In Genesis 11, we are told that the peoples of the earth once possessed a common language and used the same words to speak of things. Migrating westward, this unified human community arrives at a plain where they decide to build a city containing a tower that could reach the heavens. Upon witnessing their pursuit of this project, it is said that God decided to confuse their speech and dissolve their shared linguistic bond. He then scattered the people across the earth, leaving the unfinished remains of a city henceforth known as “Babel”.
It is sometimes suggested that the story of the tower of Babel serves as an etiology that provides a mythic explanation for the origin of linguistic diversity across human communities. According to such an account, it may seem as though God’s decision to confuse the languages of humanity was simply a response to the construction of Babel. Had the people never decided to build their tower to the heavens, one might suppose that they would have never lost the unified language that they all shared.
However, this supposition fails to adequately account for the intimate connection between humanity’s common language and their project at Babel described in Genesis 11. According to the story, the construction of Babel is not simply enabled by a common human language. Rather, it plays an essential role in the ongoing preservation of that language. Only by building the city and its tower, the people claim, can they avoid being “scattered abroad across the face of the whole earth”. In other words, their shared language and the construction of Babel are both necessary, mutually dependent elements of humanity’s attempt to seize control of their own fate.
In what sense can the shared human project at Babel be said to prevent their being scattered across the world? How can it be a necessary condition for their common language? The unity of a common language is shaped by the form of life that its speakers share with one another. In the absence of a shared project that characterizes their form of life, the lives of the various peoples at Babel, along with the languages that suit their ways of living, will have nothing to hold them together as one. As their forms of life diverge in accordance with their different projects, so will the languages that reflect those forms. Rather than being a project made possible by their common language, the peoples of Genesis 11 share a language only insofar as they also share the common goal of constructing the city and its tower. Their lives as builders of the city is where their language finds its proper home.
If a shared form of life is essential to the possibility and preservation of a universal human language, what is the form of life that the peoples of Genesis 11 actually share? Why does it lead God to intervene in their affairs? Unlike the subsequent circumstances that unite the various people groups that God scatters across the earth, the lives of the people at Babel are engaged in a unique project of spiritual resistance. Specifically, they are not united by their place within a world provided by God. Rather, they aim to create a world that ignores their dependence on the divine. With the creation of Babel’s great tower, they intend to overcome the separation between earth and Heaven that characterizes the distinction between humanity and God and subject the world to their own wills. By placing themselves above all of creation and forgetting their dependence on God, the people at Babel have become idolatrous. It is this idolatry that leads God to act against their ambitions and confuse their speech.
God’s defeat of the idolatry at Babel is not motivated by a superficial desire to reserve power for himself alone. Depicting God as a sort of Zeus for the Ancient Near East fails to reveal the true essence of idolatry and its importance for humanity. When faced with the idolatry at Babel, we must first ask why it is contrary to God’s will for His creation. Idolatry is not a danger because humanity is mistaken about what they can accomplish. As God Himself acknowledges in the story, the people at Babel really are on their way to being able to overcome any obstacle they encounter. (11:6) But by subjecting God’s creation to their own ends, the people at Babel are no longer allowing God’s creation to flourish in accordance with its own essence. Instead of shouldering their responsibility as shepherds of the things that God created, they have chosen to do violence to the world as it was originally intended to be. Crucially, this is not simply limited to the created world around them. By subjecting the world to their own purposes, humans no longer live in accordance with their own essential role as shepherds. Human nature itself, along with rest of the world, is distorted by the violence of idolatry.
In the time before the construction of Babel, the wickedness of humanity had led God to blot out every living thing from the face of the earth. In the aftermath, God made a covenant with Noah to never again flood the earth and destroy the life He had created. With humanity’s renewed defiance at Babel, Genesis presents God’s adherence to his covenant and a new approach to the corruption of nature. Instead of punishing humanity for their idolatry by destroying them, God decides to save them in spite of their wickedness. Confusing the language of the people at Babel serves as the first step of God’s new solution to human evil. This solution continues with the story of Abraham, where God promises that He will make Abraham’s name great. This commitment stands in stark contrast the people at Babel who attempt to make their own name great (11:4), without faith in God.
Taken together, the stories of Babel and Abraham present the nature of human wickedness and God’s solution to it: Human wickedness consists in the idolatrous desire to make one’s own name great. Human redemption lies in a life of faith that trusts in God’s will for what He has created. This faith does not require humans to abandon their freedom and power. On the contrary, it is only through the life of faith that humanity and God’s creation can truly flourish at all. The story of Babel presents human beings in the grip of idolatry. This idolatry is not made possible by their shared language. It is reflected in their language itself along with the common project that accompanies it. By confusing their language and scattering them across the earth, God frees the people of Babel from the grip of evil and opens the door to future redemption.
By recognizing that the common language at Babel is an essential manifestation of idolatry, rather than an enabling condition of it, we can see that the story is not merely intended as an explanation of linguistic diversity. Because the shared language is itself a reflection of an idolatrous form of life, the confusion of language plays an essential role in God’s solution to human evil. Presenting the nature of human wickedness and its solution is the primary goal of the story, not describing a mythic origin for human languages. The latter element is simply a result of the form that God’s solution takes. Acknowledging this key point of emphasis is crucial for understanding the role of Babel within the overarching narrative of Genesis as a whole.
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