By Matthew Gindin
I was recently listening to the punk band Bad Religion’s album Recipe for Hate. The song Skyscraper centers around the metaphor of the tower of Bavel (Babel). I can’t claim to understand the lyrics to the song in toto, but it does seem to use as its central motif the destruction of the tower in order to criticise someone about something. It seems to criticise the destroyer of the tower, not the builders. The song also seems to contain an implied criticism of the story of the tower of Bavel itself- the last verse of the song characterizes the story as hardly understood and never any good.

This got me thinking about the story. How good of a story is it?

This question resonated in my mind more because of some reading I was doing lately, in a book called Ancient Near Eastern Thought and The Old Testament by John Walton. This book, which I recommend, strives to let people know what more than a century of intense archaeological investigation has uncovered about the cultures surrounding ancient Israel. It puts the Torah into context. Walton says, as many have before him, that the story of the tower of Bavel takes its central image from the Babylonian ziggurat.

In Genesis 11:1-9 a group of early humans settles in Shinar, probably Sumer, an area in southern Mesapotamia associated in the Torah with Babylon. The Mesapotamian building materials are foreign to Israelites, so the Torah describes them for us. The “city and tower” being built (see below), if true to history, would have been an urban area housing public buildings. In this case it was in effect a temple complex. These structures, which began being built at the end of the 4th milennium BCE, were still visible in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The tower in the story is almost certainly based on the ziggurat temple complexes of Sumer, which are frequently described in Mesapotamian literature as”with head touching heaven”, as in the Torah as quoted below.

The story in the Torah is as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 And they said: ‘Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in heaven and let us make us a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ 5 And YHWH came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built. 6 And YHWH said: ‘Behold they are one people and they have one language and this is what they begin to do.  Now nothing will be withheld from them which they aim to do. 7 Come, let us go down and confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ 8 So YHWH scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off  building the city. 9 Therefore was the name of it called Bavel; because YHWH did there confound the language of all the earth; and from there did YHWH scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

This enigmatic story seems to warn human beings about the hubris of using technology to storm the heights of heaven and make themselves secure from any danger. Sound familiar? Far from being a story that should irk Bad Religion, a band which continuously snarls warnings about human arrogance and self-deception, I would think this story might make it on to their “acceptable biblical stories list”. I suspect that such a list does not exist. In any case I didn’t write this to explain Bad Religions drash on the story but to look at the story itself and its ancient context.

In the story YHWH confounds people’s languages and spreads them out over the world. The story then explains the existence of multiple languages: they are there to prevent the creation of a mega-mono-culture and the attendant human hubris and blindness. Uh-oh: God does not approve of globalisation.

The fact that the story appears based on ancient Israelite perceptions of Babylon is also interesting. Babylon was a sophisticated, expanding empire with technology beyond Israel’s. Israel, a society of farmers and shepherds, looked up at the urban megalopolis of Bavel and its temple-towers and saw nothing but a symbol of human arrogance and, it seems, a force that threatened to destroy smaller cultures and impose it’s own hegemony on everyone.

One interesting thing about this story, though, is that the Israelite perception of the nature of ziggurats- temples reaching upwards to heaven- is wrong. As Walton points out, ziggurats had a different nature and purpose. Humans did not use them, did not live in them or climb up them. Ziggurats existed as stairways upon which the gods descended to bring blessing to the earth, and to receive offerings. The ziggurats were not for the use of human beings, but for the use of gods!

We can thus see that the Israelite story is not an accurate depiction of Sumerian or Babylonian religion but rather takes up an image from the civilization of their neighbours and riffs on it to make a point- a point that is both a shot at perceived Babylonian arrogance and a broader theological and ethical statement. Anyone familiar with the sourcing of the story of Noah and the flood in older Akkadian and Mesapotamian stories knows that this is not a singular occurence in Israelite literature. It appears that the crafters of Israelite literature took up motifs from the literatures and civilisations of their neighbours and ran with them in a completely different direction. Completely different because the religious sensibilities of Israel were truly an anomaly in the ancient near east, as archaeology only proves more and more.

But wait- did I write “crafters” in the plural? Didn’t the Creator of the Universe write the Hebrew Bible? Well, let’s assume for a moment that She did. In that case we would have the interesting fact that God wrote a story about Bavel that was, in effect, a factually inaccurate satire of Sumerian civilisation which made compelling points about human culture and God’s vision of it.

Whether Moshe wrote that story down at Sinai or it was redacted centuries later from oral traditions and old scrolls, it is still possible to accept the Jewish claim of divine inspiration for the story of Bavel and the Torah as a whole. As the Christian theologian CS Lewis wrote in Reflections on The Psalms, just as God can take up humanity and make it serve divine ends, so can God gather up a literature (in this case the literature of Israel and the surrounding cultures upon which it was partially based) and make it serve divine ends. The Torah never once describes God working independent of nature: when the red sea is split God doesn’t simply push the waters back. Rather a wind separates the waters, and likewise blows them back. Perhaps we can understand God’s authorship of the Torah in a similar way. Nothing is here created ex nihilo.

To answer my own question: is the the tower of Bavel a good story? Yes, I think it’s a very good story. The technological explosion, and its accompanying arrogance, have not only allowed us to touch the heavens. We have also exterminated more than 50% of the cultures and languages of the world, an untold number of its animal species. We have pierced the atom and cell and are quick approaching the doleful day when “there is nothing they cannot do”.

I am reminded of a verse from the Daodejing, the ancient classic of Daoism by the Old Master, which describes the ideal civilisation (translation by Red Pine):

Imagine a small state with a small population

let there be labor-saving tools

that aren’t used

let people consider death

and not move far

let there be boats and carts

but no reason to ride them

let there be armor and weapons

but no reason to employ them

let people return to the use of knots

and be satisfied with their food

and please with their clothing

and content with their homes

and happy with their customs

let there be another state so near

people hear its dogs and chickens

and live out their lives

without making a visit.