The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World's Cultures

Abstract

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) The of Babel, standing unfinished, has become cultural icon, symbolizing the preposterous pride of its builders and the divine punishment for all such acts of arrogance. It has cast its long shadow over the entire history of interpretation of the biblical narrative in Gen 11:1-9 in which it is found. In this interpretive history, the tower with its top in the heavens (11:4 NRSV) has been adopted as the key to the story's theme: the human attempt to assert autonomy, attack heaven, and challenge God. The division of languages and dispersion of peoples-that is, the origin of the worlds cultures-that concludes the story of Babel is inseparably linked to this iconic symbol. Differentiating the world's peoples is the sign of God's displeasure with the tower; it is both the penalty for human pride and the means to restrain further assertions of it. The pride-and-punishment reading of the story of Babel is already firmly fixed in the earliest extant interpretation of Gen 11:1-9 in the book offubilees (ca. 200 B.C.E.), where it is found in the author's explanatory additions to his retelling of the biblical narrative. It has been embraced with little basic variation by both Jewish and Christian exegetes throughout the history of interpretation, and it is still dominant in recent scholarly commentaries on Genesis. Outside of biblical scholarship, this reading of the Babel story has been given broad cultural legitimacy in classics such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, in many works of art such as Pieter Brueghel's masterpiece, and in all children's story Bibles.1 Recently, particular ancient version of this pride-and-punishment reading has become popular. This approach, defended most extensively by Christoph Uehlinger and supported by biblical scholars writing from liberation or postcolonial perspectives, such as J. Severine Croatto, views the story as critique of empire.2 According to this approach, the story is about pride and punishment, yet now the pride about which it speaks is the hubris of imperial domination, and the punishment it describes is God's judgment on the empires, in particular Babylon (Babel), that oppressed Israel and Judah.3 The emphasis on one language at the beginning of the story represents the imperial suppression of local languages and cultures, and God's punishment brings down the empire with its monolithic aims, setting free the local languages and cultures to flourish. This contemporary approach builds on an ancient view, which appears first in Josephus (Ant. 1.113-14) and is adopted widely afterward, that the building of Babel in Gen 11:1-9 was really an imperial venture masterminded by the violent king Nimrod, who is identified with Babel in the genealogy in Gen 10:8-10. In recent years, few interpreters have begun to question aspects of the traditional pride-and-punishment reading of the story and have given greater attention to the story's theme of cultural origins on its own terms. This approach began with the work of Bernhard W. Anderson, who, while retaining the basic pride-andpunishment framework, also saw in the story a conflict of centripetal and centrifugal forces and prominent theme of the homogeneity versus the heterogeneity of peoples. He thus gave new emphasis to the story's explanation of the diversification of humankind after the flood.4 This shift away from the pride-andpunishment reading toward new interest in the story's theme of cultural diversification has subsequently been advanced by Ellen van Wolde, and it is reflected to some extent in the commentaries of Terence Fretheim and Walter Brueggemann.5 I wish to take up this recent work and extend it by arguing that the story of Babel in Gen 11:1-9 is exclusively about the origins of cultural difference and not about pride and punishment at all. The story's terminology, explicit claims, and repetitive structure all focus on the tension between singularity and multiplicity with the purpose of explaining the origin and variety of the world's cultures. …