The story of The Tower of Babel is presented conventionally as a story of humanity's frustrated pride. This is incorrect. The story of The Tower of Babel is a story of fear.
Humanity stayed together, and they busied themselves together on building a citadel (or at least a tower of veritable city-like proportions.) That is the sort of thing people do when they are afraid. Humanity then had plenty of cause to be afraid. The description of God coming down to see what was going on with the tower is somewhat fanciful in terms of his omnipotence, but it speaks volumes as regards his apparent un-speaking to those foundational post-Flood generations.
Humanity, equally apparently, was left to its own devices. The interpreters are quick to note that the people seem to be disobedient as regards the initial directive to "fill the earth" (though the directive could possibly be met by population growth as well as dispersal), but fear of being spread out is not the simple equivalent of disobedient refusal. The world was unknown, and the lore represented in many places in Scripture about astoundingly great beasts lurking in the distances and the depths was certainly taken seriously. And this is to say nothing of the demonic forces abroad in the popular consciousness.
And there was a fertile seed-bed of harrowing imageries close at hand. While the pre-scattering population is described as a single people with a single language, and while the tower-building is described as an agreed-upon exercise, there is no more warrant for taking the apparent single-mindedness described among the population as universal than there is warrant for taking a Gospel declaration that "all Jerusalem" did this or that at face value. It is left to simple logic based on how humans have ever acted to deduce that the labor of building the tower might well have been comparatively un-enticing to the descendants of Canaan--those "lowest of slaves."
A people who keep slaves are afraid of those slaves. A people who are afraid of their slaves--or, indeed, who are haunted by any potential for dissention latent in factions or discriminations--are liable to understand their existence in terms of latent threats, from within or without. The world post-Flood was a frightening place (and Noah's apparent hundreds of years of hanging around after having launched his bizarre, illogical curse on the personally innocent Canaan could not have helped. One can only with difficulty try to imagine what Noah might have said to Canaan's equally innocent, and equally cursed, children and grandchildren, so close at hand.)
The only overtly-describable "pride" in the story of The Tower of Babel is the pride of the interpreters, so eager to describe the debts and redemptions of this or that "salvation economy." Of course, the contention that humanity has gone off-course in its pursuits is not the same as to say that humanity has gone off-course in only some one (or some few) manners. That is why "Aware, Away, Awry" does not hinge on the content of humanity's failed state, but rather on the inevitability of departure from any initial moment of consciousness going wrong, as we assume without warrant that our proper future lies elsewhere than in continual recapitulations of our past ("in the beginning," as Jesus would say.)
The interpreters read "pride" into the story of The Tower of Babel, when they should read "fear." Indeed, fear is perhaps the greatest element of human existence that is overlooked by theologians, as they choose instead to opine that other peoples' resistance to this or that belief system is rooted in pride. Pride, for example, is postulated as the cause of evil humanity's refusal to ask God for this or that in prayer, when Jesus is inclined to tell believers that their understandings of the flawed inclinations of human parents are nonetheless understandings that credit human parents with good intentions--all the more to illustrate the perfect, nurturing intentions of God as a parent. It is not pride that Jesus is thus countering, but rather fear.
No comments:
Post a Comment