The settlers of the valley in Shinʿar initiate a building project. Their sharing a language would, on the face of it, facilitate that plan. What is crucial is that, contrary to the divine command to the first humans to “be fruitful and become many and fill the land and subdue it” (Gen 1:25), this population chooses to dwell together in one place. Shinʿar is apparently a Hebraized form of Shankhara, the Kassite name for Babylonia in the late second millennium B.C.E., but we don’t know how far east of Mesopotamia these settlers originate. Gen 11:2 When they moved on from the East, they arrived at a valley in the Land of Shinʿar, and they settled there. Our medium of communication is vulnerable to diverse interpretations. This little exercise in exegesis demonstrates how ambiguous language can be. The generation of the flood were muggers and fought with each other while these treated each other with love and camaraderie … “Harmoniously”-unlike the generation of the flood, they spoke as one (see the commentary on verse 9). They said: Every 1656 years the sky collapses, as it did during the flood. “Sharply, cleverly”-this interpretation is punning on חד “sharp” (Genesis Rabbah 38:6 says, שֶׁאָמְרוּ דְּבָרִים חַדִּים, “they said sharp things”), suggesting that they calculated that the sky was due to collapse, so they aimed to build it some supports. “About the one God”-taking אחד as “singular, unique,” as in the fundamental Shema text of Deuteronomy 6:4 this reading suggests that they spoke about the One who is one in the world. They came with one plan: It isn’t all up to him to select the heavens, let us go up to the sky and make war with him.Ģ. The phrase I have rendered “a single set of words” could also be interpreted as “one words,” “unique words,” “few words.” The leading medieval Jewish exegete Rashi (11 th century, northern France) extrapolates four different meanings (most of which come from Genesis Rabbah 38:6), some by punning:ġ. Gen 11:1 All the land was one language, and a single set of words. The narrative begins in an unspecified place, not in Babylonia. The people couldn’t speak to each other and therefore couldn’t cooperate. But the Way of the World, represented narratively by the Deity, thwarted the plan, and the building was never completed. In his essay on the Tower of Babel, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the Jewish French-Algerian philosopher, points out what is perhaps the most obvious outcome of the narrative: the builders had a plan, an ideal, and they began to realize it. We may therefore feel encouraged to seek a different, deeper meaning in the famed tale of the Tower of Babel. When the Tower of Babel narrative begins, we have already been informed that the various peoples, each speaking its own language, were spread across the known world. Gen 10:5 From them separated all nations into their territories, each one according to its language, according to their families among their nations. In its context in Genesis, the story is unnecessary. The biblical story of Babel is ordinarily viewed as the suppression of human hubris and/or a put-down of Babylonia, and it also functions as an etiological tale to explain how, in illo tempore, language became diverse.
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