Head in the Clouds
According to the bible, the story of all the world’s different languages begins with Babel.
Sometime after the flood, the people,
came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there…And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”
God doesn’t like what they are doing and he is going to put a stop to it. I know the reason given, but I’ve yet to figure it out.
The LORD came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the LORD said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.
God then ‘confounds’ their speech and scatters them all about.
My memory of this story from the time I was a kid had the people building a tower to reach God and to do it on their terms. This text doesn’t say anything about that, but I think that may have come from Isaiah which some commentators believe references this event.
(Babel being Babylon and the event in Isaiah is mocking the King of Babylon.)
Once you thought in your heart, “I will climb to the sky; Higher than the stars of God I will set my throne. I will sit in the mount of assembly…
A sort of stairway to heaven.
The people wanted to make a name for themselves. What would they think of our cities with our towers with their tops in the skies?
And what of the LORD? He/she worries “nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.”
Why didn’t the LORD stop us from going to the moon? Why hasn’t he/she stopped us from sending spacecraft to deep space? Why hasn’t he/she stopped us from mapping DNA? What have we accomplished since the tower of Babel?
If you take this story at face value, then the LORD is so anxious about what humans would accomplish he changes everyone’s language and puts it all to a stop. But at some point he/she either gives up trying to keep us from progress or is unable to doing anything about it.
I think it is a very human author writing about his view of God, the world, and what he sees and is trying his best to understand and describe it. Still, it could have happened like this in some form. I don’t know. Despite how old my kids think I am, I wasn’t there. Me, I’m just babbling.
I always wondered about the new languages and how the people speaking different tongues then spread across the world and somehow new nations and languages grew from this one event. Or did they? Today, we understand languages and their origins better, (I’m not an expert!) and for folks who speak more than one language, they report how often true meaning gets lost in translation. Meaning is more than words on a page. But I digress.
It reminds me of Madeleine Albright. Once the former Secretary of State was speaking to a foreign group and was aided by someone interpreting for her. As she was waiting for her words to be spoken by the man she interrupted and said, “That’s not what I said.”