Bible Reading: Genesis 11

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, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4: And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5: And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6: And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7: Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8: So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9: Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

John's Midrash

So what are we to make of this story? God has already wiped out mankind once with the Flood, but his pesky brood of humans has reconstituted itself. They seem to be united, they all speak the same language (an early form of Esperanto?), they work well together, and they have begun to become quite powerful. They seem not only capable of, but perfectly willing to, build an immense tower up into His Heavenly Territory.

When God says, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”, it is impossible not to hear the panic in His voice. The Created may soon be more powerful than the Creator! Maybe they will imagine rocks too heavy for God to lift and then build a Great Catapult and begin to pelt Him with them! Maybe they will imagine a world without arbitrary cruelty, misery, disease, and death, a world in which, to put it simply, God just isn’t needed anymore.

In the Garden of Eden, God had grown the Tree of Knowledge and Adam and Eve disobeyed Him by eating of the fruit of that tree. Now, years later, their descendants are not only “Knowedgeable”, but supremely intelligent, imaginative, and creative. So what is a scared and threatened God to do? He could always flood them out again (although in Genesis 9, verse 12, he sort of promised not to). He could perhaps lower their I.Q. to a maximum of say 70; that would surely put a damper at least in their engineering abilities. He could perhaps implant a sort of “imagination filtering chip” in their heads, so that he could stop any untoward idea they might have before it could be fully formed. Or he could perhaps limit their creativity to such realms as poetry, music, and water ballet as opposed to symbolic logic, nuclear physics, and cognitive therapy.

But this angry Jehovah used his own, not inconsiderable, creativity to come up with a much more interesting solution to the problem of restraining Mankind. He would in no way make them less intelligent, imaginative, or creative. He would instead “confound their language” and thereby totally undermine their unity. And in so doing, He would lay the groundwork for every miserable tribal conflict that would plague Mankind until the End of Time. God’s hand-picked 43rd president of the US, George W. Bush, once described himself as a “uniter, not a divider.” In this story of the Tower of Babel, God reveals Himself to be the exact opposite of this, truly He is the Divider, not the Uniter, of Mankind.

This site represents the views of John R. Thornton. He encourages those who disagree with these well-reasoned views to read and interpret the Bible for themselves.