What does Babylon mean - part 1

Then they said, "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. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other." So the Lord scattered them from their all over the Earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel -- because the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From their the Lord scattered them over the face of the Earth. -- Genesis 11: 3-9


A modern reading of this passage shows God at His most nasty, curmudgeonly, neurotically patriarchal best. Mankind unites to do something big and God, since all human achievement is apparently to be stifled, kicks over the sand castle and sends most of them off to go live in places like Greenland and Borneo. Three days later He invents the cubicle, and ever since mankind has been able to serve out his meaningless days in harmless futility, all so that he can die and fulfill his one true purpose: serving as fertilizer for God's favorite kind of flower -- Begonias.

There's just one little problem with that interpretation. That passage wasn't written in modern times. It was written in a different age, to a different culture, for people with different expectations about how the world works. It made sense to them. For us, I'm guessing it will take me three sittings at the keyboard or more to tease out the intended meaning.

The first problem is the writing style. The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are written in a style called "creation stories". Every religion has them. Creation stories work like a child's mobile of the solar system, where little paper mache planets circle a bright yellow tennis ball. They show you the basic workings of the world, quick and dirty.

An example might help to illustrate. In the story of the flood, we are told that mankind is going to be destroyed because of its wickedness. Only a few will survive this judgement. One man will be responsible for their salvation, and the only way to be saved is to be counted a member of this savior's family. After the time of destruction these few will emerge into a new world, with all the earlier wickedness having been washed away.

Now, in one sense the Biblical flood account is recorded as a historical event, yet in another sense one can take the basic outline of the story and see that it is a clear presentation of the Biblical plan of salvation, with Jesus taking the role of worldwide savior and Heaven filling in for the boat. And so a calamity becomes a 'teachable moment'.

But it's another creation story that we need to serve as the prologue for the Babel account. You see, in our culture its all the rage to speak of a unified world population as a good thing. Here's a quote to show what I mean:

"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking"

That's from Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist and wheelchair-bound ladies man. His statement could serve as a modern update for the people of Babel and verse 3 "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." All we need is to undue the gulf of understanding; to keep talking. We all want the same things, so the logic goes, peace and prosperity, love and compassion. If we could only get past our fears and see our similarities, things like genocide and concentration camps would all become a thing of the past.

The Bible respectfully disagrees.

The Biblical position on the nature of human "unity" is found in another creation story, that of the Nephilim.

From Genesis 6: 4-5 -- The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days -- and also afterwards -- when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

Unfortunately this story has been saddled with a dump truck load of late medieval mysticism and now is often taken as a story of demons having sex with women who then gave birth to giants. I won't even justify this with a rebuttal. The ancient Sumerian texts that touch on this subject give us a different, less fanciful explanation. (Sumeria was the ancient kingdom around modern day Iran/Iraq and the location of Babel)

When mankind was living in tribes it was common for the biggest and most brutal to command the tribe. But mankind has this funny little trait called pride -- a word that our generation constantly confuses with dignity. Dignity says that people are intrinsically valuable. Pride says that other people are valuable... but not nearly so valuable as you are. Leadership wasn't enough for the Nephilim. They began to claim divinity, to be descended from the gods, a ploy that kings would imitate for thousands of years after them. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is a story that records something called the 'right of the first night', a privilege that these 'sons of god' claimed giving them the right to bed any virgin before her wedding night ("lay with the daughters of man"). It's presented as an example of human depravity. Notice that the Biblical comment on "men of great renown" comes just before a comment on human wickedness. If you want to get the right mood for the "renown" statement, spit when you say it.

In the Biblical view, you can talk until your blue in the face, arms, legs, and netherregions, and you will never get peace or prosperity. The hearts of the people involved won't allow for that. Words become tools of manipulation in the arsenal of wicked man, a way to try and get what he wants while giving up as little as possible. And should they ever get power, men will oppress each other in the most hideous of ways, fashioning themselves into little 'gods' and turning other people into drones without rights or intrinsic worth.

It's a bleak view, but its got six thousand years of recorded history backing it up... and counting.

Next, in part 2, we will look at what it meant to the ancient Hebrew to say that someone wanted 'to make a name' for themselves.