little about the Edenic, Antediluvian, & Abrahamic / Patriarchal Covenant eras in favor of composing narrative composed of a representative number of vignettes which probably began as oral history that was eventually written down for ease in persevering God’s either partially inspired or fully inspired as what we would recognize as ur-text for what we know today as the Book of Genesis.

Moreover, Israel’s neighbors were accustomed to the deployment of fictions in order to relay their spiritual beliefs & ethical principles from generation to generation.  Therefore, the deployment of both fiction qua fiction or historical fiction & text that looks more like history qua history, the Hebrew narrative answers the competing narratives on their own level, serving a corrective function. 

What is the text intended to convey?  It’s a linking text intended to move the narrative forward.   The covenantal cycle now progresses as the Noahic era is inaugurated.  The author wants to move from the shadowy past that the waters have buried, taking the good & leaving the bad, in order to move into the Patriarchal Covenant.  As such, this story is similar to the Pericope Adulterae, which we examined in Easter As Eschatology. 

The people of the world are growing up & learning to work together.  We have here a God’s eye view expressed as a short summary of the period of human history spanning the Noahic Covenant, & it also informs us in general about the overall contours of every covenantal era.  Just as the Pericope Adultery heralds what follows in the events of John’s Gospel *and* serves as a brief summation of Redemptive History that applies in every age, so too does the story of the Tower of Babel.  It summarizes God’s activity & humanity’s activities relative to the Temple City of God in which we all live both particularly (via a brief sketch of the Noahic Era) & generally (every covenantal administration includes activity on the part of God & man).

2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 

People continued patterns of migration, settling lands, cultivating them, & working together to build a civilization in fulfillment of the Edenic Mandate. 

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. 

They demonstrate that they are people who developed the skills necessary to build a civilization.  We have here a focus on the genesis of cities.    Like God, who was in Genesis 1 & 2 depicted as the archetypal builder before He was a warrior, they are working together instead of at cross purposes as they did during the Antediluvian Covenant’s declension cycle. 

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, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” 

They are not a nihilistic people.  They desire to build a city, a place where people can find organized religion, organized commerce, & orderly justice - at least in theory if not in fact. 

5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.   

This is a common theme in ANE literature.  The gods witness from above & then visit.  In this text, God, who is both immanent & transcendent decides that it is time to judge what humanity has been doing,  We will see this again in Genesis 19.  

Unlike the more sophisticated pagan pseudodeities & the god of all goat fuckers (Lev. 17:3), God is neither cruel nor cowardly, nor is He depicted as as an impatient, capricious, less than truthful kingly, prophetic, priestly Creator, Judge, & Deliverer.  Rather, God is depicted as the only member of the Heavenly (or any other) court who is the Cosmic Creator & Deliverer of the whole wide world who is the Heavenly Divine Suzerain who has justly & graciously judged the world & successfully delivered the populace thereof from His own wrath (& presumably that of the territorial pseudodeities) & both reaffirmed & reestablished His covenant representatively with all living creatures of all flesh as well as with Noah both individually & representatively. 

6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 

Growing up, I heard this part of the story negatively, as if God’s plan has been or is in the process of being thwarted.  That’s not at all true.  

Both blessing & sanctioning are in this text.  The LORD, in His role as Creator & Deliverer addresses the heavenly court.  He commends their unity & single-mindedness in building a civilization.   He prophesies that this is only the beginning of what they can do.   He remarks that their single-mindedness is sign that, with the right resources, they can, over time accomplish just about anything. In doing these things, He places His Priest - King seal of approval, 

7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”  

If God feels so good about the overall contours of what is happening on Earth, why does He introduce contention?  First, archaeology informs us that they were building cities & cultivating the land.  However, this is the ANE, & polytheism us everywhere.  They were also building ziggurats, & the Nephilim were still on the scene & would continue to be for quite some time. The children of Cain & Nimrod & the descendants of Abel, Seth, & the Antediluvian patriarchs would continue in a polytheism project - a project in which the vast majority of their pseudodeities were territorial, prompting the LORD to keep the terms of His covenant & scatter them.  

8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. 

God bless us all, every one, & “Go & sin no more.”