Episode 237: Sam Boyd - What the Tower of Babel Is Really About
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Sam Boyd joins Pete and Jared to uncover the misconceptions which are often read into the Tower of Babel story and get to the heart of the political and cultural implications of the narrative.
Join them as they ask the following questions:
Where is the story of the Tower of Babel found? What are the contours of the story?
How does the traditional interpretation of the story vary from Sam’s interpretation?
Is the story of the Tower of Babel about multilingualism?
What’s the connection between the Tower of Babel and the call of Abram?
How does Sam translate the opening of the story differently if it’s not about multilingualism? How does that translation affect the rest of the story?
How has this passage been used in recent history, politically?
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Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
You can take language out of the Tower of Babel—it ruins the story for us, I know. But I think it actually makes more sense of how that functions relative to the call of Abraham. — Sam
There is a constant theme of "bad things happen when the human and the divine realm cross in ways that are not okay with God." — Sam
Just as a literary function, God is tired of people pushing out the boundaries between divinity and humanity. — Sam
Some of those interpretations that see this story as [about] multilingualism, they're still picking up on the idea that [the people are] waging a war against God. And I'm just sort of adding some linguistic precision to that. — Sam
The Tower of Babel is the first time in the Bible where there's really collective action. — Sam
You can see the way that people use this story to construct this identity of land and language in ways that are striking, in ways that have real political impact. It says something about the way that people see themselves politically, economically, culturally in the world, and it has these sort of real world impacts. — Sam
In some areas, modern Christian communities don't see multilingualism as a good thing, at least as a political instrument. — Sam
Mentioned in This Episode
Books: Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy by Sam Boyd
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete
You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared
And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music]
Jared
Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast. Our topic today is what the Tower of Babel is really about.
Pete
Really, really about.
Jared
And our guest is Sam Boyd.
Pete
Yeah, Sam Boyd. He's the assistant professor of religious studies and Jewish Studies, specializing in the Bible, and its ancient Near Eastern context. And he teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and full disclosure, Sam and I, we go way back, he's a friend of mine. And, you know, without exaggeration, I had a lot of brilliant students at Westminster—you being one of them, Jared.
Jared
Thank you, thank you. Mhmm.
Pete
Probably in the top two or three or four students.
Jared
Sam was.
Pete
Sam was, not you.
Jared
Yeah, I remember.
Pete
Yeah, you were okay.
Jared
He was there around—I think he was a little older than me.
Pete
You overlapped a little bit, yeah.
Jared
But while I was there, and he was there, he was kind of known as like the wunderkind.
Pete
Yeah, and he's a great guy on top of it, too. So anyway, it was great to have him here. And he does a lot of very specific focused work in the area of Bible and its context. But also, as we'll get into here, where that goes, and what the implications might be for some of these stories like the Tower of Babel story, and that's we get to that at the end and that’s really fascinating stuff.
Jared
Yeah. And he's the author of the upcoming book, "Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy," which is coming out June 20th. So, if this is an interesting discussion for you, I'd mark that on your calendar, June 20th. "Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy." Let's get into it.
Sam
[Music plays over clip of Sam speaking] “The Tower of Babel is the first time in the Bible where there's a really collective action. And you can see the way that people use this story to sort of construct this identity of land and language in ways that are striking, in ways that have real political impact. We're becoming a tower of Babel. And as we all know from the story, the more multilingualism you have, the more it's a sign of divine curse, because that's clearly what happened in the Bible.”
[Music continues]
Pete
Sam, welcome, welcome to our podcast!
Sam
It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Pete
Isn't it though?
Sam
It is wonderful.
Pete
It is! It's fantastic.
Sam
I love being here, thank you.
Pete
Yes. Okay, our episode today, we're talking about the Tower of Babel. And let's just start with... Refresh our memories. Like, where is the story found? And basically—I mean, what it's about as part of the discussion today—but just basically like, what are the contours of the story?
Sam
Thank you. Yeah, so, the story is in Genesis chapter 11, verses 1-9. And the basic context within those verses, at least in the traditional understanding of the text, is that there are these very obscure Hebrew phrases that begin it and they usually get translated “people have one language” and something else. But the idea is that traditionally understood this is sort of a story in which people have one language, they build a tower in a city—the tower is what stands out in everybody's mind, which is why we call it the Tower of Babel. And God comes down, he takes a look at it and he goes, "Oh, this is just the first of what they'll do." He disperses them and this then becomes the explanation—scholars might call it an etiology for the name Babel—God confuses their languages.
And so in the traditional understanding, this story toggles between a world where everybody speaks the same language, and then a world of multilingualism. And what's significant about this story being in Genesis 11, it's the last sort of narrative episode of what scholars call the primeval history, which is Genesis 1 through 11, and the very next episode out of this comes the call of this guy, Abraham, who is obviously the founding figure of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So, clearly Genesis 11—just by virtue of the fact that it's right next to the call of Abram—in some sense, it's the standalone story that has excited the imagination of people. Like, what does it say about multilingualism? What does it say about all sorts of things mythologically in the biblical text?
But then it also is like, this last episode of this important section from the creation of the world that then resolves, in some sense, in the call of this one guy Abram. Who, then, just becomes the focus of everything else. So, it's got this important pivotal moment, this sort of pivot within biblical literature itself and then it's also you can go to a bookstore and find linguistics textbooks that mention the Tower of Babel, or Babel is now sort of the name of a number of of new novels that have come out. It's sort of been a part of popular, political, intellectual culture as a standalone story. But within the biblical texts, the traditional understanding is just that. It's this ultimate affront to the divine, the punishment of which is the advent of multilingualism.
Pete
And the affront is the attempt to build a tower, so called, that reaches up to the heavens.
Sam
In the traditional interpretation...Yes.
Pete
Right. Okay.
Sam
[Laughing]
Pete
That's what we're gonna get into.
Jared
Yeah. So-
Pete
Apparently, alllllll the Sunday school classes have been wrong.
Jared
Right. We are excited for you to sort of take us through.
Pete
Sam ruins the Tower of Babel.
Jared
Yes, Sam ruins the Tower of Babel. So, take us through—and maybe, as you are able, maybe toggle between that traditional and what are the questions that come up that lead to maybe a different reading, or the reading that you would see in there?
Pete
So, sum up what your reading is. Like a tweet, think like the young people.
Sam
[Laughs]
Pete
Think Twitter. Okay, so give us a tweet of like—okay, how is it different? And then let's really get into why you would say such crazy things. Go ahead.
Sam
I can't think like the young people, I hate their music already.
Pete
I know, these kids today...
Sam
I’m old. I walk around and the fraternities and sororities, and their rock and roll and hippity hop, I can't do it.
Pete
[Laughing]
Sam
But I think the... [Sighs] The story, as I see it, and exploring sort of the topic of this book, we understand that it is the Tower of Babel—we have two important words there, "tower" and "Babel"—and as the advent of multilingualism. And what I'm arguing about in this book is that it's not about the tower. It's actually not about Babylon. And it has nothing to do with the advent of multilingualism. So, basically, 0-3 on the story. And where I get there, sort of reading through the story, Genesis 11:1-9 on its own—those obscure phrases in Genesis 11:1 (and it's also shows up in Genesis 11:6) of having one language, they don't really, that phrasing doesn't really appear anywhere else in Biblical Hebrew and Hebrew inscriptions, and other Northwest Semitic inscriptions—which are like inscriptions related to biblical Hebrew more closely, we can talk about a little further afield, but…
Pete
Not to get too nerdy, but what is—I mean, because it's translated in English as “one language.” I mean, or other ways but like, woodenly, what does the Hebrew say? If it's even fair to put it that way.
Sam
"One lip."
Pete
Oh, gosh...
Sam
And it's this "one lip" thing that sort of attracts the language idea. My argument is that there are, further afield from biblical Hebrew into the realm of Mesopotamia—ancient Mesopotamia—there are inscriptions there that speak of “one mouth” that the king imposes his good governance, or when the enemies of the King have one mouth, it's treason. And so my argument—which is not unique to me, there are others before me, a wonderful scholar, German scholar in 1990 wrote a book about this, though he and I have very different views in the composition of the biblical text, which will sort of take my research in a different direction. But I think he's right, that this idea of one mouth is kind of the political rhetoric behind Genesis 11:1, so that when the people have it, and they build a city, and a tower—and two articles came out fairly recently that I use a lot in the book that argued that Genesis 11:5, the grammar of the Hebrew actually dictates that this is a completed tower that they finished. It's not the incomplete thing of, sort of, art history.
So, the story is now unfolding as people have sort of a united intent against the divine, and they build a tower in a city. Now, in the ancient world, if you were going to build a city, you'd ask the gods or goddesses for permission to do so. They just go do it. They're not asking God for permission. And there's a scholar, he sort of sees this as basically God receding. And if God is going to actually have some sort of relationship with humanity, something different needs to happen—which is where I think this pivots to the call of Abram, but getting ahead of myself here—So, in my understanding the Tower of Babel, these are idioms of united, political afront against the divine, doing things without conferring with the divine—and there's actually again in the ancient world, a king named Sargon II, who was the only Mesopotamian King whose body was never recovered from battle, like unheard of, that when he died in battle, they didn't recover his body. What did he do? And there's actually a text called the "Sin of Sargon" text, where some of these ancient Mesopotamian scholars are like, "Maybe he didn't really confer with the divine enough when he built his city." His main capital, that he built a new place called Dur-Šarruken.
So, there's some sort of that cultural background going on here in the biblical text maybe, that the people complete the tower, and God looks down—kind of like the Garden of Eden, where people get to eat the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the syntax, the word order, the Hebrew there, exactly the same in Genesis 3:22-24 and Genesis 11:6, nowhere else happens in the biblical text where God comes down and says, "Look, they did this. Lest they do something else, lest they have the Tree of Life, lest they complete their building of the city, I'm going to disperse them." And so it's really the city that's like the ultimate affront to the divine. Like they got a tower and god's like, "I don't want them to get anything else." So, he basically disperses them.
And this actually solves sort of a problem in biblical research. There’s a very famous German scholar, Hermann Gunkel, who used to think of Genesis 2-3 as two different stories combined—one about a tree of life, one about a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil—and he did the same thing to Genesis 11. There was a story about a tower and a story about a city. Because at the end of the story, it only mentions the city being left off from being built. The Tower of Babel mentions the tower twice, it mentions the city three times. The city is actually the more important thing (I'm arguing in the book). So, not about a tower, more about the city. I'd argue not about multilingualism, because this is—the particular words in Hebrew—through a variety of considerations that I'm happy to walk through—I think are better translated otherwise. And then there's sort of good reason for seeing this as less to do with Babylon and more to do with another kingdom a little further north called Assyria. And there are a variety of things behind this.
But even this character, Nimrod, who shows up in Genesis 10, very enigmatic in the biblical text. He gets described as building Babel in Genesis 10, which is why though he's not mentioned at all in Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel story, he becomes, in sort of the religious imagination afterwards, the archetypal evil king who's responsible for all this. He's actually much more depicted as like an Assyrian king, the way that he, sort of, is depicted as not just building cities—a very prominent thing that this guy Sargon II does. In fact, one of the city names, some scholars think is a bit of a reference to Dur-Šarruken, the capital he builds. So, there's a number of things that connect it to an Assyrian background, and it's interesting because in the ancient world Babel was actually sort of a term that people would use to describe prestigious cities. Like, "Oh, it's the New York of.” You know? I live in Boulder, Colorado, it's the San Francisco of Colorado. You know, hippie, all that stuff, you know, really cool progressive culture, whatever. Like, Nineveh is like the Babel of Assyria, like we have that in some texts, like it's using that as a label. So, that Babel is here, that is an etiology for confusion—which I'm arguing is not linguistic confusion, but confusion of political or unified intent against the divine. It makes better sense of the Hebrew, I'd argue, it makes better sense of exactly what the Tower of Babel is doing relative to Abram. Yeah, and it's another fun opportunity to take 121 words in Hebrew, that you can take, and people have been reading it for forever and it's a fun story of like, you have them translate it and they can make sense of all the words but the word for "lip" itself, there, שָׂפָה (safá)...
Pete
Right.
Sam
On its own, when it's not put directly next to another word לָשׁוֹן (lashon), which means "tongue." "Safá" on its own elsewhere, doesn't mean language. And the fun thing about sort of an exploration of the Tower of Babel, the way that I do it in the book, is that it's only, I think, when the Bible is edited with two stories put together. In Genesis 10, there's a story from what we call the "priestly source" and you've had people like Joel Baden, Jeff Stackert, R.E. Friedman, I'd also really like to mention Julia Rhyder at Harvard, who's a phenomenal scholar of PNH. Liane Feldman is probably the smartest person I know. I want to make sure because there's such a world of Pentateuchal scholarship where everybody looks like me and it's a problem. So, I want to make sure that some of the incredible women scholars out there, like Laura Quick at Oxford, you know, get their due.
Pete
Mhmm.
Sam
But what we see is when these "J" and "P." These two different stories are put together, P has this notice of lashon in Genesis 10. J has the story of lip in Genesis 11 and so when you read it as like unfolding chronologies, what else could Genesis 11 be, but a story about multilingualism and how people spread?
Pete
Because that is the point in chapter 10, right? The spread of different languages, right, right.
Sam
In Genesis 10:5, Genesis 10:20, Genesis 10:31, but that's all P. And that's one word lashon. Genesis 11 is a different word, safá. And when you separate them in different narrative contexts, it does something fun to it, where you can take language out of the Tower of Babel—it ruins the story for us, I know. But I think it actually makes more sense of how that functions relative to the call of Abraham. And you get all these other fun things like there's a guy named Claus Westermann, who wrote this commentary on Genesis, and he has this throwaway line of, except for one story "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta," which is an ancient epic, or ancient sort of story, that there's no other sort of parallel within the world of the Bible for multilingualism like that. Now, some scholars are questioning whether "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta" is actually a story of multilingualism, in which case there is no parallel. So, you know, from the Greek world, there's a great scholar, Deborah Gara [sp?], who's done work on this, but not so much from the world of the Bible directly.
Pete
Mhmm.
Sam
So, I think it's like one of the things where you start pulling the thread and there's so many other things that start falling in place for me.
[Ad break]
Jared
Can you maybe go to—we've mentioned it a couple of times—we talked about its relationship to Genesis 10 and maybe how that can lead us in an interesting, I mean, maybe misdirect us. But if we connect it to the call of Abram, maybe there's some interesting things there. So, what is the connection to the call of Abram? Because I think scholars, for a long time, have recognized some of those connections.
Sam
Yeah, there's a very famous German scholar, Gerhard von Rad, who talks about Genesis 11 is the ultimate sin against which the call of Abram is this ultimate thing of grace—which is obviously a very German Protestant way of viewing it, not necessarily the way I would view it, altogether—but in the particular story to which Genesis 11 belongs, there is a constant theme of "bad things happen when the human and the divine realm cross in ways that are not okay with God." So, Genesis 2-3 is the classic one. And you have the Nahash, the serpent, who tells—You know, who has this conversation with Eve, but always is using the plural “you”s, you know, Adam is right there and doing nothing. And it's this story of, you know, God said, "don't eat off these two trees." And then people eat one, but they don't eat the other, which is kind of, again, an explanation or an etiology of how humans are like God, like we have some knowledge of good and evil, some discernment or judgment, but we’re not. We don't live forever. And then you move forward in time—But that's a boundary crossing between the divine and the human realm that has consequences.
Pete
Mhmm.
Sam
Move forward in the same story that I would call J, the very next major episode is Cain and Abel. And there's this passage in the Psalms where God gets to appoint the days for the life of people. And what happens is, Cain decides on his own, he will appoint the days of the numbers of life of Abel, like another big boundary crossing—big problems happen. And then you get to Genesis 6:1-4, which is the biggie, like Darren Aronofsky’s Noah–which I've never actually seen. It's kind of pathetic. Like I walk around here all the time, and try to connect with my undergrads, like, "Hey, it's like Game of Thrones," they're like, "We don't even watch that anymore." It's like, yeah, I never watched it. I don't like violence, but I really want to relate to you.
Pete
[Laughing]
Sam
So, please help me.
Pete
Yeah.
Sam
I know, read the Bible. Like this is how I'm going to do it. But you get to Genesis 6:1-4, it's the B'nai Elohim, who have these relations with women. And again, it's a boundary crossing that, in J, is what causes the flood. And then the next story is the Tower of Babel.
Pete
Mhmm.
Sam
You know, and it's, again, this boundary crossing where now, the divine realm isn't even being conferred with. He's off somewhere, people are doing this on their own, and God has to come down to take a look at it, which is... And then when he sees it—and I would argue that sort of the larger background of the ancient world and the importance of conferring with the divine for city building, as you know, sometimes the god or goddess would give you the revelation for doing it. The way in which Sargon, this Mesopotamian king built his capital, numerologically, like, the width of the walls was connected with his name, he sort of built his identity in it. He bragged about being another sort of Gilgamesh or Adapa, which are these ancient characters that had this connection to the divine realm. Genesis 11, people are doing the ultimate front yet again, they're building a tower and especially a city without God even being conferred with, he's got to come down and take a look at it. And it's like, "I'm going to disperse you, you are done."
You know, and there are all sorts of interesting readings that sort of come from this thread, you know, are people doing this because they're afraid another flood is going to happen? You know, there's this sort of story out there that they're... What is their motivation for doing this? And I would argue that it's, again, sort of another example of bottom-up affront to God. Now, how is the call of Abram a solution to that? What's Abram doing in his youth? It doesn't say. There's nothing, you know? According to later interpretation, he's smashing idols, and has this conflict with Nimrod as the king or…You know, there's actually, in Islamic tradition, there's a mosque in place called Sanliurfa. "Urfa" is the Ur of Chaldees in Islamic tradition, that's where all this happened and there's a holy mosque there with a holy pool that have fish in it. And the pool is symbolic because Nimrod tried to light Abram on fire, Ibrahim, for his vision, and God douses him with so much water, there's a pool in it where fish can swim.
Pete
[Hums]
Sam
That's like how great. So, for the relationship here is Abram's doing nothing, actually, in the Bible. The silence is intentional, because God is going to deal with people by an arbitrary top-down decision. Nothing that Abram did. Not in like a grace, Protestant, whatever, but it just as a literary function, god is tired of people pushing out the boundaries between divinity and humanity. So, if he's going to relate to humanity, the silence is intentional. There's nothing you need to know about Abram. You just need to know that God says [in Hebrew] "Lech lecha m'eretzcha" [in English] "Go forth from your land," [in Hebrew] you know, it's just, "God says this, do this." Why? Just do it?
Pete
I mean, there's nothing he did that led to God conferring favor on him or anything. It's, I mean, the way the calvess would say, "he's elect," right? This sort of elect-
Sam
Or, Gary Anderson is a phenomenal scholar at Notre Dame, has this great essay in one of his books where he talks about the surprise of election here.
Pete
Mhmm.
Sam
And it's literally surprising. I mean, the guy's... He's got a wife, she's barren. That's all you know about him. And like any other person around—So, part of the argument of the book is that silence that has clearly been exciting the minds of especially Jewish and Islamic interpreters over time, like, what was it? He has to have been doing something. I'm arguing that that is intentional silence.
Pete
[Hums] Well, let me ask, Sam, just getting back to the story itself. If multilingualism is not the issue here—two questions—How would you translate the opening of the story differently? Right? And also, what about the—again, does it say "confusion of words," later on? I'm trying to remember the Hebrew myself, but there's some confusion of language or of words or of communication—how does that fit with a less-than-non-linguistic way of reading the story?
Sam
So, I would translate that opening—and I'm actually scrolling down to my translation that I do—all-
Pete
Going to quote yourself?
Sam
Yeah, exactly... Buy my book!
Pete
[Chuckling]
Sam
All the way- "All the world was unified," or "had the same plan" is another way I'm translating the "Safá ahat" the "one lip" and they had the same custom. And what's fun about sodevar—which is the word here, oftentimes, they had the same words, the same...and then, safá ahat, they had the same language—There was a scholar in the late 17th, early 18th century in Amsterdam, Campegius Vitringa.
Pete
Of course.
Sam
He came to the same conclusion.
Pete
Huh...
Sam
And it's great. He basically says, this idea of one lip is the same thing as another phrase that shows up in Exodus 24:3, B'kol Echad, which means with "one voice," and the idea of [speaking Hebrew], which is the next phrase in Hebrew—which is like the "same words" or "similar unified words" or something like that—in that same passage refers to laws or customs. So, he says this, and he critiques the official state translation of the Bible.
Pete
Huh.
Sam
And got in big trouble because he's doing this right after another guy, Baruch Spinoza, was using the Bible to make political arguments all the time. So, this guy Campegius Vitringa, comes to this argument, not doing the critical scholarship that I'm doing. He gets actually tried for criticizing.
Pete
It's like, dude, read the room here, man. You're the wake of Spinoza, come on. Alright.
Sam
No, exactly, no, exactly. But he gets criticized and actually sort of brought into an official charge. "How dare you criticize the state translation of the Bible?" And he recants, but not because of any linguistic evidence.
Pete
Right, of course.
Sam
So, it's interesting to me, you have traces of not just this wonderful scholar in 1990, the German scholar I mentioned before, but this guy all the way back in the late 17th, early 18th century, who sort of sees that, you know, if we work a little harder on the Hebrew, there's maybe a different answer that comes out.
Pete
Okay. So can you say something like—I'm trying to get some clarification about the beginning—Can you say something like there was one culture? Is that overstating? Or is that maybe a way. Like, he said, "One plan, one custom," or something like that. There's a way of doing things, they were united and how they live or exist or something, but not their language. That's not the issue.
Sam
Not their language. And this came out of, in some sense, the work I did on this particular Mesopotamian inscription, and a phrase in it—that actually shows up in a number of royal inscriptions and ancient Mesopotamia—Where it's not just a custom in the sense that, "Hey, we wear the same clothes," there's more of a united intent behind it towards an actionable thing. So, in ancient Mesopotamian rhetoric, when all the enemies of an Assyrian king have one mouth, they're fighting against the king. It's treason.
Jared
It's treasonous intent.
Sam
Yeah.
Pete
Ah, that's cool. Yeah. Because that obviously fits very nicely with your theory.
Sam
Well and then you even get retellings in antiquity, where they build a tower with a sword on top. That's in these ancient Aramaic translations, where they're fighting. You know? And even some of those interpretations that see this as multilingualism, they're still picking up on the idea that this is like—I think Philo calls it like—they're waging a war against God. And I'm just sort of adding some linguistic precision to that.
Sam
Yeah.
Jared
So, can we go then from there getting clear on that? Can you say a little bit more about how the silence at the beginning of 12 is intentional? To sort of say, "Okay, this isn't working, this is how it's going." Can you just say a little bit more about what's the force of that? Like, what does that do for the narrative?
Sam
I think for the narrative, with the force of that, is all the way back from Genesis 2, to 3, to 4, to 6, you have this problem of people forcing this boundary, and they're doing something bottom-up. So, the idea then of having a guy who's not doing anything, and God is like, "Alright, this is how we're going to have a relationship. I'm gonna come straight top-down." It's random, it's arbitrary, but this way, there's no possibility…There's no background against which he's doing anything that would enfract on this divine human boundary. "I'm just going to come down, arbitrarily, to this one guy, hanging out there, chillin, doing whatever he's doing, and I don't-" You know, doesn't want the reader to know anything about him because this is like the perfect arbitrary, top-down decision, as a solution to something that has been bottom-upping and really transgressing this divine human boundary ever since creation.
And you see even ancient interpreters who see the Tower of Babel as a story of language struggling with how to connect this. So, Jubilees has Abram—this sort of second century BCE document—who's not only getting this connection to God, but he gets the language that's part of the solution, because language is part of the problem in the previous chapter. And part of the argument of the book is that if we understand the Tower of Babel in the traditional way as being about multilingualism, and the call of Abram isn't solving that, then it's an abiding problem. And you can see the way that the Tower of Babel still functions in modern culture where people still see it. Even in Dante, Dante would talk about, you know, the languages of Hell, like as multilingual—People have languages where they don't understand each other.
Pete
[Hums]
Sam
As like, this is like The Fall Part Two, if that makes sense?
Pete
Mhmm.
Jared
Well, I want to make sure we get to that because I think that's an important kind of second half of this conversation is, we have what's in the text, but then we have how people have used it.
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Jared
How has this passage been used in recent history, politically? What's the danger of—because it feels like we're getting really into the weeds and esoteric about this or that—but it actually has consequences.
Sam
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, part of when I was really thinking about this passage, I remember seeing Rainn Wilson's tweet about how one of the oddities of history is that Jesus of Nazareth goes from being a poor peasant Jew who preaches good news to the poor, to becoming a bumper sticker for gun rights and white America. And it's this weird mystery of history. And I remember, like, throughout COVID, watching people use the Bible for different things, you know, like, "Don't tell me to wear a mask." Well, like Leviticus 13 and 14 have this highly infectious disease, and you're supposed to quarantine, wear something over your lips, and say "unclean." Like, it just doesn't make sense to me that the Bible becomes this prop. I mean, that's clearly what it is.
And I think for me, I wanted to write a book—you know, as you guys know, when you go off to grad school, you specialize. You do like Bible in the ancient Near East, or source criticism, there's a lot of overlap there, or you go to somewhere different to do Second Temple Judaism, or you go somewhere different to do like medieval Christianity and Judaism and somewhere different to do modern religious, whatever. But there's some history that connects the papyrus scrolls in which these things are written to the guy who takes the Bible and tries to do an insurrection on January 6, and I wanted to write a book that had a little bit of that history that connects from the start of the passage to like, how is it showing up now. And what was really interesting to me is to look at even the art history where the representations of the Tower of Babel, expand exponentially with the rise of the nation state, because it becomes a narrative of—the Tower of Babel is the first time in the Bible where there's really collective action. And it's there with this, you know, priestly Table of Nations in Genesis 10, of like how nations happen in spite of their languages. So, in the traditional understanding, there's this real importance to this passage of political sensibility of an idea that I'm speaking a language—and you even get arguments into the 16th century of is that language...Can I justify the language I use on my land as being something that escaped the curse of the Tower of Babel? So that my language is elect? Martin Luther did something similar with German, there's a guy named Becanis who was in the Netherlands and he tried to use his dialect of Dutch to say it's actually connected to Hebrew and connected to a passage in Genesis 10, where this guy, Japheth’s descendants go to the Islands of the Nations which you can also translate the goyim, the Isles of the Gentiles. He goes, "Oh, that's Europe. And this is happening before the Tower of Babel? Maybe my dialect escaped the curse."
Pete
[Chuckles]
Sam
And you can see the way that people use this story to sort of construct this identity of land and language in ways that are striking, in ways that have real political impact. And you sort of then fast-forward to the founding of America, and it's fascinating because scholars have pointed out if there was any area in the history of the world that would not necessarily be unilingual, and if one language is what we're gonna go with, would not use English—we just fought a war with the Britons, who used English. Like it's not a necessary and natural occurrence that this would be our language. We, in the colonial situation in America, were very multilingual. So, think about all the German hessians, think about all the French traders, think about all the Amerindian native indigenous dialects, think about all the African languages you'd hear because of the horrible, awful deplorable situation of slavery in America. But you get a little further in time, and by the time you get to the early 20th century, especially Teddy Roosevelt, pre-World War One and then to World War One, Teddy Roosevelt makes the statement that the language of the country ought to be the language that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were written in. And it's become sort of a de facto, just statement of who we are. Such that leap forward a few more decades, and you get politicians—there's a guy named Pat Buchanan who ran for president a few times in the 1990s, early 2000s—If you go to his web page and Google Tower of Babel, and he uses that passage to criticize Bush, another Republican's, policies on immigration, "Too lax, we're becoming a tower of Babel."
Jared
[Laughing]
Sam
And as we all know, from the story, the more multilingualism you have, the more it's a sign of divine curse.
Pete
Ah.
Jared
Hmm.
Sam
Because that's clearly what happened in the Bible. You see it happened even earlier, there's- One of the original editors of the Atlantic wrote a poem in the Atlantic in the 1890s, where he uses the Tower of Babel, and he talks about Europe's motley throng in a very negative, xenophobic way. Fast-forward a little bit more into the 2000s, 2017, there was a—Southern Poverty Law Center has identified them as a hate group—but they appeal to the Tower of Babel to make America an English only nation. And they've met with—Steve King back then was the House of Representatives in Iowa. He's no longer in his seat—But they met with the Trump administration, they tried to pass an act in the House of Representatives that didn't work, but it's still there. And it affected real people, you know. Even to the point of other—I mentioned this at the end of the book, if you Google the new Amazon headquarters in Virginia, and then Google Pieter Bruegel the elder's depiction of the Tower of Babel, they look the same. So, it says something about the way that people see themselves politically, economically, culturally in the world, and it has these sort of real world impacts.
One more story. About two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a very large Art Park in Russia built a 26-foot tower wooden structure of Babel and burnt it to the ground. Clearly has resonance for our cultural moment. What they meant by that, they described as the collapse of world order under COVID. But, you know, people reinterpret it in light of Putin’s insane ambition, and the collapse of, sort of, a world order under his anarchy, and ultimately, human rights issues. But I think, Jonathan Hite, wrote about the Tower of Babel as the narrative of our times. The incomprehensibility, the violence that can result from it—you find even ancient mosaics, Hukuk, in Israel, that date to like the fifth century AD, that have a mosaic of the Tower of Babel, where people are fighting with each other because they can't understand each other.
Pete
Right.
Jared
So, that's the argument, then. It is, that's the curse. The curse is multilingualism. And it leads to all of these bad things. Therefore, we need to unite under one language, as a nation state to overcome the curse. This is kind of God's will.
Sam
Exactly. So, for the Tower of Babel, if the call of Abram solves one part of it, but if we understand the Tower of Babel as language oriented, but that's not there in the Bible and Abram's called, then it's still something that needs to be dealt with. And you can look at Acts 2 and Pentecost and people saw this as a celebration of multilingualism, actually. Like Augustine of Hippo says, it's kind of like the story of Joseph, what humans wrought for ill, the Tower of Babel, God ultimately has for good, the multilingualism of early Christianity. And again, just the fascinating history of how at least in modern—in some senses, in some areas—modern Christian communities don't sort of see multilingualism a good thing, at least as a political instrument. The nation state is there to help solve that curse.
Pete
Hmm. I had no idea. I don't know about you Jared, but this is like all over the place. So...
Jared
Right?
Pete
Go figure. One thing I just, you know, back to the Assyrian connection.
Sam
Mhmm.
Pete
I find that interesting in the sense that—I mean, feel free to disagree here—but there's a sense in which there's a political map being drawn even in the early chapters of Genesis and I would say that Genesis 1, there was the background of the Babylonians there, and you know, the flood story, it's very much anti-Canaanite, right? So, you've got that problem going on. And it's nice to see the Assyrians included in this barrage here.
Jared
[Laughing]
Pete
In 1-11 because, I mean, they're the big pain in the neck for a great deal of time in Israel's story, so, it makes sense to say that. So you're really against “it's about Babylon.” But you're saying that just doesn't make as much sense as the Assyrian idea.
Sam
So, I think, in at least in some, you know, strands of the sort of sources that we see—it's funny because when people say the Bible is unique, and X, Y, and Z, they miss that like most—first of all, they're usually wrong. Like Assyrian scribes counted all the number of syllables at the end of Gilgamesh to make sure it was accurately transmitted—the masoretes weren't the only ones who did that—Like the big thing where the Bible is different as you get to the law code, and there's no king. This is the first time in human history where there's no king and there are arguments that that is a very anti-Assyrian thing to do. Like Assyrians are coming in and Code of Hammurabi, which is the King's law, Shamash, the god of justice, gives the god, the king, wisdom—kinome in Akkadian—but it's really the king's law. And so the idea that you get to—this is actually the E-source we're talking about now, which is not the same story as the Tower of Babel, but they're all about the same time. I think they're all about the same. I tell my students that 744 BCE is probably the most important year in human history. And they all go, "Uhh.." and this is one of those gotcha-moments, "Gee-wiz" moments. It's when Tiglath-Pileser III says, "That area over there in the West," which from Assyian's point of view, Israel and Judah is the West, "I'm going to take that over." And that's, I think, when people start writing biblical literature.
Pete
Yeah.
Sam
You know?
Pete
That's when the prophets started.
Sam
That's when the prophets start. That's Isaiah, you can see Isaiah. So, I think there's something with some of these earlier—and I'd say that J and E are, you know... I always—when I would teach in graduate school, and I occasionally have older students, I would always joke that, "Yeah, source criticism is really sort of a literary thing. But when it comes to dating, I kiss dating goodbye."
Jared
[Laughing]
Sam
And you can always- If they smirk, like "I know where you came from. I came from where you came from."
[Pete and Jared laughing]
Sam
So, like, it's okay. This is a safe place. But yeah, like Nimrod. Nimrod's name, according, you know, is "let us rebel."
Pete
Yeah.
Sam
Like there are- I mean, there's also Nimroud, like an actual place name. But, you know, some scholars have looked at him as a character, as sort of playing on this idea of anti-Assyrian—you know, maybe anti Babylonian—sentiment, but I don't think we need to go... Just because it's Babel in Genesis 11, some would say this is a later addition at the time of the Babylonian exile. I mean, Babel was being used as this sort of broad, nondescript place name already. So I think…
Pete
How old is that? How far back does that go? Do you have a sense of that? How Babel was used that way?
Sam
Stephanie Daly, a phenomenal Assyriologist at Oxford, has done a lot of work on this. I mean, certainly about the time like the eighth century about the time I'm saying that this was being written to. Something there.
Pete
So that's pretty old... Yeah.
Sam
So, before—I mean, like Nineveh, like Assyrian cities at this time were being like, "Oh, it's the Babel."
Pete
Yes. Right.
Jared
Right. It didn't take long for that to catch on.
Pete
Right.
Jared
Excellent. Well, I mean, this was, I think, a fascinating—I really, really appreciated taking us through the history and then connecting it to how this is being utilized now, and it shows that the work of really digging in and understanding what's going on isn't just this esoteric exercise, but can have practical implications around again, how people are utilizing some of this in art and in politics, and what the messages are that are being shared. So…
Sam
Well, I think that's right and, I think, I remember before COVID, Greta Thunberg, the climate change activist, gave us some passion speech before the UN leaders, excoriating them, "You've left us with this world that's burning." And then Robert Jeffress, a pastor and advisor to President Trump, has an interview that gets published reads like "She's just misguided. If she read Genesis 9, she'd see that the rainbow says that the world will never be flooded with waters again." Now when I read—first of all…
Pete
[Laughs]
Sam
Climate change is a thing, I don't care how you read Genesis 9. But secondly, when I read Genesis 9, it's God promising "he" won't ever flood the earth, he's not saying we can't do it to ourselves.
Pete
[Laughing]
Sam
And this hit home to me because a little over a year ago, we had a fire in Boulder that was two blocks away from my house. Seeing the ash come, yelling at my family to get in the car. It was in October, November, and December that Boulder had never seen snow, which has never happened in the history of this state.
Pete
[Hums]
Sam
And all sorts of things that we're still figuring out about the fire. But climate change is real. And we live in Boulder, in this beautiful area of the world, but it's a high desert climate, which means we get really dry and if we don't have precipitation, we're a tinderbox. So, seeing the Bible, you know, it's just in my mind of like, this is how people use it and that affects the air I breathe. And at some point, it's not okay anymore, that we just have little worlds because we're too connected.
Pete
Yeah.
Jared
Mhmm.
Pete
Right. Well, listen, Sam, this is...I'm never going to read the Bible again. I'm done. Because I thought the simple thing like the Tower of Babel story is now complicated. So thank you for that.
Sam
I ruined the Bible for Pete. I love it.
Pete
I know.
[All laughing]
Pete
You ruined it for me!
Jared
You're in an elite group.
Pete
Oh gosh, anyway, but listen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about, I think, a really complicated topic if you get into it, but with like you said Jared, a lot of practical implications. So... Yeah.
Sam
Thank you!
[Outro music]
Jared
Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to TheBibleForNormalPeople.com/give.
Pete
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Jared
And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show.
Outro
You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don't forget you can also catch the latest episode of our other show, Faith for Normal People, wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People podcast team: Brittany Prescott, Savannah Locke, Stephanie Speight, Natalie Weyand, Stephen Hunting, Tessa Stultz, Haley Warren, Nick Striegel, and Jessica Shao!
[Outro music ends]
