I Am Only An Egg

The other day I, for whatever reason, happened across the story of the Tower of Babel. In the story God goes down and sees the people building the tower and decides to confuse their language. His justification for doing this he says (to himself...) is that if the people can build a tower so large then nothing is impossible for them. I was raised in a Christian family and when I was told this story by my parents they said God confused the languages of men as a punishment for their arrogance in trying to reach Heaven with the tower. But that explanation doesn't seem to fit when I look back at the text now, was their intent to reach Heaven? They say their intent was to remain unified so they won't be "scattered over the face of the earth" which seems like a pretty valid reason to me.

Verse:
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, [a] they found a plain in Shinar [b] and settled there.
3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel [c] —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. [link]



My questions are:

-Does God give a valid justification for his actions? How do Christians justify this seemingly random, malicious sort of act?
-Is he intimidated by man? If so, why?


(My apologies if this is a topic that's been discussed into the ground by everyone and his mother)

purple_kathryn

Further question:

Why did god have a problem with a relatively tall tower but the taller towers we have now or the space programme?

gstafleu

The tower probably was a ziggurat . A ziggurat was a normal building in Babylonian religion. The link suggests that the goat herders known as the Hebrews were intimidated by the larger-than-goat-pen-size of the ziggurat, and so they dissed it.

An additional reason for the dissing may be that the Hebrews had turned their god into an ultra-transcendental being: you couldn't even say his name. That of course makes the idea of building a tower to reach the guy totally blasphemous. Now god was not 100% transcendental from the start, I think he grew so over time. So we'd have to know his level of transcendentality at the time this myth was formed to know if it was part of the reason for dissing the tower.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

Further answer:

The tower myth is based on the Babylonian and Hebrew mythologies as they were in 500BC (give or take). It only makes sense in that context, not in the modern one where our mythologies are different than they were 2500 years ago. BTW, this is a common error: trying to assign contemporary meaning to symbols from ancient cultures. That can sometimes be done if the symbols in question are universal (parts of the Adam and Eve story e.g.), but not if they are culture bound, like the tower story is.

Gerard Stafleu

TonyN

The earth was destroyed by water due to man's wickedness not too long before this tower was being built. Mankind would have reduplicated what occurred before the flood had God not disrupted their plans. God not only disrupted their languages, he caused the nations to split off from the major continent then. God just didn't want a total collapse of civilization to occur again.

gstafleu

There seem to be a couple of slight issues with this view. First, the text clearly links the babbelization to the tower building, so bringing the flood into it constitutes a rather forceful reading-into-the-text. Second, the result, according to the text, is the stopping of the tower project, no mention of the prevention of a generalized collapse of civilization is made.

Now maybe there are some other pointers in neighboring text that lead you to make a link with the flood and the prevention of its recurrence? Otherwise it would seem that this is a bit of, admittedly inventive, fantasy.

BTW, if god wanted to prevent the general collapse of civilization via a god-caused flood, the easy way to do that is not to god-cause a flood.

Gerard Stafleu

Jack the Bodiless

The God of Genesis was very different from the "omnimax" God of modern Christians. He was indeed afraid of humans usurping his power, becoming like him: that was the reason for the expulsion from Eden (Genesis 3:22).

The Babel "storming of Heaven" almost succeeded. According to the Book of Baruch, the builders actually reached the underside of the Firmament (the solid sky-dome of Biblical cosmology) and started to drill through it!

GarColga

It's not in the Book of Baruch, which is sometimes called Baruch 1. It's in Baruch 3, "The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch."

The Second Heaven.

Chapter 3

1 And the angel of the Lord took me and led me to a second heaven. And he showed me there 2 also a door like the first and said, Let us enter through it. And we entered, being borne on wings 3 a distance of about sixty days' journey. And he showed me there also a plain, and it was full of 4 men, whose appearance was like that of dogs, and whose feet were like those of stags. And I asked 5 the angel: I pray thee, Lord, say to me who are these. And he said, These are they who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and 6 continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they 7 had built the tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they took a gimlet, and sought to pierce the heaven, saying, Let us see (whether) the heaven is made of clay, or of 8 brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest.

I Am Only An Egg

That's interesting about the book of Baruch (3). I'd not known that the story was described in any further detail anywhere else. Leave it to the Greeks to take one's myth and make it something even more fantastical. Was there a single author/transcriber to any of these books of Baruch? Or is Baruch sort of like Euripides or Homer and so forth, where more than one author is suspected? And was he Greek? I'm just going by the title of the text given.

This seems rather short sighted of God. Supposing the reason you give was the reason God split the language; isn't it sort of redundant to drown everyone except the righteous when all he had to do was, according to you, split up their languages in the first place? It seems rather unnecessary and cruel. Also, how long after the flood do you consider the Babel incident to have occured?

John Kesler

It's also mentioned in The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE: