I was listening to a recent speech that Matt Dillahunty gave in Australia (listen here if you’re interested), and in part of it he brought up the story of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11. It’s a story I’ve thought about several times since leaving Christianity. I don’t recall everything Matt said about it, though I know I’ll be making some of the same points he did. I haven’t been a Christian for about 5 years now, and it’s sometimes hard to imagine that I ever believed stories like this one, though I definitely did. And a number of other conservative Christians do as well.
A few days ago, I asked my wife if she remembered what God was angry about in this story, and she gave the same reason that I thought: God was angry because people were being prideful. In case you’ve forgotten, the crux of the story is that several generations after the flood, mankind was growing numerous, and they all had one common language. They decided to build a tower that would reach Heaven (see how prideful?), so God put a stop to it by confusing their language. This caused the various groups to split up, each person going along with whomever could understand him or her.
However, after looking at the details a bit more, it turns out that my recollection was a bit off. First, the people weren’t actually being prideful at all. Instead of trying to build a tower to Heaven — God’s abode — they were just trying to build a tall one to make it easier to stay in one geographic area:
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 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.”
— Genesis 11:1-4
The phrase “in the heavens” is just talking about the sky, not the realm of God. For just a moment though, let’s pretend that they really had been trying to reach God with their tower. Why would that be such a bad thing? Doesn’t the Bible repeatedly tell us to seek after God? Furthermore, would they have succeeded? On September 12, 2013, Voyager 1 actually left our solar system. In all those miles, it didn’t bump into Heaven. No earth-based tower would ever run the risk of reaching God’s home. So not only were the people not attempting that, even if they had been it wouldn’t have succeeded, and it actually would have been flattering toward God.
So if God wasn’t angry at them for being prideful, why did he confuse their language and force them apart? The next few verses give us the answer:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
— Genesis 11:5-9
Essentially, God was just being a jerk. He was like a kid stirring up an anthill. I mean, God forbid (literally) that people advance technologically, right? Wouldn’t want them discovering things like the germ theory of disease, after all. And why prevent wars by keeping people within the same culture? Much better, I guess, to create different cultures so mistrust and bigotry can form. Furthermore, if this was such a problem at the time, why hasn’t he stopped us again? We’ve figured out ways to overcome language and culture barriers now. We’ve done so much more than just “build a tall tower.” God’s motivation in this story simply makes no sense at all.
However, if you step back for a moment and stop trying to view this as literal history with an actual god, things become clearer. Imagine living thousands of years ago and trying to make sense of the world around you. You think the world is flat and that the sun revolves around it. You don’t understand the cause of thunder storms, earthquakes, or volcanoes. You can’t imagine how animals and humans got here without some kind of creator. And if there’s a creator, why didn’t he make life easier? Why does he allow disease and starvation? There are so many difficult questions that just have no answer. And so people began to formulate answers as best they could. It’s easy to see that one of those questions may have been “why didn’t God (the gods) give us all the same language?” And so they came up with an answer.
Looking at it from that perspective, it’s much easier to understand how a story like this came to be. These people were dealing with the world as they saw it — and to them, the only reason they could think of for God not wanting everyone to have the same language, is that they would accomplish too much. They had no idea that humanity would one day find a way around that problem, rendering their explanation invalid.
Speaking as someone who grew up believing that stories like this were actual history, I know how easy it is to just go along under that assumption without question, especially if those around us believe as we do. It’s not stupidity; it’s either isolation and ignorance, or it’s stubbornness. We can help the isolated and ignorant by just being available to discuss these things when they come up. And with the Bible, there are plenty of examples to be found.
Finding Truth 
“You can’t even show that any new technology was actually even learned in building the city they were building. Its purely assumption not having any idea of what they did or did not know about building.” -ABlacksmanagain
well, it is strongly implied that this was the tallest tower built yet. do you disagree?
when constructing tall things, it takes a new way of doing things and is quite different than building smaller things. how do they lift their materials up there? how wide should the base be to reach a certain height?
are these sun dried bricks or kiln dried? what do they use for mortar? what type of clay?
There is really quite a lot that goes into engineering and construction. technology is involved. I am surprised that you refuse to see this. you’re acting as if tall towers were built all the time in that place and time period. where does the bible say that or even imply it?
the text says that god saw them building the tower that reached up into the heavens (descriptive term for very high) – it does not say that god saw them building another tower. “Aw, they keep building them stupid tower! well, I’ll stop that!” interestingly, it doesnt say “pagan worship” either – it doesnt say that anywhere in the context of that story.
now, if we’re going off of secular history, again, it shows the tower of babel to be nothing more than a children’s story, or an ancient legend. archaeology not only doesnt support it, but it refutes it.
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I keep feeling like this is some kind of joke.
it is entertaining and it’s just so absurd, and has that Monty Python feel to it. I kind of enjoy ABlacksmanagain, but I struggle to determine if he’s just messing around or if he’s serious. either way, I guess, it is fun.
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Nate,
I agree with ABlacksman that it doesn’t look like the author was saying that his god did not want the people to acquire knowledge in general, but I think he may be strawmanning your argument. Is that true?
I still think the text seems to speak for itself and the most clear reading to me upon first reading and thinking about it was much closer to what you are saying than Blacksman’s, but I guess if we were trying to be generous we could say that it wasn’t written with extreme clarity precisely what the intent was. This actually in general is my difficulty with discussions on anything related to any scripture considered “holy”. While it could be argued that this passage has no impact on the way we pragmatically live our lives, the unfortunate thing was that when I was a believer I found that passages that actually do impact our lives pragmatically also have such fuzziness to them to make it unclear what the real intent of the author was.
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” I guess if we were trying to be generous we could say that it wasn’t written with extreme clarity precisely what the intent was.”
I think this is about as close as any rubber stamper on this blog such as yourself is ever going to come to being truthful about the text.
Truth is the passage does not specifically state what actions God has in mind but the entire context of the BIble indicates it would be sinful actions not acquiring as Nate has indicated over and over and over advanced knowledge.
I know you can’t help yourself to try and rubber stamp Nate out of yet another blundering hack job but you too show high degrees of intellectual dishonesty if you can read nate over and over again state that the passage is about stopping men from acquiring technology and claim I am strawmaning his argument
You also show intellectual dishonesty in Spades if you can opine that the text like alleged other texts is lacking in clarity but in true mental gymnasitic and gyrations like a spinning top claim that Nate’s reading is clear at all
If the text is not Clear it to e determined then nate’s reading cannot be considered clear AT ALL. it would all be a wash. So saying its the most clear is just the usual contortions of rubber stampers to make their leader’s obviously blundering hack job seem more reasonable and this blog more than anything else perhaps is about trying to Make Nate seem reasonable at every turn even when he is out on a broken limb with no wings to fly –
and yeah even lying that he’s flying
Nate should one day try an experiment. He should post something critical of the bible that is only a third (and even less than third will do) reasonable – just like he always does – but this time that even he knows and accepts is deeply flawed, wrong and somewhat obviously wrong with closer attention. He would learn something about his blog he is in denial about (or more likely just won’t publicly admit he already knows).
I GUARANTEED and would bet money (if i was a gamblin man.) it WOULD be rubber stamped by the faithful. It would be a HIGHLY entertaining thread…..well for me at least a little bit more than usual.
Anyway you all have a great day and don’t wear out that rubber ….remember there will be need for stamping in the days to come. Preserve it well……lol
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Click to access seely_babel_wtj.pdf
http://amazingbibletimeline.com/blog/tower-of-babel/
i mean, the story is just a legend or a fable. whether it be a timeline generated with the biblical genealogies or by clues in the passages compared with archaeology, the tower of babel story was set in a time that already had differing nations and languages.
and even if you dont agree, the links are interesting.
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ABlacksmanagain,
you disagree with nate on why god confused the languages. cool. you assert that it was due to pagan worship, yet have failed to present any contextual evidence. cool.
you do all of this to avoid the obvious, which is whoever told the tower of babel story and claimed to know what god did or thought and claimed to know how the world got different languages, was just making things up – much like you made up the part about pagan worship in the tower of babel.
you also spend your time ranting and accusing others of the things you do so you can avoid sharing how you “know” that the first cause had to be supernatural, and how that means it was only 1 god, and how that god is the god of the bible.
it’s a joke that never gets old.
you cant even fathom that your faith isnt in god, but is only a faith in the men who told you about he god they wrote about. you mentioned the “emperor’s new clothes” earlier – interesting since belief in this god of the bible is just like seeing the emperor’s new clothes.
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Hi Blacksman,
I’m not sure why lying has to be brought up in this discussion. What I wrote in my comment was what I felt was true, and I don’t claim that makes it correct. I didn’t even claim for sure you were strawmanning, I said it looked that way and Nate may come back and say that he actually does hold the view that you expressed which would mean that my guess about how it looked was wrong. If I thought it for sure I wouldn’t be asking him to confirm.
What I see here is that you have an assumption that some of the rest of us don’t have, and that is the assumption that the entire bible is a consistent document that cannot contradict itself. I wouldn’t hold that assumption for the Hindu Vedas so I see no reason to do that here. The bible was written by many different people in different times. Scholarship has shown that the concepts of “gods” was very different a long time ago and the more obvious reading of this text actually matches with that. You can read Thom Stark’s “Human Faces of God” to get an idea of what scholars think of the differing concepts of gods in that time-frame. You may think he is a liar as well as many other scholars. I can actually relate to you and agree that it’s difficult to tell who to trust, so I don’t blame you for having a little bit of a trust complex.
So we have some differing assumptions and my gut tells me you are not lying because of your differing view, but I could be wrong about that too.
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Your Johnny-One-Note sonata, Mike, Vitriol in C sharp minor, is quickly becoming boring.
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I personally think that blackman is an apologist who believes the bible is inerrant despite the evidence and believes it is god’s will that he refute the non-believers by any means necessary. to him, the bible is just right, and anyone or anything that disagrees is just wrong.
I think he believes that “reason” and “logic” are god’s and that man cant fully comprehend them, so both “reason” and “logic” are identified by him solely as matching and agreeing with the bible. that’s why he doesnt appear to understand reason or logic, because he cant define them by secular means, and that would counter the bible.
the bible, to him is true. It says so, so it must be. you’re “lying” if you dont agree.
the emperor’s new clothes.
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“The bible was written by many different people in different times. – It was also written, Howie, by men WRITING of different times, times in which they didn’t live and of which, they have no direct knowledge – in essence, pure speculation.
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“Howie, by men WRITING of different times, times in which they didn’t live and of which, they have no direct knowledge – in essence, pure speculation.” – Arch
kind of like saying the tower of babel had anything to with pagan worship is pure speculation… as pagan worship is literally nowhere in that context.
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“kind of like saying the tower of babel had anything to with pagan worship is pure speculation… as pagan worship is literally nowhere in that context.”
Further, during the entire thousand years that the Bible covers (from the advent of writing by the Jews c.1000 BCE, to the end of NT times, anyone in Mesopotamia, believing in only a single god, would have been considered by inhabitants of that area to be the pagan.
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Rubber stamping.
it is “rubber stamping” to go to these absurd lengths in order to defend the bible, when it has glaring logical shortfalls, internal consistency issues, historical problems and scientific errors.
to give the bible a “pass” must be from god just like it says, in light of such problems, is rubber stamping.
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Howie, your last comment is almost exactly what I was going to say next. I think that Mike is so certain the Bible must be right, that he has to argue for this story by any means necessary. In fact, I think that subconsciously he’s aware of the problems with it, since he agrees that it doesn’t make much sense for God to confuse people’s languages just because they built a tower, especially considering everything we’ve done since. But that’s what the passage says. And instead of seeing this as a sign of the Bible’s human origins, he’s forced to assume that God must have been concerned with something else. And when the rest of us don’t see it that way, it’s due to our own personal failures rather than any objective criticism of the text.
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Oh, and by the way, you’re right that I wasn’t talking about knowledge being the issue. It seems to be the potential accomplishments mankind could achieve if they kept working together that so troubled this god.
However, I don’t know that I would exclude knowledge from that. The writers of the Bible already believed in a God that wanted to keep knowledge from people, as seen in the Garden of Eden story.
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I have had Christians tell me that if there is any possible harmonization, including a supernatural explanation, to an apparent contradiction or error in the Bible then there IS no contradiction or error.
Imagine if we did that for every event in our lives.
“Your Honor, we have demonstrated to the court that the overwhelming evidence points to the defendant being the perpetrator of the crime.”
“Objection, your Honor. My client cannot possibly be found guilty of this crime as we assert that an invisible ghost is the perpetrator of this crime and as this assertion cannot be proven wrong, my client must be found innocent.”
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I agree, Gary. We give nothing else the benefit of the doubt like that.
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” In fact, I think that subconsciously he’s aware of the problems with it, since he agrees that it doesn’t make much sense for God to confuse people’s languages just because they built a tower, especially considering everything we’ve done since.’
Nate you pretty much suck at psychology as well but if you want to get into that we can talk about your subconscious and conscious issues in regard to yourself, your ego and why you have personal issues with your inlaws. Some home TRUTHS I am sure you won’t want hear
On the other hand if you want to dispense with the cheap and intellectually dishonest theatrics of claiming i subliminally admit to you interpretation we can stay on the text (although I can see why you wouldn’t want to since it defeats your claims to do so)
The text doesn’t say he confused their language just because they built a tower no matter how much you (At this point pretty much bared face) lie and twist and turn. Its right there
““Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OF WHAT THEY WILL DO. And nothing that THEY PROPOSE TO DO will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.
The clear and undeniable statement of the text for anyone with an ounce of intellectually honesty (which….yes I grant you are showing you unsurprisingly don;t qualify under) is that God scattered them for what they might to do next after that not merely for building that tower itself. Its their unity but ot under him that has his concern not their ummm…..lol…. technology.
So mike and the text has no problems with proposing the scattering of men just because they built a tower because the Bible never states it was just for the building of a tower but what might follow after. Plus yes a great deal has not been accomplished that could have been under one united world (Thank God because given the way they went we’d be all offering up children for sacrifices daily)
It Is HILARIOUS (I mean literally lol chuckle) to see your level of Macarena gyrations to get out of what the text point blank states. You are just showing how deep your intellectual dishonesty goes and confirming over and over what I have said about your hacking abilities.
Letterman retired but you should try Fallon with those mental gymnastics……lol
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ROFL………..
Nate:”Oh, and by the way, you’re right that I wasn’t talking about knowledge being the issue. ”
Nate: ” God forbid (literally) that people advance technologically”
Only one Nate’s blog do they not know the root word in techNOLOGY
Stop with the hilarious entertainment. I Have work to do and its distracting. At least wait till the weekend when I can get some popcorn and kick back and laugh 🙂 🙂
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“However, I don’t know that I would exclude knowledge from that.” – I can see the likelihood that a god, vis-a-vis, the religious leaders who spoke for said imaginary being, could envision a danger to their belief system (and thus their livelihood), if people were to acquire sufficient independence as to decide they had no need of a god.
On a separate note, I suspect the Judges of the pre-kingdom era were quite akin to present-day Islamic Imams. Anyone (besides Mike) have any pros or cons on that?
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That goes hand in hand, Gary, with, “There’s no evidence that that a monotheistic Hebrew religion existed in early Mesopotamia, therefore it must have.“
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Speaking of psychology, one has to wonder what happened to this man in his life that created what we see here today – he couldn’t have been born like that.
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“The text doesn’t say he confused their language just because they built a tower no matter how much you (At this point pretty much bared face) lie and twist and turn.” – ABlacksmanagain
you know what else the text doesnt say anything about? pagan worship.
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“Only one Nate’s blog do they not know the root word in techNOLOGY” – ABlacksmanagain
it is interesting, most of those on nate’s blog know that “knowledge” and “”technology” do not mean the same thing, although technology does require knowledge. your continual confusion on these simple and basic concepts is baffling.
but you dont think technology had anything to do with it. maybe god just didnt like towers back then but changed his mind later?
one thing is certain, it had absolutely nothing to do with pagan worship, as that cannot not harvested from the text in the slightest. To assert that it was because of pagan worship is pure conjecture and a desperate display of making anything up to try and salvage the absurd.
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“Speaking of psychology, one has to wonder what happened to this man in his life that created what we see here today – he couldn’t have been born like that.” – Arch
it’s difficult to watch. surely, if there were a god, he’d take pity on this man
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