![]() How and when was the tower of Babel story written? The story ends with an etiology (an origin story) connecting the name of the city with the confusion ( b a lal) of languages and identifying the city as the origin point for the dispersion of humanity ( Gen 11:9). The narrative’s conclusion focuses on the real issue at hand: God’s dissolution of humanity’s linguistic unity, an act that results in dispersion and that reflects the historical experience of the Israelites in the exilic and postexilic periods. The tower itself, however, is a minor motif-something mentioned twice and only in passing (see Gen 11:4-5). The tower, then, is a symbol of humanity’s ability and propensity to cross boundaries and of God’s endeavor to check such behavior. It is true that God expresses some concern about safeguarding the line between the human and divine spheres, perhaps even suggesting that the people pose some kind of threat to the divine realm ( Gen 11:6, Job 42:2). The standard answer is that the project of building a tower reaching the heavens is a symbol of humanity’s arrogant pursuit of fame and power-ideas closely linked in the ancient Near East. At the center of the story is humanity’s transition from speaking one language and living in one location to speaking several languages and living in multiple locations across the world. But in the account in Gen 11:1-9, God denies their preferences. They preferred settlement to the uncertainties of dispersion, uniformity to diversity, fame and power to obscurity and weakness. The people who built the tower of Babel were driven by fundamental human concerns. Instead of being the central interest of the story, the tower functions as a symbolic motif. The tower’s destruction, though often read into the story, is never stated. For example, the story only implies that the workers stopped building the tower. As a result, readers often overlook the fact that Gen 11:1-9 reports little about the actual tower. The notion of a tower reaching toward heaven is deeply inscribed in our cultural memory. Together with Solomon’s temple, the tower of Babel may be the best-known building in the Hebrew Bible. ![]()
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