The Unfinished Tower of Babel: Divine Intervention and Social Change

By Robert L. Bonn

In this radical reinterpretation of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Dr. Robert Bonn incisively explores how the Babel myth reveals the ways that divine power clashed with human empire-building and continues to do so again and again throughout the history of the western world causing empires to decline and at the same time giving birth to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sistina Street Press
• Release date: May 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989976015

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PREFACE

Written in Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel tells of how a certain lord came down one day from the heavens above to stop us from going any further with a certain tower we had started to erect. His intervention would dramatically change the social order of the time and alter the course of subsequent history.¹ Before his visit, the whole earth had one language and the same words.² After it, we found ourselves confused in our language, unable to understand one another’s speech. The unity of our society gone, we scattered … abroad over the face of all the earth. So, we left off building the city and halted construction on our tower. And, despite centuries of progress, we would never succeed in making the world a place of one language and the same words. Nor, for that matter, would we ever eliminate the confusion that would remain embedded in our social order.

By any measure, the Tower of Babel is a remarkable, indeed extraordinary, story. Why would our interests clash with those of a god? Why would that god come down to earth to stop us from doing something we wanted to accomplish, something we had the capacity to do? Are we to take such a story on faith and believe it because that’s what is written in the Bible? Or should we reject it because there is no empirical proof that such an event ever happened? Or, I shall ask, should we accept the story as a myth that remains wrapped in mystery yet one that gives insight into our human nature and into the dynamics of the social changes that have marked the subsequent course of our history?

We can begin to unlock the mystery of the myth by thinking of towers as the most visible, and thus symbolic, signs of our empires. We build them to project our power and might. Towers enable us to show to the entire world exactly who we are. In recent history we have seen an ongoing race among the nations, cities, and even corporations of the world as to who can erect the world’s tallest tower. Towers in that sense show that our empires are, indeed, real.

Further, we should accept the assumption of the myth that it is in our nature to be empire builders, in the sense that empires are social orders that incorporate large numbers of people living across vast expanses of land under the umbrella of common language, uniform culture, and codified systems of law. Our world requires empires if mass populations living across widespread territories are to communicate with one another and live together in a common social order. In that sense, empires advance human civilization and represent social progress.

The myth, however, clearly implies that from the Lord’s point of view there is something wrong, indeed very wrong, with our advancing our global empire by erecting the Tower of Babel. The key here is the Lord’s statement, Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. In other words, if we were to expand our empire by building such a great tower, we could go to any sort of excess. Had we managed to complete our Tower of Babel with its top in the heavens, we would have had an empire that incorporated heaven and earth into one seamless realm. Then we would have a heaven here on earth. And thus there would be no need for a lord who resided in the heavens above. The Lord would be one of us. To put it another way, we would become God.

Perhaps the most unusual part of the myth of the Tower of Babel is that without explicitly saying so it puts forth what is essentially a blueprint for our subsequent history. Our world has seen many great empires. One noted historian recently identified no fewer than seventy of them.³ In ancient times they were centered in cities such as Babylon and Rome. In the Middle Ages, the empire was The Church itself. And in modern times, the empires have been based in a number of European nations, in Japan, and later in Russia and in the United States. Each of these empires has in one way or another sought to make the whole earth once again a place of one language and the same words.

Nevertheless, however civilizing and progressive, empires have also caused great harm. They employ coercive force to expand and maintain their power and influence. They benefit the few at the expense of the many. And by imposing a uniform, universal social order on the whole world, empires remove the richness that comes with a diversity of nations and peoples. Although some people prosper greatly in empires, empires all too often reduce us to the status of second-class citizens, strip us of our personal identities, or enslave us. For these many reasons, those subject to the authority of empires have often resisted their rule—and as a result, sooner or later, every empire has shown signs of social instability and decline. None has yet to succeed. Although each has begun with a clear version of the social order it wished to promulgate, each has ended in confusion, the comprehensive, unified world sought by its builders all but lost as their particular empire has fallen and its people once again have scattered.

Today, driven by our powerful technologies of communication we are yet again building a global empire that would bring the entire world into one all-embracing socioeconomic system, a one language of free-market capitalism. In today’s secular world, the notion that the Lord will come down from the heavens and put a halt to our ambitious enterprise sounds rather preposterous. Nevertheless, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, we find ourselves beset by forms of confusion, which though unique to our age are so great that they threaten to undermine the stability of the empire we are trying to build.

Lastly, seeing the story of the Tower of Babel as myth makes us realize that, despite our great technological achievements and enormous prowess in building empires, we remain in many ways creatures of myth. In that sense, the hope is that we can use the perspective afforded by this reexamination of the myth of the Tower of Babel to appreciate the course of our history and better understand the society in which we live.

¹ From this point forward, for the sake of simplicity, I will use the masculine pronoun interchangeably with the feminine; in each case, however, know that either or both senses of the term lord (or Yahweh) is implied.

² Throughout the book, direct quotes from the account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11: 1-9 are shown in quotation marks without citation. For the complete verse, see the beginning of this book.

³ Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 1–29. For a discussion of the nature and types of empires.

One

BABYLON

Divine power clashed with empire in ancient times, when the Israelites emerged from subjugation under Babylonian rule. Babylon was the preeminent global empire of the Mesopotamian plains east of the Mediterranean Sea, dominating the then-known world from the sixth through third centuries BCE. Seen through the myth in Genesis, the Babylonians built the city as well as a real tower they called the Etemenanki, whose top was figuratively in the heavens.

The lord of whom the biblical story speaks is Yahweh, who, exerting a power that was invisible to the Israelites, delivered them from the Babylonians. Further, by proving he was a god who could stop anyone from completing a tower to link heaven and earth, Yahweh demonstrated a power that the gods of the great empire did not possess. Yahweh could impose a confusion of language … so that they [would] not understand one another’s speech and a related scattering (of people) abroad over the face of all the earth. As a result, the people would leave off building the city, and their Tower of Babel would never be complete.

The Babylonian Empire

Governing the territories of the fertile Mesopotamian plains that lay to the east of the Mediterranean Sea, the Babylonians ruled over what was one of the greatest empires of the ancient world.⁴ Founded in 1867 BCE, their empire was centered in the city-state of Babylon. From its beginnings, this city was a prosperous center of commerce and trade. It was the first city in the world to support a population of more than 200,000, and at the height of its power, it had more than 800,000 inhabitants. Babylon would become the world’s largest city between 1770 and 1670 BCE and again between 612 and 320 BCE.

It was the noted King Hammurabi (ruled 1792–1750 BCE) who made the city the center of an empire by taking control over the surrounding region and consolidating his power. Thereafter, whether by assimilating conquered peoples or by inventing it themselves, the Babylonians produced one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. Early on, they demonstrated that human intelligence could be employed to accomplish great feats. They used the wheel to transport goods and people. They used the plow to cultivate the earth, and they domesticated animals for use as both sources of food and instruments to do the work of humans. These basic technologies assured a continuous supply of food for them as well as for the many who came under their rule.

Over and above their technological accomplishments, the Babylonians demonstrated that humans had the capacity to generate the knowledge necessary to manage the world in which they lived. It was they who developed a set of written cuneiform characters that formed the world’s first alphabet, and it was they who first counted with numbers. Armed with such essential cultural tools, they developed calendars with which to measure time and systems of accounting with which to conduct commerce. Under Hammurabi, they even developed one of the earliest codes of civil and criminal law, so that they could maintain social order among the diverse peoples subject to their rule. Put together, these many accomplishments meant that, at the height of its power, the capital city of Babylonia was by any measure a truly global area; it was the center of an empire in which several million lived together under one unified rule. And, as such, it was a place that enabled commerce, literature, and the arts to flourish.

Divine Authority of Rule: A Babylonian Myth

The Babylonians also developed a unique justification for governing their great empire.⁵ They believed that their gods gave them the right to rule over all other nations and peoples on the face of the earth. Their gods lived on the mountaintops or in the skies above, and the realms of heaven and earth were joined as one. More, as told in the Enuma Elish, the epic poem that was their scripture, their creation story was one in which the gods fashioned the social order reflected in their empire.

The story began by telling how the gods first emerged, two by two, out of a formless, watery waste—a thick, veritable ooze that lacked boundary and definition. As each new pair of gods emerged, a power