The City and The Stars

ESV Genesis 11:4

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

 

Why is this passage ponderable?

In the time after Noah, it was not unusual for people of a given family or tribe to ban together for mutual protection and to forsake their nomadic ways in favor of a homestead. To sustain this lifestyle  required communal shelters.

Tents fabricated from animal skins were ideal for nomads but an ever-growing population soon drove the demand for animal skins well beyond the the available supply. Necessity is the mother of invention. So it is likely that the process for making bricks and binding them into walls for a shelter caught on and spread to many homestead areas including Babel. Just as cities to this day vie for record high skyscrapers that lord it over the shorter buildings, so it is possible that the people of Babel sought to make a name for themselves by building a tower so high that anyone who saw it would be spellbound.

Some scholars believe that Nimrod came with his tribe into the plain of Sannaar and built a city with such a tower. The purpose of this tower was to commemorate deliverance from the waters of the flood one hundred and thirty one years earlier. Under Nimrod's leadership over a  fifty six-year period the tower reached a height comparable to the mountains seen when the waters receded. Perhaps at the very top of the tower Nimrod's tribe wanted to mount a sign bragging about their building feats and commemorating their communal lifestyle. However, this violated God's command to disperse and populate the entire earth. It also unleashed a new round of jealousy and resentment from other tribes. To build a city and a tower was no crime; but to do so to discourage emigration was foolish, wicked, and offensive to God.

It is also possible that after years of fighting each other and neglecting food production tasks, the warring tribes were forced to do what God had commanded in the first place: disperse to the far corners of the earth and populate new areas. With no central core to control the evolution of language, it is likely that each tribe began to add new words and expressions to their basic vocabulary. After hundreds of years the language of one tribe would no longer be recognized by other tribes. That would explain how God enforced his command. He did not confuse their tongues. They brought it upon themselves.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada