The Tower of Babel…
In preparation for my religion class, I found myself reading through Genesis in an attempt to compare the motives of Adam and Eve’s ingestion of the fruit from the Tree of knowledge of good and evil to the motivations of the post-flood builders of the Tower of Babel.
Now, I’m going to be honest about the fact that I have never actually read the biblical text regarding the tower until now, so it came as a great surprise to me when I found but a couple of verses saying something about God’s perception that if all people had a common language nothing would be impossible for them (if anyone actually got through that god-awfully long sentence in one try, congratulations). Missing were the stories about how the people wanted to reach Heaven to bitchslap God, and present was the notion that the people wanted to give themselves a name. Let me go ahead and type out the verse from my new revised standard edition Bible, just to make sure I’m not horribly misrepresenting the text:
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its tip in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole Earth”. –Genesis 11.4
God proceeds to foil their plot at a unified nation by mixing up their languages.
I guess having never read this before or heard it really spoken about in the context of the scripture, I have difficulty understanding God’s motive in this instance. If someone out there has a greater grasp of this, please feel free to comment.
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Gen 11:4
Human pride would be God’s motive,… if God needs motive to act. Remember, we are talking about Noah’s descendants (the great flood); God has made it clear that He has boundaries.
They are not submitted to God. They are searching for signifigance outside of God. Who truly knows why God does things in ways most cannot comprehend, perhaps God has seperated them so that He can deal with them individually. HE wants to bring their reliance back to Him, and not themselves.
I’ll leave you with a word from wise old Soloman…Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. Prov. 16:18
Hey Andy,
Um, I hope I can still comment. I think I will have to agree on the above comment.
It’s the same thing as the Garden of Eden deal, just masqued differently. In the Garden, they were wanting to become like God (knowing good and evil).
In Tower of Babel, they were trying to reach God. Their pride in thinking that building the tower high enough to reach God is possible…THAT is what pisst off God…and actually, even if God didn’t mix their languages, the people would still not have been able to accomplish what they thought they were capable of doing. It was their pride. They thought they were all that! ha.
But, like it or not, God has a sense of humor…and confused them a little more than they already were (confused about how “great” they thought they were). ha.
I think the issue I’m having in this case isn’t so much about the story of the tower of babel, but of the way it is portrayed in the text. It implies(at least from my perspective) that the tower was to be built as a feat which would keep them united as a people, not to challenge the authority of God(unless I missed the part where people are not allowed to form unions).
Addressing the issue that God does not need a motive to act…I don’t know. I suppose that no where in the Bible does it explicitly say he does, but it would seem that a creature made in his own image should be able to at least comprehend his decisions.
I don’t think God has issues when people desire to be unified. It was that they were wanting to be unified for the wrong reasons, for themselves… a statement repeated in the scripture. The nazi’s were unified, it didn’t make the cause right.
Can we, images of God, comprehend him? Read Job, last three chapters I believe. Some decisions, yes, we know Him by reading the bible. But as Job states in earlier chapters, “Wisdom and understanding come from the fear of the Lord”, not by merely being created in His image.
just my thoughts