GENESIS 11, or, "Say What?"

People build a big tower only to have God knock it down. We trace the lineage of Noah's son Shem down to Abram

I had always understood the Tower of Babel story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris. In my mind, the story always went something like this: Back in the days when there was only one language, man arrogantly thinks he can build a tower higher than Heaven, God becomes angry, destroys the tower and makes it so that everyone speaks different languages.

This turns out to not quite be what the Bible actually says. Indeed, the Bible tells us that there was once only one language. And indeed, people are trying to build a really big tower. But when reading the story for myself, it didn't seem like the people were building the tower out of some desire to be greater than God. In the chapter, the people say to themselves, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

I guess your interpretation hinges on the use of the phrase "the heavens". If "heavens" is meant as capital H "Heaven", then yeah, I can see how the story becomes about man's hubristic desire to become more powerful than God. But if "heavens" is supposed to be read as "sky", then it seems to me that the people in the story just want to build this awesome tower. After all, they do say that they want to build the tower so that they "may make a name" for themselves. To me, this makes the Tower of Babel like the Trump Tower of antiquity - an amazing structure you can put your name on and have a bunch of people gather in.

It never mentions in the chapter that God is upset by the people' arrogance. Instead, God seems to be threatened by the power people have when they unite. In the chapter, God says to himself, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." Here, God seems more fearful of man's power than angry at their arrogance.

The chapter doesn't even mention the destruction of the tower. It is, however, described in the Book of Jubilees, a non-cannonical book of the Bible that is widely considered to be pseudepigraphal.

Also, in the chapter we get to see how Abram, one of the Old Testament's greatest figures, is descended from Shem. It turns out that Shem is Abram's great - great - great - great - great - great - great - grandfather.



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