Why Did Babel Fall?

The story of the tower of Babel, as you learn it in kindergarten, goes something like this:

Humanity decided to rebel against God. They all got together and started building a tower that would reach up to the heavens and allow them to fight Him. God saw this and, since rebellion against God is not the kind of thing God approves of, decided to disrupt the project.

On the other hand, since humanity was at least acting together in their rebellion against Him (as opposed to the generation of the Flood a few generations earlier, who were all terrible to each other), He decided not to actually punish them. Instead, He made them all start speaking different languages, so they could no longer coordinate on building the tower, and the project fell apart.

This version of the story is, more or less, taken directly from the midrash. There are a couple of serious problems with it:

1. It doesn’t remotely seem like a reasonable interpretation of the text (more on that later). For those of you who aren’t familiar with midrashim, this is quite common and wouldn’t necessarily be a fatal flaw by itself.
2. If the saving grace of the Babel generation was that they were unified, it seems kind of perverse to disrupt the tower in a way that destroys that unity.
3. Rebellion against God is bad, granted, but if the unity of the Babel generation was enough to spare them punishment, why disrupt the tower at all? If they just need to learn that it’s futile to try to rebel against God, He could have done literally nothing, and eventually humanity would have realized that you can’t fight God no matter how tall your tower is.

A quick look at the text (Genesis 11:1-9; translation my own, but do let me know if your preferred translation differs in an interesting way) reveals quite a different story. The reason for building the tower is given in verse 4: “And they said, ‘Let’s build us a city, and a tower with its head in the sky, and make a name for ourselves; lest we be spread across all the land’”.

In other words, the unity of the Babel generation was the very purpose of the tower. It was supposed to keep humanity anchored in Babel instead of spreading across the entire planet. How exactly it was supposed to achieve this isn’t clear, at least not to me; possibly it was just supposed to be a landmark to keep people from getting lost, or perhaps the construction project was supposed to keep people around until it was finished – which of course it never would be. Or maybe “and make a name for ourselves” implies the idea that people would keep coming to Babel to see the famous tower, thus maintaining the city’s status as the center of civilization.

And to this, how did God respond? Verses 6-7: “And God said: ‘They have one people and one language for them all, and this they have begun to do; now nothing that they take the initiative to do will be beyond them. Let’s go down and confuse their language, so that a man will not understand [lit. “hear”] his fellow’s language.’”

There’s quite a lot to unpack there (there’s even more in Verse 5 which I’m not even going to touch). The “this” in “this they have begun to do” is a little opaque but presumably refers to the tower itself. On the other hand, “now nothing … will be beyond them” is probably about their unity rather than the tower. It’s easy to see how being unified might make humanity stronger, but hard to see how a big tower would.

Beyond that, we start running into problems. The verses make it sound a lot like God is worried about humanity’s potential. As much as I like the idea that a unified human race could challenge God Himself, this is obviously nonsense if you genuinely think God is omnipotent.

But if we take a step outside the religious perspective, I think there’s something interesting here.

From a secular point of view, religious stories—myths—exist to answer questions: where do we go when we die? Why don’t snakes have legs? Why does the universe exist at all? What’s the correct way to live my life?

So it looks like the Tower of Babel story is trying to answer the question “Why are there multiple languages?”. And remember, in Jewish tradition people often treat language as being intertwined with one’s national identity (see above, “they have one people and one language for them all”; also in the kiddush, “… chosen us from among all nations, and exalted us above all tongues”). So really the question is a more general one: why are there multiple nations?

This is a logical enough question. From a secular perspective we can’t be sure that whoever wrote the Babel story had heard or believed the Adam and Eve story, but at the very least it seems reasonable to assume that humanity started somewhere specific and then spread out from there (and from a modern scientific perspective, we know that’s actually true). But to me, what this story implies is that someone at some point thought that humanity should be one nation, that that was our natural state, and wanted to know what had gotten in the way.

And from that perspective, the story starts to look pretty sinister. Because what the story says is: look, we tried our best, we tried to stay unified, but the all-powerful creator of the Universe decreed it was not to be. Sorry, bud.

But this is a lie.

We didn’t try our best. To this day humans of different nations war with each other or oppress each other or even just ignore each other and allow each other to die of starvation or disease, but not because communication is impossible. Not because we tried to cooperate on solving world hunger but a miracle got in the way.

But because we got in the way. It is human nature that keeps us divided from each other.

Aha! You say. But isn’t human nature also created by God? So in that sense, isn’t the lesson of the Tower still true?

Sort of. But the critical point here is one of moral responsibility and obligation. Human nature might come from God (or evolution or whatever), but ultimately we’re responsible for our actions. If someone gets killed by a meteor strike, that’s a tragedy; but if someone gets killed by a human, that’s murder. That the murderer was motivated by his own nature doesn’t absolve him.

So the story of the Tower of Babel is an example of us ducking responsibility by blaming a feature of the world that is ultimately our collective fault on the inscrutable Will of God. This is particularly perverse when you remember that other stories in Genesis tend to assign humans responsibility for things that actually weren’t our fault, like the pain of childbirth.

I get that this is quite unfair. Even if I’m correct that the Babel myth exists as an explanation for why there are multiple languages, and that the person who came up with it considered that to be the same question as why there are nations, that doesn’t mean they thought of it as something to blame anyone for. As far as I know, the idea of pan-human collective responsibility has not enjoyed a lot of support throughout history. The idea that anyone should feel guilty for humanity not being united probably never occurred to the Babel authors.

But I wonder, sometimes, what the world would be like if we’d all taken responsibility for each other from the start. And I tentatively propose that it would be better.