Heaven and Earth: A Tower and a Rescue

 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech…

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” … 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; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 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. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

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

genesis 11:1-9 (abridged)

I always loved the story of the Towel of Babel growing up, but I could probably chalk that up to my love for different languages and learning them, and I liked the idea of God making the different languages in the world and all that would entail. It wasn’t until recently that I took another look at the story I had heard growing up and was able to reexamine it and change how I viewed everything. The lullaby effect had long since settled in, but getting the chance to see the story in a new way was enlightening. And it’s something I think other people should consider too. So let’s dive in.

Note: This is the fourth installment of the “Heaven & Earth” series. To read the previous installments, click here.

The Words Behind the Story We All Know

The story of the Tower of Babel is one that many are familiar with. Mankind comes together and builds a big tower to the heavens, God gets upset that they’ve decided to build stuff, so He swoops down, stops everyone from talking to each other by shuffling their languages about, scatters them all to the wind, then kicks back in heaven laughing about the silly human’s attempts to cooperate. Right? Is the moral of the story that God is a Luddite who hates technological advances? Or that God fears humanity?

Or could it be that there is a much deeper story being told in the text and that it points more toward the good character of God rather than something else? I think I know what I’d prefer to believe.

The first thing to point out (as I often do) are the etymologies for the different names and things going on in the text. In the story of God mixing up all of the languages of humanity, there are a few things to point out. The word “Babel,” when it appears in the Bible, is almost always translated as “Babylon.” The word “Babel” is kept as the translation in the story instead of rendering it as “Babylon” in order to keep at the wordplay that is going on in the original text. The Hebrew word for “confuse” is balal, which sounds an awful lot like “Babel.” Here’s the key line in the story that conveys that point: “Therefore the city’s name was called babel because there the Lord balal the language of the land.”

So we translate the word as Babel to honor the wordplay (e.g. to babble), but doing so can obscure the connection that we are supposed to recognize: the connection between Babel and Babylon, and how this story acts as the origin story for Babylon, the epitome of empire and force and unpeaceful living, in direct contrast to what God longs for humanity. Babylon epitomizes brute force and what happens when you place your individual advancement above others’. The story of the Tower of Babel acts to illustrate the pride at the center of Babylon, and by extension, at the foundation of the Tower itself.

Chiasms and the Center of the Tower

So when we approach something like the Tower of Babel, the first thing that must be asked is why God finds the need to come down and disrupt the building process (I mean, we don’t hear of God coming down and disrupting any other building processes in the rest of the Bible!). Plainly put, what is God’s problem with humans building the tower?

You could argue that the tower’s reaching into the heavens was humanity trying to step into God’s domain, and God stopped the work in order to stop them from infringing on His territory. But I think the reason God stepped in is that He saw a deeper issue at play. You see, the whole of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 is a chiasm. Now, a chiasm is a literary technique from the ancient world used to convey ideas, coming from the Greek letter chi (rhymes with eye), or “x”. Essentially, a chiasm is whenever you have a repeated phrase or idea later on in the story, with the two parts mirroring each other in a literary “x”, with a particular insight to be found at the intersection of the “x”. A particular story may be represented in the simplest form an A, B, B’, A’ pattern. The “inside” of that chiasm, where the “x” intersects between those B and B’ forms, is the little nugget of wisdom that we are supposed to focus on in the story.

And once you realize this literary tool exists, it is something that will radically change how you interact with the Bible, because you realize how common a tool it is. It is widely used by Jesus, Paul, and all throughout the Old and New Testaments.

N.B. – If you want to learn more about chiasms, I would suggest checking out the BEMA podcast with Marty Solomon, who I am indebted to for teaching me all this and changing how I view the Bible. I would also recommend checking out Madelynne Jones’ amazing online artwork exhibit that shows the chiasms built into the creation story. Full disclosure, she is my sister, so I’m a little biased, but I would still recommend it anyways! This website also lays out a bunch of chiasms in the Bible, and is worth some time.

Many stories within the Bible are chiasms, and the Tower of Babel is no exception. So what is at the center of that chiasm in Genesis 11? What is the thing that we are supposed to be focusing on? Let’s look:

A All the earth had one language
 B there (v.2)
  C One to another (v.3a)
   D Come, let us bake bricks (v.3)
    E Let us make for ourselves (v.4)
     F A city and a tower (v.4)
      G And the Lord came down to see (v.5)
     F' the city and the tower (v.5)
    E' that the humans built (v.5)
   D' Come, let us confuse (v.7)
  C' everyone the language of his neighbor (v.7)
 B' from there (v.8)
A' (confused" the language of the whole earth (v.9)

As we can see, the Tower of Babel story mirrors itself. And at its center is the line, “And the Lord came down to see.” So even this little digression into chiasms shows us that the center of the story lies on asking why. Why did God come down? It is obvious what is supposed to get our attention.

Many would say that God comes down because humanity decides to build a tower. But I don’t think that’s the answer. Verse 3 has humans mentioning baking bricks, and God doesn’t intervene, so He seemingly has no issue with that. Verse 4 has humanity saying “Let us build a city and a tower,” and God doesn’t interrupt them mid-sentence to stop that plan. So what does it?

“So that we might make a name for ourselves.”

I don’t think God’s problem is with the building itself; His issue lies with the motivation behind its conception. Humanity’s focus has shifted away from God and towards themselves — their focus is on their own power, their own prestige, their own accomplishments. It seemed that humanity has strayed from God’s plan. So what is God to do?

He could wipe it all out, but He made a promise not to do that again after Noah, and He keeps to his word. So what does He do instead?

Picking a Partner

He picks a partner, a man named Abram, and the story of the Bible zooms in from all of humanity to the family of a single man, a partner, with the implied expectation that God will correct humanity through one family. And God eventually blesses Abram/Abraham immensely, in Genesis 12:1-3 and Genesis 15:1-5.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed… And [God] brought [Abram] outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then He said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Genesis 12:1-3, Genesis 15:5

This is a gigantic blessing to give out. So, why did he? What justifies Abram as being worthy to receive this blessing? I think there’s a reason why. Look at Genesis 11:27-32:

Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

Terah took Abram his son and Lot the son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, his son Abram’s wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

Genesis 11:27-32

Now, I know that these bits of genealogy are usually the bits that we gloss over, but I think there are hidden gems in here. In Jewish tradition, the older child is listed first in the genealogy. They were known as the behor; they were responsible for eventually taking over as the head of the family, which meant greater responsibility, but also greater privileges, including twice the size of their father’s inheritance and first pick for most things in life, including selecting a spouse. Abram was the oldest, so he would have gotten to choose his wife first. Abram obviously marries Sarai, who was barren, and many chalk that up to saying, “Well, he didn’t know she was barren, but God worked through it.” But the Jewish belief is that Abram knew Sarai was barren (she likely wouldn’t have had a menstrual cycle, or some other way to distinguish her barrenness) and still chose her. Why? So that his brother, Nahor, would be able to marry the woman that could bear children and continue the family line. So take that in for a moment: in a world dominated by family structure and being able to continue your lineage, Abram sacrificed that opportunity so his brother wouldn’t have to by marrying Sarai. The rabbis of old say that is why God chooses Abram; he wants a partner who is the opposite of Babylon. Someone who sacrifices themselves rather than sacrificing someone else at the altar of progress or fame.

The Grand Rescue Plan

So God institutes His rescue plan for humanity, to return them back to the path He originally desired for them through the eventual birth of Jesus, a descendant of Abram! And to top it off, he renames Abram, anointing him as Abraham, which he does in Genesis 17:1-8. In the ancient world, to rename something requires something significant to have occurred; it shows that you have changed enough from what you were in order to be referred to as something entirely different. It’s why Jacob has his name changed from one that means ‘red-haired trickster’ to Israel, someone who ‘wrestles with God.’

And when God renames Abram, He does so with excellent wordplay. Abram comes from ab ‘father’ and ram ‘exalted’, so an ‘exalted father.’ The Hebrew word for ‘multitude’ is hamon. So God is literally taking the first two letters of the word for ‘multitude’ and sticking it into Abram’s name, both increasing the length of his name, while also saying that he will be the ‘exalted father of a multitude’ — the exact promise that God makes to Abraham in Genesis 17!

The story of Abram turning to Abraham shows us that God is looking for partners who willingly self-sacrifice, in opposition to the tale and morality put forward in the Tower of Babel. God is not interested in partnering with someone who wants glory and fame; He wants to pair with someone who emulates Him. He is choosing to save us His way: subtly, slowly, sacrificially. Abraham then becomes a symbol for us to follow; even though he had his failings, he is still firm in his faith.

As followers of Jesus, Paul would define us as spiritual children of Abraham, and if God’s plan is to reunite heaven and earth through the lineage of Abraham, what does that mean for us Gentiles? It means that God will still work through us, the same way he worked through Abraham, as long as we are willing to step into that same covenant with Him that Abraham did.

And speaking of Paul, there’s one more thing to mention about the Tower of Babel. For all of the failing that we see in the story of the Tower of Babel, it gets redeemed later on, in the New Testament. In the story of Pentecost, we find the fulfillment of the Babel story. Instead of people coming together to raise their own banner, and having their languages scattered as a result, we see people coming together to raise the glory of God, and languages being united together instead. I like to think that it’s God saying, “See what happens when you focus on the right thing?”

So much can happen when our focus is on God. So much can happen when God partners with those who willingly sacrifice themselves for others.