The City of Babel

It’s funny how we get these pictures in our head.  We have these images that we think are in the bible.  But the thing is, they are not.

Most of us know that it’s just a common assumption that there were three wise men because they brought three gifts.  However, the number of  is never stated.  It could have been two.  It could have been twenty.

Because we’re used to seeing pictures of the animals entering Noah’s arc in pairs, we assume it was a pair of each animal.  In fact, though, it was seven each of the clean species of animal that went on.

This morning I was reading about the “Tower” of Babel.  I notice a number of things that I never had before.  Things that contradict what I always thought I new about it.

For example, I always thought that everybody spoke the same language before the tower of Babel.  But if you check out the chapter before, when they go through all the lineages of Noah’s sons, they note that some of them developed their own languages.  It seems like God causes the tower-builders to lose the common language they all shared.  But there were already other languages around.

There is some more though.  The passage about the Tower of Babel is below. 

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 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.”

 5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, “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. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel ^[c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

We always talk about the Tower of Babel as if it was one structure in the middle of a cow field that was going up.   But the plan was to build an entire city according to verse 4.  They mention that the tower will be a part of it.  Clearly it’s part of the problem.  They think the tower will allow them to reach the heavens.  I can see the various problems with this.

But they have other stated goals.  They want to make a name for themselves.  They want to avoid being scattered over the Earth.  We never find out what part of the plan is the most offensive to God. 

It does seem reasonable to think about the tower though.  Becuase here’s another thing that never occured to me: What do they mean by “not be scattered over the face of the earth.”  Is this a general statement about all the random things that can happen?  Or is this a specific reference to the flood?

Did they recall, through stories, the flood?  It gives one explanation for why you’d want to build a tower of stones.  Maybe the hope was that they could make it higher than the flood waters would ever go.  Maybe by using those “new fangled bricks” the assumption was that the foundation wouldn’t be washed away.

I know that God said he’d never flood the world again.  Maybe that’s the whole point.  Maybe part of why God scatters them for their failure to trust his promise to never flood the world. 

There is relevance in all this in my every day life.  When I am in the middle of something great with other people, the natural assumption is that Satan is responsible for the disruption.  But one of God’s earliest actions in the entire bible is to get in the middle of something which is on some levels great.  And to disrupt it utterly.   Clearly the issue isn’t so much what they were doing (building a city) as why they were doing it (to make a name for themselves, to avoid being scattered.)  Even the idea of reaching heaven isn’t a bad one.  But the way in which they wanted to do it was bad.

Interestingly, God didn’t say “Yeah, that’s a good plan.  Why don’t you see if that little brick tower of yours makes it up to heaven.”  God new it would never be high enough.  Today we know that.  He confounded a community because their hearts and intent was wrong.  That’s an interesting thing.

My own children and my high school students so often remember the punishment, but not the crime.  Sometimes, my youngest will come out of time out and say “Why did I get that time out?”  It’s human nature to try to minimize the effect of the consequences of our actions, rather than trying to avoid the consequences themselves.

If my assumption about the flood is correct, if the tower was a way to make it through the next flood, we see how far back this goes.  The mind set wasn’t: “Let’s make sure humanity never again gets so corrupt that God wishes he never made us in the first place.” It wasn’t “Let’s celebrate the fact that God’ll never use a flood again.”  It was “How can we create an insurance policy for when the flood returns.”

I wonder what my life would be like if I spent more energy taking the right lesson away from my struggles.