We Babble On

It's one of the more embarrassing memories I have. It was almost nine years ago now. I was in Greece, and I was making my way to the Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, where I'd gotten special clearance to stay in the monasteries for a few days as a pilgrim. Early one Thursday morning, in the darkness, I'd taken a 5:30 bus from Thessaloniki two hours north to Ouranoupoli, where I'd picked up my pass (my diamontirion) and bought a ferry ticket at another office – the only way to the Holy Mountain is by boat. By the time that ferry reached the port of Dafni on the mountain's coast, it was quarter past noon, and all I needed to do was find another boat to the monastery. Only, I stepped off the first boat and realized that nothing was labeled and that most of the people milling around me couldn't understand a word I was saying. No longer could I assume everybody knew at least a few words of English. And my Greek wasn't good enough to get by. Eventually, someone directed me to a portly fellow in a cafe who understood me enough to grasp my need. He pointed me to a boat I'd passed back and forth a few times – a boat which had just pulled away, and which apparently sold its tickets on board, rather than prior to boarding like all the others. As I prepared to ask what other options I had, he made a pair of calls. Port police arrived, escorting me back to the dock to look at the departing boat – which was circling back for me. As a man on the back called out for an explanation, the port policeman pointed to me and, in an unmistakable tone, simply yelled: “Amerikano!” The results of a language barrier can be most mortifying.  

(Things were somewhat better once I was in the monasteries; I had good conversations with a couple American-born monks, I overheard a guestmaster use a bit of English to communicate with some Romanian pilgrims, and even my roommate at one monastery, a Russian Orthodox seminarian visiting from Moscow, spoke English well enough to bridge the gap.)

But back to the present, and better days. These past couple weeks, we've been exploring the opening verses of Genesis 11, the story of people who settle on the Sumerian plain and decide to bake bricks and build a city and a tower rising all the way to the sky. We've heard how the Babylonians thought of their city as maybe older than the gods themselves, but even if not, then at least built by gods for gods in the days of creation. That's certainly not the picture Genesis has, where this city's built by humans long after creation. We've considered the city as a political project, the beginning of a kingdom where men lord it over others. We've considered the city as a new kind of civilization, aiming to establish its own brand of truth and justice, although inevitably “iniquity and trouble are within it, ruin is in its midst, oppression and fraud don't depart from its marketplace” (Psalm 55:10-11). And we've considered the tower, a ziggurat meant to be a staircase for gods to descend to their temples on earth, as a religious project, the dawning of idolatry and its way of looking at the world.

At this point, we read that “the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of humanity have built” (Genesis 11:5). But there we've stopped, waiting to find out if he has anything to say, now that the action is shifting his way. And he sure does. The story started with a background note, asking us as readers to imagine that “the whole earth had one lip and one words” (Genesis 11:1). Now God calls our attention back to that: “Behold, one people, and one lip is for all of them” (Genesis 11:6). One lip, one language – ]we know, at some point in human history, there must have been just “one original language.”¹ And that's certainly no bad thing: “One single language was right for humble people.”² Certainly they could then “take proper advantage of their common language” to do good to each other, to foster understanding and harmony and virtue.³ Even this great city would make an awesome “institutional base from which to carry out man's mission in the world.”⁴

This 'one people' is equipped not just with “one lip,” but also with “one words,” maybe 'few words' (Genesis 11:1), “a particular uniformity of speech and writ.”⁵ Some linguists contend that “our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world.”⁶ Well, this one language gives this one people a “common understanding of the world” to share.⁷ But “a language can only give us a partial glimpse of reality, selected by the categories of that language.”⁸ So this one common understanding can only ever be incomplete, expressing a vision of the world that differs in some crucial ways from the world. And the fact that they have 'one words' could reflect there being just a few limited ideas – that, for all their aspirations, they've come to be uncreative and unreflective, as they all think about the same things in the same ways.⁹ No wonder, as they build their city and tower, that, unlike God surveying his creation, then never stop to see whether or not it's good.¹⁰

So suppose they finish it that way. Suppose God pats them on the back and walks away. It's a civilizational project that, by its very nature, will limit the people's ability to imagine anything outside this direction they've embarked on. If humanity stays just one people with a limited frame of reference, then who will ever rub idea on idea to spark a flame, when their whole system is designed to “limit the emergence of new ideas,”¹¹ to keep humanity “trapped in an echo chamber of its own design?”¹² How can their vision not become “a hermetically sealed shadow world cut off from what is real,” where “self-examination... would be impossible?”¹³ The city's also a political project bent on securing and keeping dominance. But a universal politics, which addicts its subjects and doesn't let them imagine a different world, “would have no effective source of opposition.”¹⁴ If this one-world empire faces no challenges, it can reign in eternal tyranny, their boots grinding humanity forever into the dirt under new suns. And this is a religious project that directs people to gods who can be cajoled down to barter in a world where dead idols are pampered while live children starve. If that's worldwide, if that same religiosity fills the earth, then humanity's soul will be chained by covenant unending with death. Early Christians wondered how a child taught its language by idolaters could avoid learning idolatrous habits, when “in that milieu he heard his earliest words and sucked in that falsehood with his mother's milk.”¹⁵

Such a city and tower are what “they have begun to do, and now,” says God, “all that they devise to do will not be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6). As one people with one language and one agenda, they can harness the entirety of human effort in the same direction all at once. When our Amish neighbors raise a barn, it's the power of their whole community poured into it, hence its swift achievement. But what could we raise with the mind and muscle of the whole human race? That's what Genesis invites us to wonder. What God sees when he looks down the road from here is “the prospect of unrestrained human powers exercised in support of unlimited imaginings and desires.”¹⁶ Suppose that, for the last four thousand years, we'd been harnessing the total human effort into furthering medicine. All the resources and attention wasted on other squabbles, poured into that instead. Would any cure have been withheld from us? Or suppose today, Earth put everything we have into finding a way to settle Mars. With the full backing of a world at peace, would that be withheld from us once we'd dreamed it and schemed it? Eventually, we'd surely make a way.

The possibilities are as endless as human desire. No wonder God judges that “nothing will succeed in checking their impulse,”¹⁷ that human beings “will not allow themselves to be turned away from what they have undertaken.”¹⁸ It sounds like quite the compliment. But imagine what it means if “anything that is good or evil will be within their grasp.”¹⁹ It's one thing for an angry caveman to go on a mass clubbing spree, a worse thing for his descendant today to be a mass shooter, and worse still to hand him some nuclear launch codes. More power without more virtue, more know-how without more wisdom, is a recipe for disaster. What God sees is that “the more power they are able to concentrate, the more harm they will be able to do to themselves and the world.”²⁰ There's no question that we'd “use the leverage of unity to magnify the human capacity for evil” – it's just what we do.²¹ If our dreams are unlimited, what about our nightmares?

All we seem to want, irrespective of consequences, is that “all that we devise to do will not be withheld from us” (Genesis 11:6). That language shows up just one other place in the Bible, when “Job answered the LORD and said, 'I know that you can do all things, and that your device cannot be withheld from you'” (Job 42:1-2).²² This is God's sole right, to irresistibly accomplish his plan. That's what we're demanding: in refusing to believe in words like 'impossible' or 'no,' humanity is grasping after a collective godhood.²³ If we could get hold of it, humanity would be a corrupt god loose in the universe. No wonder God sees already in this city and tower a “harmony that was full of harm.”²⁴ This one-track human ambition not only threatens humanity's humanity, but it poses “a great threat to the earth,” and beyond.²⁵ As one writer put it, “neither the earth will put up with it nor will the heavens bear to behold” what nightmarish hells an unlimited sinful race will crack open.²⁶

Later Babylonians had a saying: “If a city's top rises into the sky, that city will be abandoned; if a city's top rises into the sky like a mountain peak, that city will be turned to rubble; if cities rise into the sky like clouds, they will experience misfortune.”²⁷ God won't stand for it. So here he prepares “to foil the contrivance of their mad undertaking.”²⁸ If before “a man said to a companion, 'Come, let us brick bricks..., Come, let us build a city'” (Genesis 11:3-4), now God mimics them in heaven: “Come, let us go down and mix there their language, that a man not understand the lip of a companion” (Genesis 11:7). Which is exactly what he does: “the LORD mixed the lip of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). It's a weird turn of phrase, to 'mix' a lip or a language – it's a term you'd use in baking for mixing different ingredients together.²⁹ Middle Eastern kings used that phrase to describe forcibly resettling people into a city and integrating them into the existing population, which is the opposite of what God is up to.³⁰ Here, God mixes new ways of talking into the flour of the human experience.³¹

It's fitting, because when God says 'Let us mix,' 'Let us confuse,' it's spelled almost just like the word for 'brick' spelled backwards, suggesting that God will “unbrick what they brick,” deconstructing not their tower and their city but the language building-blocks that are holding up the very foundations.³² So here “the laws of language were torn apart,”³³ “their common speech became a babble of tongues.”³⁴ Taking this at face value, it must've seemed to them like “they began speaking nonsense, like insane people, to one another.”³⁵ As a result, “they were dispersed through their diversity of languages.”³⁶ “So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8), breaking up their united peoplehood and exiling them from the safe haven they'd tried to build themselves.³⁷ This city can't be their artificial Eden; they're sent every which way. The word 'mix' makes sense now: it's a blender without a lid, whirling and spattering humanity everywhere.³⁸ It was everything the city was supposed to stop (Genesis 11:4). In trying to stave off their worst fears, they guaranteed those fears. So naturally, “they stopped building the city” (Genesis 11:8). Why bother any longer?

“Therefore, its name is called...” (Genesis 11:9). The Bible is written so brilliantly. The word for 'name,' shem, sounds like the word for 'there,' sham, which itself is the first syllable of the word for 'heaven,' shamayim. The people settled in sham and wanted to build a tower all the way to shamayim so they could make their own shem; what results is that from shamayim, God comes down and judges them from sham, so that everyone imposes a shem on the city.³⁹ God cancels out the shem they meant to place and gives them the exact opposite of what they'd prayed for.⁴⁰ It's “poetic justice” – literally.⁴¹ Hence “they called its name 'Babel'” (Genesis 11:9).

The Babylonians hinted that Babel was named from its mighty rivers that enriched the soil and channeled the commerce of all the land their way, since their word for 'to channel' was babali.⁴² The Bible hits back and says Babel gets its name “because from there the LORD scattered them” (Genesis 11:9). The real flow doesn't channel the world to Babel but away from Babel, dislodging and impoverishing the city.⁴³ The Babylonians also bragged that Babel was bab-ili, 'the gate of the gods.' They therefore postured as “Babylon the pure,”⁴⁴ “the pure city.”⁴⁵ But in Hebrew, babel sounds a lot like balal, 'mix'.⁴⁶ Instead of an orderly gathering of gods, Babel is all scrambled. In fact, this word for 'mixed' leads to a Hebrew word for 'perversion,' mixtures like incest and bestiality (Leviticus 18:23; 20:12) – so far from being a 'pure city,' it's a disgustingly perverted city.⁴⁷

Not only does 'Babel' now refer to people being channeled away instead of channeled in, not only does 'Babel' denote a perverted scramble instead of a pure city where gods gather, but when God announces, “Let us mix,” that word is spelled the same in Hebrew as the word for 'foolishness.'⁴⁸ While they're pretending to be “Babylon which diffuses wisdom,”⁴⁹ God pronounces them the city of foolishness – not to mention that babel sounds a bit like mabbul, the Flood!⁵⁰ These intricate puns pile up, “bursting Babel's bubble of bombast.”⁵¹

So it's no surprise people read this as a straightforward story of “God's punishment” on human “audacity and impiety.”⁵² First, God “let them toil and labor” on the pointless project, letting them waste their efforts to teach them a lesson.⁵³ Second, God gave humanity newfound limitations, yielding “an enormous impediment to human labors.”⁵⁴ And third, what God does severs the social bonds keeping the one people together. The Apostle Paul said, “There are doubtless many different languages in the world, and none is without meaning, but if I don't know the meaning of the language, I'll be a foreigner to the speaker and the speaker will be a foreigner to me” (1 Corinthians 14:10-11). Down through history, differences in language have often stoked “fear of foreigners.”⁵⁵ Once people saw each other as foreigners, “war broke out among them on account of the divisions that the languages brought among them.”⁵⁶ From then on, this judgment became “the most ruinous plague in human affairs..., the beginning and seedbed of all evils and discords.”⁵⁷ (My quest for the ferry at Dafni wasn't quite that dramatic, but the language barriers that made me a foreigner sure plagued me!)

But the early Christians saw another side, too: how, even in this, God “is entirely mercy to his creation.”⁵⁸ We needed help breaking out of the self-made cage we loved! God's intervention brought “a holy gift,” that an empire of sin “should not once more contaminate all people and make the offense general.”⁵⁹ God wanted “to make it impossible for them to form a dangerous unity” that could hurt us in the future.⁶⁰ Divided, we're limited in the good we can do, but we're also more limited in the amount of evil we can do.⁶¹ We're practiced enough in bringing nightmares to life as it is; God has kindly spared us from the nightmare of a world dreaming one invincible woe. He's stolen from us the strength we'd claimed to thrust all things down into hellfire.

In the process, “the mercy of the Lord appeared among their tribes and relieved those who were afflicted by their deeds.”⁶² Having been under the thumb of this political project, the forced laborers find great relief when the language of propaganda and control is shattered.⁶³ The tongue of tyrants' command being tangled, it can't demand allegiance from the uncomprehending masses any more.⁶⁴ The fall of this prospective one-world empire liberates the downtrodden, so that they can't be enslaved forever.

And since “habits of speech can create habits of mind,”⁶⁵ with all these new languages God introduces “into the drama of humanity different ways of thinking about and engaging with the world.”⁶⁶ So “a great variety of customs, religions, and ideas arose because of the diversity of languages.”⁶⁷ As one philosopher puts it: “a thousand gardens must bloom in order to avoid the flowers of evil becoming the world's monocultured crop.”⁶⁸ In setting human thought free to bloom in all colors, God “forced them to advance to a better state..., a good and beneficial discord.”⁶⁹ He breaks the level surface as if plowing and planting, summoning a new shoot of hope. Now peoples “each have their own language with the resources provided by the Lord,”⁷⁰ so that “with the tongues, as with gold, he made them rich.”⁷¹ There's a rich beauty to all these different words and thoughts, with “over seven thousand languages in existence today,”⁷² all born from older languages through change.⁷³

But those left behind in Shinar resented sorely the burden of Babel. They dreamed of a day when “the lands of Shubur and Hamazi, as well as twin-tongued Sumer..., together with Akkad... and even the land Martu, resting in green pastures, yea, the whole world of well-ruled people, will be able to speak to Enlil in one language! For on that day... shall Enki... change the tongues in their mouth, as many as he once placed there, and the speech of mankind shall be truly one!”⁷⁴ Impatient, empires down through history have tried to make it happen, often imposing a preferred language, a lingua franca, that can be shared by many peoples – today, English functions as the world's major lingua franca (as even my time on Mount Athos illustrates). But that's often happened by force: one Roman citizen said that “the imperial city has taken pains to impose on her subjugated peoples not only her yoke but also her language..., but at what cost this was achieved: all those terrible wars, all that human slaughter, all that human bloodshed!”⁷⁵

God warned Israel about this long before, that if they were faithless, he'd “bring a nation against you from far away..., a nation whose tongue you don't understand” (Deuteronomy 28:49). And that's exactly what happened when he called Babel against Judah for her sins. Babel was “a nation from afar..., a nation whose tongue you do not know, nor can you understand what they say” (Jeremiah 51:5). And in exile, they had to learn “the language of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4). Even after resettling their homeland, “half their children... could not speak the language of Judah, but only the language of each people” (Nehemiah 13:24). Early Judaism had to adapt, translating their Scriptures into Greek and explaining them in the synagogues in Aramaic.

It was into that situation that God sent his Son, the same Lord who had inspired Adam's language and scrambled the languages at Babel.⁷⁶ He was born into a multilingual Galilee where he and his apostles would've spoken Aramaic on a regular basis, Greek often, read Hebrew as needed, and used a bit of Latin here or there.⁷⁷ In such languages he ministered, not with wordless songs of angels, but with grammar and syntax like ours, nouns and verbs and adjectives people could understand. And when at last he went to the cross for us, at the top was a sign “in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek” (John 19:19-20). He died under the banner of the many languages of Babel to “ransom people for God from every... language” (Revelation 5:9).

But the Lord didn't stay dead. He rose from the grave, he ascended into heaven, and he told his disciples to wait for a new power to come. And then it was Pentecost morning. Just as Jews imagined that “the LORD sent a great wind upon the tower” that stretched toward heaven,⁷⁸ and that “the winds cast down the great tower from on high,”⁷⁹ so in this city “there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind” (Acts 2:2). The rushing wind hadn't come this time to cancel the one sound of human defiance, but to herald the LORD come down to build something new. “And there appeared to them dividing tongues as of fire..., and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:3-4), with “no foreign speech beyond their powers of comprehension.”⁸⁰ As a crowd gathered, visitors from every nation, “they were confused” – just like the people at Babel⁸¹ – “because each one was hearing them speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). The message bridged every Babel-divide, for “we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God” (Acts 2:11), as “every tongue among the people was confessing Christ and speaking of his mysteries.”⁸²

Babel is happening in reverse! “The spirit of pride fragmented language, and the Holy Spirit gathered dispersed languages into one!”⁸³ The upper room where the Spirit came down “is exalted even more than Babel,” had “conquered Babel in the benevolent speech of all tongues,” by becoming “a school for the sons of the light.”⁸⁴ What was built was a single people, the Church; and just as some Jews read Genesis as teaching that the people at Babel were originally “united in possessions, what one possessed being at the others' disposal,”⁸⁵ so this church was “together... and had all things in common” (Acts 2:44).⁸⁶ In time, this people grew troubled, as “a complaint by the Greek-speakers arose against the Hebrew-speakers” over unfair treatment (Acts 6:1). But “there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1). And just as the first scattering had a silver lining in filling the earth, so now “those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). They “traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch” (Acts 11:19), but that was only the beginning of what God had begun to do in them – and all that Christ desired would not be withheld from them.

“If he had given his Good News to the world in a single language, only a single people would have received it to be made disciples; but now that he has given it abundantly in all tongues, all peoples of the earth have lovingly longed for it.”⁸⁷ By the close of the second century, we're told of “many nations” who “are barbarians with respect to their language but, as regards doctrine and practices and conduct, they are most wise and pleasing to God on account of the faith.”⁸⁸ Thus, “each one according to his language prays to God and sings his praises as he is able, and the Lord of Every Language hears those who pray in every language as though he were hearing one utterance.”⁸⁹ These were centuries of Scripture “spreading far and wide through translation into a variety of other languages” so that it “came to the knowledge of the nations for their salvation.”⁹⁰ By the late fourth century, Gospels had been “translated to the language” of “Syrians and Egyptians and Indians and Persians and Ethiopians and countless other nations,”⁹¹ a priest from the Balkans could celebrate German Goths “scrutinizing the utterances of the Holy Spirit” in their language,⁹² and a Spanish bishop could say that “Latium, Egypt, Athens, and Thracians, Arabians, Spaniards acknowledge God; the Holy Spirit understands all languages.”⁹³ “All these tongues express the one faith..., all tongues preach the same wisdom, the same doctrine and discipline,” but “however great the variety of languages, it is one and the same gold that is preached.”⁹⁴

Missionaries from France and Ireland brought a new mission to the island of Britain, gradually raising up poets and leaders in its various languages and translating the basic confessions and prayers of the faith into Old English.⁹⁵ In the ninth century, God raised up a pair of brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, who used their powerful language skills and prayer to evangelize the Slavic peoples, translating the Bible and the church's prayer and worship and getting it blessed by the bishop of Rome, Pope Adrian II, by laying their work on the altar above the bones of the Apostle Peter.⁹⁶ Some of us have been raised on the idea that Scripture in everyday language (the 'vernacular') wasn't accessible in the Middle Ages, that it took brave revolutionaries like John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and Martin Luther to defy authority and set God's word free at great cost; but these days, that “old fantasy” of a fallen institutional church opposed to the vernacular Bible has been “wholly discredited.”⁹⁷ Before any of those men had even been born, already “more-or-less complete Bible translations were in Europe-wide circulation,” followed soon by a large “amount of Christian biblical writing... composed, copied, and printed in nearly every medieval language.”⁹⁸   (Visit the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, and you can even see a few of those old pre-Reformation vernacular Bibles among their many Latin counterparts.)

I could tell you of a man in the 1500s named Francis Xavier, sent half-reluctantly to southwest India, where “we couldn't understand each other, as I spoke Castillan and they spoke Malabar,” he said, “so I... sought out men who knew both languages..., and, by our joint efforts and with infinite difficulty, we translated the catechism into the Malabar tongue. This I learned by heart, and then I began to go through all the villages of the coast... I assembled them twice a day and taught them the Christian doctrine.”⁹⁹ After ministering there and in Indonesia, he led the first organized mission into Japan, writing that “if we all knew the language, I do not doubt but that a great many Japanese would become Christians. God grant that we may soon acquire it well, as we have already for some time begun to understand it,” even as his first Japanese convert “wrote out in his own native language a great many things concerning Christian mysteries and laws... and has diligently preached the gospel day and night to some relations and friends.”¹⁰⁰ By the time Francis died at age 46 while waiting for a ship to China, he may well have led more people to Jesus than almost anybody since the apostles (or so I've heard it said).

From the apostles until now, we've been filling the world with the gospel in many languages. And it's ongoing, and far from over. The Bible translator alliance illumiNations estimates that thousands of languages still have nearly no Scripture in them – something they're working diligently to fix. But all these languages praising Christ, with or without the Scriptures, are “a sign of the gathering together into the unity of the Spirit and of the way up to heaven,” not by a tower but by a cross of faith and hope and love.¹⁰¹ Down through these ages to now, “Christ joins and unites all into one faith through the gospel, even though the different languages remain.... If we both understand Christ, we mutually embrace and heartily kiss each other as fellow members,” Luther said, “but where Christ is not present, there the punishment of Babylon still prevails.”¹⁰² Our mission, then, is to rescue the babbling world from the 'punishment of Babel,' bringing the gospel in every language, facilitating worship and prayer in every language, restoring unity across every language barrier through the single doctrine and discipline of the Christ who is Lord of Every Language and the same peace and love woven by the Spirit who breathes one utterance!

The prophets left us with a promise that's happening before our eyes, and will happen more fully in the end. “At that time I will restore to the peoples a pure lip, that all of them may call upon the name of the LORD and serve him with one accord,” not with division (Zephaniah 3:9). All the earth, through this gospel, will become “a people humble and lowly..., nor shall there be found in their mouth a deceitful tongue..., and none shall make them afraid” (Zephaniah 3:12-13). For “the LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will quiet you by his love, he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17), and set us up all, at last, “for praise and for a name” (Zephaniah 3:19). Then we'll be “a great multitude that no one could number..., from all tribes and peoples and languages,” carrying the linguistic riches of the nations into the holy city, and crying out with one eternal polyglot shout that our God saves (Revelation 7:9-10; 21:24-26)! From and in every language, hallelujah, we will glory: Our God saves!

What a Nimrod...

Election day. But it's a Thursday, not a Tuesday – 1784, not 2024 – and the Rev. Joseph Huntington is stepping up to the Hartford plate, his sermon at the ready for Gov. Griswold and the assembled legislators. Just yesterday, ratified copies of the treaty were exchanged in Paris. So ended what one had called “a war which will one day shine more illustriously in the historic page than any which has happened since the time of Nimrod and the Giants.”¹ A new nation had been born, and Pastor Joseph's big brother Samuel had played his part – a signer of the Declaration, president of the Continental Congress, and now Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut. No time to dwell on family pride, though; the new state government was waiting on Pastor Joseph to begin.

God, said Pastor Joseph, “saw all his works, and all the works and ways of men, the whole business and result of the world, as clearly before he began to create as he will at the consummation of all things.”² Before light was born, from eternity he'd seen Eve's teeth break the fruit's skin, the ark splishing and splashing in the flood, brick atop brick at Babel. And God has worked, Joseph testified, through these twists and turns of history to sculpt the peoples of the earth in many ways, even through “the event of war foreign or intestine, and many new nations have rose out of blood.”³ Reflecting the sentiments of his day and place, Joseph declared how “we once loved Britain most dearly, but Britain the Tyrant we could not love. Our souls abhorred her measures.... We rose from the dust where we had long been prostrate – our breasts glowed with noble ardor – we invoked the God of our fathers, and we took the field.”⁴ And yet all this had been the mysterious wisdom of God, he said, for “God has often made the lawless ambition and proud spirit of men instrumental in making new kingdoms or dividing ancient ones. As in the case of Nimrod, a proud and lawless man, a man of blood in contempt of heaven, a mighty hunter before the Lord, he soon began a kingdom distinct for himself.”⁵

There's that funny name again: 'Nimrod.' He's mighty mysterious in the Bible, maybe because – as some think – there was a longer Nimrod epic that circulated of which the Bible only kept these highlights.⁶ His story's told now in just this little five-verse “digression of particular political significance.”⁷ Verse 10 is the first appearance of another key word in the Bible: 'kingdom.' Nimrod is “the first person described explicitly as having a kingdom,”⁸ which seems to make him “the first king mentioned in the Scriptures,”⁹ a pretty important position to be in. These few verses we've read cover “the beginnings of kingship and, thus, of political rule in the world.”¹⁰

So roll back the clock to the days of yore in the 'land of Shinar,' to ancient Sumer, where the people said that “when the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kish,”¹¹ a city a few miles east from a little riverside town called Babylon. But then, so they tell us, “Kish was smitten with weapons; its kingdom was brought to Uruk.”¹² Uruk had been “a hotbed of technological invention” long before 3000 BC, by which time they'd begun waging war.¹³ A sign of the turbulent early 2000s, they built a massive defensive wall, a feat credited to Uruk's larger-than-life ruler Gilgamesh, heir of kings Enmerkar and Lugalbanda. Among his notable successors was Lugalzagesi, who came in and raised Uruk to dominance by conquering Kish and many other cities of Sumer; his records claim the god Enlil “put all the lands at his feet and, from east to west, made them subject to him. … Enlil permitted him no rival; under him the lands rested contentedly, the people made merry.”¹⁴

Enter a man known to history as Sargon, 'True King' – we still haven't settled whether it's a name he was born with or adopted.¹⁵ He was a social outsider, not a Sumerian by blood or culture.¹⁶ Later stories told how his mom, a priestess illegally pregnant, made a basket and put her baby boy in it and floated him down the river, Moses style (cf. Exodus 2:3).¹⁷ These legends say that, after driving far down the Euphrates, a gardener fished him out of the water and adopted him, raising him to become cupbearer to King Ur-Zababa of Kish.¹⁸ Whatever the story, over 4300 years ago, Sargon took over the city of Kish while renoving another town further north, Agade, into “the first purpose-built capital” in the world.¹⁹ He marched his army south and, to hear him tell it, he “was victorious over Uruk in battle, conquered the city, captured Lugalzagesi king of Uruk in battle, and led him off to the gate of the god Enlil in a neck stock.”²⁰ In the process, Sargon says he “conquered fifty city governors with the mace of the god Ilaba,”²¹ “enabling him to rule all of Sumer to the headwaters of the [Persian] Gulf.”²² Thus “Uruk was smitten with weapons; its kingdom was brought to Agade.”²³

No king until Sargon had unified these many cities into “a single territorial state,”²⁴ and with Sargon came “the emergence of a new ideology of kingship,” no longer a shepherd of men but a hero on the battlefield.²⁵ In these conquests, he claims that “Sargon, king of the world, was victorious in 34 battles; he destroyed their city walls as far as the shore of the sea.”²⁶ He colonized Sumer with his own Akkadian people, who “saw themselves as dominating local populations rather than working pacifically with them.”²⁷ Not content with Sumer, he began to spread northward to the land later known as Assyria, waging a campaign northwest into Syria to the edges of the Mediterranean, and then later he fought the eastern powers in Iran.²⁸ People could readily imagine him saying: “Truly the mighty king, the king of battle, am I. No other king has yet gone where I have.”²⁹ Later, “in his old age, all the countries revolted against him and besieged him in Akkad,” but “Sargon went out, defeated his adversaries, annihilated them, and slew their very large army,” keeping his empire intact in his hands.³⁰ He died in the fifty-sixth year of his rule, likely in his eighties by then.

He left the throne to his son Rimush, who faced an immediate rebellion all over. He put it down with relish, claiming in campaigns against various rebellious city to have killed thousands of men, expelled thousands more, and taken thousands of prisoners captive³¹ – all in all, about a third of all adult men in the land did he subject to “cruel punishment, mass execution, or forced labor,” while confiscating massive tracts of land for his loyalists.³² He boasted of being “fully three times victorious over Sumer,” part of his own kingdom, “in battle.”³³ When he was assassinated after nine years, the throne was left to another son of Sargon, Manishtusu – or, as he put it, “the god Enlil made him great, called his name, and granted to him the scepter of kingship.”³⁴ He ruled fifteen years and waged battle overseas as far as Arabia,³⁵ but he was also a builder, enlarging temples in Nineveh.³⁶

His reign also ended by assassination, putting power in the hands of his son Naram-Sin, a man all too like his grandpa Sargon.³⁷ A “profoundly unpopular king,” he faced a huge rebellion by people fed up with his empire.³⁸ “All the four quarters revolted against him and confronted him,” his records say.³⁹ He brags that “he filled the Euphrates River with their bodies.”⁴⁰ Thus “he was victorious in nine battles in one year, and the kings whom they raised, he captured.”⁴¹ He “expanded the empire, quashed revolts, ruled for four decades, and eventually declared himself a living god..., a god made flesh.”⁴² “They built within Agade a temple to him,”⁴³ and he began spelling his name, “Naram-Sin the Mighty,” with the symbol for godhood tacked on;⁴⁴ he encouraged people to regard his late father as divine,⁴⁵ and flatterers named themselves Rimush-Is-My-God, as they'd already been renaming themselves Sargon-Is-My-God.⁴⁶ Naram-Sin was the first king to brag what a great hunter he was.⁴⁷ What Sargon, his sons, and his grandson built, the Akkadian Empire, was the world's “first attempt to exercise political control over an extended and diversified territory,”⁴⁸ an attempt widely resented by those under it.⁴⁹

Later kings of Assyria, which the prophets call “the land of Nimrod” (Micah 5:5), were obsessed with Sargon's legacy.⁵⁰ They imagined Sargon had laid down the gauntlet for his successors: “Lo, the king who wants to equal me: where I have gone, let him also go!”⁵¹ They thus used Sargon's memory as “ideological justification of an ever-expanding empire” of their own.⁵² And Genesis answers that memory by painting its picture of Nimrod.⁵³ We read that “Cush fathered Nimrod” (Genesis 10:8), even though Nimrod's story is nowhere near the Cush in Africa; probably, this bit is pasted in with a wink because Sargon got his start in Kish.⁵⁴ “The beginning of his kingdom was Babel” – part of the kingdom of Kish, in Sargon's day⁵⁵ – “and Uruk, and Akkad,” the other cities where Sargon became king, and “all of them in the land of Shinar,” Sumer and Akkad (Genesis 10:10).⁵⁶ After rooting his kingdom there, Nimrod “went into Assyria,” the land north of Shinar, “and built Nineveh, with the broad places of the city, and Kalhu, and the spring source between Nineveh and Kalhu, which is the great city” (Genesis 10:11-12) – both those cities being in Sargon's territory and later capitals of the Assyrian Empire.⁵⁷

Genesis 10:9 pictures Nimrod as “a champion warrior,”⁵⁸ “driven by a lust for domination,”⁵⁹ so that he becomes “a deceiver, an oppressor, and a destroyer of earthborn creatures.”⁶⁰ He “dared to usurp dominion over others that were not willing to allow it,”⁶¹ for “as a hunter behaves toward beasts, which are naturally wild and free, so did he oblige mankind to be in servitude and to obey him.”⁶² His achievements were through “murder and bloodshed,” and he “used tyranny to gain for himself a sovereignty that did not belong to him.”⁶³ Thus Nimrod “acquired his kingdom through civil might and not through justice.”⁶⁴ That all sounds very like Sargon & Sons.

For Nimrod had “begun to be a powerful one on the earth” (Genesis 10:8), reminding us of the disturbing folks before the flood who, born to the sons of God and daughters of man, were “the powerful ones who were of old” (Genesis 6:4). Looking back to them, Nimrod casts himself as a giant astride the world, a great hero winning glory, something more than a mere man.⁶⁵ And just like them, Nimrod's appearance in the Bible is an omen of a coming tragedy.⁶⁶ The words and themes used to describe Nimrod tie him closely to the story of Babel,⁶⁷ which naturally has led many readers through the years to put him on scene as the ringleader of that project,⁶⁸ with both stories being about “the imperial concentration of power.”⁶⁹ He offered his people a utopia, a city safe from floods and foes; he dangled the tower's upward rise as a beacon of progress.⁷⁰ But his real aim was to ape the powerful “men of the name” before the flood by making himself a legend.⁷¹ Kings often stamped their name and claim onto the bricks of their mighty works.⁷² This tower is to be a great imperial spectacle to “demonstrate the might, authority, and greatness – in short, the 'name' – of the regime.”⁷³

As early Americans read this story, “old Nimrod collected a nation of robbers” who “swiftly advanced beyond the line of justice, while crimson carnage and pale devastation stalked behind them through the land. Slavery and despotism were the effects of conquest.”⁷⁴ With that in mind, the bricks and mortar remind us of Israelites slaving at brick-making in a foreign land (Exodus 1:13-14), and given how Sargon & Sons forced captives to slave at their building projects, we wonder whether the builders of the tower are all acting as voluntarily as it seemed last week.⁷⁵ Could they be under Nimrod's thumb, their blood, sweat, and tears demanded by the state?

Sargon's empire was “bureaucratic and centralized,” imposing uniformity where there'd been none before.⁷⁶ The Assyrians after him bragged of imposing 'one mouth' on their diverse subjects, that is, unifying many peoples under the state agenda.⁷⁷ Infamously, “for totalitarian governments, conformity is the stuff of life.”⁷⁸ Gradually, indoctrination can lead to “unquestioning allegiance” from most subjects.⁷⁹ Dissenters from Nimrod's project, those who question the state, can expect pointed questions – and pointed swords – aimed back at them.⁸⁰ And so, through his “campaign for world domination” so audacious as to catch the sight of the LORD,⁸¹ Nimrod “corrupted the condition of the human way of life by a new way of living,” the way of the kingdom of man.⁸²

The very name 'Nimrod' is Hebrew for 'We shall rebel!' – he's a rebel against the LORD God.⁸³ No wonder Pastor Joseph dubbed Nimrod “a man of blood in contempt of heaven.”⁸⁴ For the sake of his heroic ventures, he was willing to profane the world, break all norms, defy deity in order to grasp power.⁸⁵ It's unsurprising that Christians, seeking a spiritual reading of the Bible, found that Nimrod “signifies figuratively the devil himself, the head of all evils,” who “scorned to be obedient to the will of his Maker” and thus “strove to obtain the citadel of God.”⁸⁶ From Nimrod, “the spirit of domination ran through the world like a raging plague.”⁸⁷

This story might seem irrelevant – after all, Sargon came to power so long ago that, if you went back even half that far, you'd have to wait a century and a half to hear angels sing to shepherds outside Bethlehem. But some early Jewish readers imagined Nimrod got his start through democratic election,⁸⁸ and he only “little by little transformed the state of affairs into a tyranny.”⁸⁹ And now we find ourselves poised in an election season of our own, with candidates for various offices promoted by political parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Solidarity, you name it. When our nation was yet dawning, Pastor Joseph referred to our elections as the time when “we choose such as we esteem men of the greatest wisdom and probity.”⁹⁰ But Pastor Joseph also warned that, if these United States weren't careful, “proud, selfish, and wicked” people will “lust for offices for which they are utterly unfit,” and to get them, politicians would “make or propagate a thousand lies to stir up the jealousy of the people, enrage the multitude, and clear the seats of honor for themselves,” the fruit of which might lead to any number of “land-defiling crimes,” not unlike Nimrod's.⁹¹ Whether Pastor Joseph's prophecy has come to pass or not, well... you be the judge.

“Such a great tempest of a time” as ours calls for great wisdom on our part to navigate it, understanding that “the chief intention of a ruler, as of... any private person” like ourselves, “should be to please God in his [or her] works.”⁹² Thankfully, Christians in ages past thought a lot about what a good political authority should be like. For starters, ideally, “royal power must... acknowledge priestly dignity as superior,” that is, the state should give the utmost respect and support to religion, not exclude it.⁹³ The Bible tells us that “a ruler who lacks understanding is a cruel oppressor” (Proverbs 28:16), and “the ruler will not be able to understand the duties of government fully if he does not know the reason why it was instituted.”⁹⁴ As we look at the candidates for office, we can ask ourselves questions like, “Who shows the most respect for people of faith? Who seems to better understand what our government is for? Which of these people seems to have the most wisdom in life?”

Christians also observed that political rulers do well “if they prefer to govern their own base desires more than to govern any peoples.”⁹⁵ They got that from the Bible, which advises that “whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32). Nimrod might be a mighty man on earth, but his heroism falls short of turning the sword at his own inward passion and desire. Nimrod can conquer cities and countries, but greater is anybody who conquers his own spirit. Can you imagine a politician who'd rather lose an election than lose her temper, who prefers governing his heart to governing a nation? Christians have long said that, “where it is the practice to select the prince by vote,” voters should look for “calmness and equability of temperament and a sober disposition devoid of all rashness.”⁹⁶

Christians also said that any political system “should be so arranged as to remove from the king the opportunity of becoming a tyrant” like Nimrod, “and, at the same time, his power should be restricted so that he will not easily be able to fall into tyranny.”⁹⁷ As we try to navigate this tempest we're in, one question we might want to ask is, “Which of these people, if in office, would face the greatest opposition when tempted to overreach? Who will have the most eyes watching their every move, the loudest voices keeping them accountable?”

It might sound odd to American ears, but the classic Christian view is that “all the particular goods which men obtain, whether wealth or profit or health or skill or learning, are directed, as to their end, to the good of the community.”⁹⁸ And so “the further it departs from the common good, the more unjust the government will be.”⁹⁹ So good rulers won't use their position “to satisfy their personal animosities,” not to serve this or that special interest, not to cater even to the majority at the expense of the minority, nor vice versa.¹⁰⁰ A good ruler is chosen for “wisdom, a sense of justice, personal restraint, foresight, and concern for the public well-being.”¹⁰¹ In our day, this is even harder because we Americans can't even agree on what the good of a community is. A good ruler, though, is one who pursues the true common good, not a false common good such as homicide or mutilation under the guise of medical care, or racial prejudices under the guise of national solidarity.

Part of the common good includes preserving the country's unity, and “when it is removed and the community is divided against itself, social life loses its advantage and instead becomes a burden. It is to this end, therefore, that the ruler of a community ought especially to strive: to procure the unity of peace.”¹⁰² Nimrods are, paradoxically, the opposite: they “prohibit those things which create fellowship among men.”¹⁰³ America has been losing social cohesion and trust for decades, or, as one sociologist put it, “without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities,”¹⁰⁴ until, as in the late Roman empire, “all are distant in affection from each other.”¹⁰⁵ Are any candidates trying to bridge that gap in affection? Who aspires to foster fellowship? Who's a unifier?

Then, since “the good of the community should not be established for a particular length of time only,” wise men tell us that a good political leader will “ensure that successors take the place of those who are faltering,” that is, they'll make the kingdom stable over time.¹⁰⁶ Nimrod didn't do that: Sargon's sons both fell to assassins, and his era's “wave of social change” led to deep “political instability.”¹⁰⁷ Unlike the Akkadians and Assyrians, we don't have a hereditary monarchy; what we do have is a political process that, as one expert puts it, “depends on responsive representative institutions, fair elections, active civic participation, freedom of expression, and adherence to constitutional norms.”¹⁰⁸ As we try to navigate this tempest with wisdom, we ask ourselves, “Which candidate sounds best for supporting that? Will this person act to preserve our process as trustworthy, reliable, fair, and respected? Will he or she make America more politically stable for the future?”

Another threat to a community “arises from within, and consists of perversity of will” when “some people are negligent in carrying out the duties which the commonwealth requires, or even damage the peace of the community when they transgress against justice and disturb the peace of others”; hence, a good political leader will “restrain the men subject to him from iniquity by laws and commands, penalties and rewards.”¹⁰⁹ So as we navigate, we ask, “Will this person hold other officials to do what the public actually needs done? Will this person punish people who disturb others unjustly through crime?”

And then “the third obstacle to the preservation of the commonwealth comes from an external cause, as when the peace is undone by the invasion of enemies,” an issue ancient Israel often had to face (2 Kings 13:20).¹¹⁰ The responsibility of their king was to defend people from outside aggression (1 Samuel 14:47); they wanted to be able to say, “The king delivered us from the hand of our enemies” (2 Samuel 19:9). (Here, arguably, Nimrod excelled... discounting.all the times Sargon, Rimush, and Naram-Sin had to fight their own subjects!) So a good political leader, wise men said, will “furnish the community subject to him with protection against enemies.”¹¹¹ As we navigate our present tempest, we simply ask, “Will this candidate do that? Will he or she make Americans safe?”

But the reason why communities exist isn't just for safety. We were made social creatures “to live according to virtue,” and the whole point of “human association is a virtuous life.”¹¹² Nimrods notoriously aim to “prevent their subjects from becoming virtuous and increasing in nobility of spirit.”¹¹³ But a good political leader will use the powers of government to lead Americans toward being better people, toward rising above our base desires of the flesh, toward loving what's good – something we're not used to thinking of law being for, in our American way of thinking. And, of course, the best political leaders of all “make their power the servant of God's majesty, using it to spread the worship of God as much as possible.”¹¹⁴ How very unlike Nimrod that would be!

Within the bounds of encouraging people toward virtue, political leaders are called to promote prosperity. Yet early Christians mourned that, in late Rome, many citizens were “captives under an appearance of liberty.”¹¹⁵ Part of the reason was “tax collectors'... incessant and even continuous destruction,” so that the state would “extort tribute from the poor man for the taxes of the rich, and the weaker carry the load for the stronger.”¹¹⁶ On the other hand, medieval Christians worried that 'democracy' was when “the common people oppress the rich by force of numbers,” so that “the whole people will be like a single tyrant.”¹¹⁷ In the present tempest, we might ask, “Who is calling us to be our best selves as a community?  Who will lift undue burdens off the poor, without oppressing others? Who is likeliest to help our community prosper?”

Of course, certainly many candidates will claim they'll do many of these things, and more. One ancient source remarked that Nimrod's aim was to make all people “continuously dependent on his own power,” promising the state's provision against all ills.¹¹⁸ Just so, in a democracy, “the voters listen during every election year to a constant litany of promises,” few of which are anything but convenient illusions.¹¹⁹ The Bible advises us, on the other hand, to “put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3). 

Even so, what you do and I do, if anything, might still lead us to somebody who's a little bit of a Nimrod. But here's the Bible's good news. Everything Nimrod does is “in the sight of the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), always subject to God's sovereignty. The LORD, not any Nimrod, is “actually king of the world.”¹²⁰ “The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Psalm 103:19). Satan, Sargon, Caesar, President – they're all living in the shadow of the LORD's throne up above. If they have any sense, then, “the LORD is to be feared by the kings of the earth” (Psalm 76:12). Whatever happens this month, “it is [God] who gives earthly kingdoms to the godly and the ungodly alike, according to his pleasure..., and if his reasons are hidden, does that mean that they are unjust?”¹²¹ Even as God's nation was oppressed by the rulers of the earth, they whispered to every tyrant, nimrod! – 'we will rebel,' one day, when salvation comes!¹²² For one day, God would “shake the heavens and the earth and overthrow the thrones of kingdoms” (Haggai 2:21-22). And that's a “divine determination which shall not be frustrated.”¹²³

Of Sargon, it was said of old that those “who are with him are twelve,” and that as long as he had divine support, “Sargon will let his voice resound in the land.”¹²⁴ And so, in the fullness of time, the LORD stooped down into humanity, and Christ let his voice resound in the land, “proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God; and the twelve were with him” (Luke 8:1). Only his kingdom means healing and liberty for all, it means righteousness and peace and joy wild enough to shake heaven and earth (Luke 7:22; Romans 14:17). And where Sargon and his twelve chiefs approached the forest wood, where he “bowed down and readied his weapons” and “offered the pure sacrifices” to seek victory by conquest,¹²⁵ Jesus, deserted by his twelve chiefs, didn't fear to approach the wooden cross, where he bowed his head and readied not weapons of carnal warfare but a humble heart (Philippians 2:8). This True King offered a purer sacrifice than Sargon could understand, rising to present his whole life and death to God for his people, and so, this complete, Jesus “sat down at the right hand of God” (Ephesians 5:2; Hebrews 10:12-13). 

Now it's like Cotton Mather said it: “The people of God may need some shakes be given unto the world..., but such a mighty arm has our Savior. … If he do but utter his voice..., there shall everything be done that his people can wish for. A powerful Nimrod that has made nations to shake with the terror of his arms: our Lord Jesus Christ can easily shake such a one down into his grave.”¹²⁶ And one day, the shout will ring out true and clear: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever!” (Revelation 11:15). Therefore, “let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28). Amen.

Our Mountain's a Molehill

The captive monarch could hardly believe what he was seeing. He could tell for some time that Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers were on the verge of being home, but young Jehoiachin, the surrendered king of Judah, could behold it now, and his mom and wives and friends could see it too, judging from their gasps. He'd been seeing glittering blue in the heart of the blue sky, but now that the tall city walls were in sight, spanning the mighty river, the mountain looming in its midst was all the more visible – a broad pyramid of seven great stages, a tower looming over everything. Jehoiachin's jaw gaped; not a sight in all Jerusalem prepared him for this... this... which could've buried the temple of the LORD beneath itself.¹ Next to him, a soldier wiped a homecoming tear from his eye. “Etemenanki,” he murmered. Jehoiachin didn't know the word. But he did recall an old, old story...

“And it came to pass, in their journeyings in the east” – these people whose wanderings hasn't let them develop a clear identity beyond a mysterious 'them,' wandering southeast hundreds of miles from the mountains of Ararat, hunting for somewhere to call home² – “and they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there” (Genesis 11:2). Shinar's the region we'd today call southern Iraq, essentially the land otherwise known as ancient Sumer,³ although 'Shinar' was a late westerner's word for the plain, not a native one.⁴ Thousands and thousands of years ago, this fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris River in the east and the Euphrates River in the west “became a magnet for migrants” from all over, able to support many lifestyles with its bounty.⁵

In Genesis, though, this story is set in a time when “all the earth had one lip and the same words” (Genesis 11:1) – not only is communication easy, but the people gathered there “share a common understanding of the world.”⁶ A prospect arises, in this “society built on confidence and trust,”⁷ of “unanimously accomplishing one single purpose,” of getting everybody on the same page for one big idea.⁸ And so “they said, a man to a companion, 'Come!'” (Genesis 11:3). “Each man thus roused his neighbor,” acting as an evangelist for this big idea, busying himself in grassroots community organizing.⁹ This is, in modern terms, practically “participatory democracy.”¹⁰ And it's a landslide, issuing in a “generally agreed-upon plan of action.”¹¹

Here's the plan: “Come, let us brick bricks” (Genesis 11:3). They took clay-rich river mud and, from March to October, spent their free time mixing it with sand and hay, kneading it with water into a thick mixture, shaping it into rectangles, and leaving it to dry beneath the warm sun for a day or two in the dry air.¹² They'd later come up with the myth that the world's first brick came from the hands of a wise god who'd nipped off a hunk of clay and grown a forest of reeds just so he could make that brick.¹³ We've found sun-dried mud bricks archaeologists say are over nine thousand years old, but almost seven thousand years ago, someone realized you could make a better, stronger brick by baking it in an oven.¹⁴ That's what they do here in Genesis: “Let us brick bricks and burn them to a burning” (Genesis 11:3), making them “stable, strong, and meant to endure for ages.”¹⁵

“To them,” the people who settled in Shinar, “the brick was for stone, and bitumen was for them as mortar” (Genesis 11:3). To Israelite eyes, accustomed to natural stone and mortar, brick and bitumen “were poor substitutes,” a hint that we should read on critically.¹⁶ But the combination of kiln-fired bricks and bitumen as construction staples in that part of the world goes back before 3000 BC, to “the beginning of urbanization.”¹⁷ It stimulates their imagination to new heights, and so “they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city'” (Genesis 11:4). The people of Sumer were exceptional pioneers at building cities.¹⁸ It's “a technical fruit of the human orientation toward social existence,” a “collective effort” that “magnifies the power of the human will.”¹⁹ In the story, the builders pitch this city as if “the fulfillment of a recurrent human dream, a dream of humankind united, living together in peace and freedom, no longer at the mercy of an inhospitable or hostile nature.”²⁰ Of course, a city, however consensus-based, will birth “technologies of control” leading to a “stratified society.”²¹

And this isn't just any generic city. Only at the end of the story does the writer let slip its name: Babel – which we know more familiarly by the Greek spelling, 'Babylon' (Genesis 11:9), on the east bank of the Euphrates River. Early Babylon, whenever it was first founded, was actually a rather unimportant podunk town, largely unnoticed by its neighbors.²² Over time, though, it slowly grew into a metropolis of “astonishing palaces, mighty temples, imposing gates..., and grand ceremonial boulevards..., the embodiment of divine and secular power.”²³ And there was, in Babylon, a temple dedicated to the city's patron god, Marduk. This central temple was called “Esagila, the exalted sanctuary,”²⁴ and in Sumerian, 'Esagila' means “House with Top Raised High.”²⁵

Which reminds us of what else they said: “Let us build a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). Even though the Bible uses just the generic Hebrew word for 'tower,' every major city in this part of the world had one special building that towered over the rest. They called it a ziggurat, from a root word meaning 'to be built up high,' and just about everybody now recognizes that the tower in this verse is meant to be a Babylonian ziggurat.²⁶ Developed from the high platforms that earlier Sumerian settlements perched their temples on, a ziggurat was “the most visible part of the Mesopotamian temple complex.”²⁷ A ziggurat was a tower of stages, wide to narrow, built of a large core pyramid of sun-dried mud bricks, covered by a mantel of baked bricks. Generally on one side, there'd be three huge ramp staircases, one coming from straight ahead and the other two running up the front of the ziggurat to meet it.²⁸ At the top was a small shrine, the ziggurat's 'head,' built of glazed brick and surrounded by groves of greenery.²⁹ Those who built a ziggurat really did say they “raised as high as heaven the head of the ziggurat,”³⁰ so that “its top was high and reached the heavens.”³¹

The ziggurat in Babylon had a name, Etemenanki, which is Sumerian for “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”³² Built in a courtyard on the west side of Babylon's Processional Way, we know Etemenanki was 300 feet wide by 300 feet long and, if we believe the Babylonians, about 300 feet high.³³ That's their great tower whose top reaches the heavens: almost a third the height of the Eiffel Tower. No wonder later Jewish imagination made it nearly 700 feet high,³⁴ or even over eight thousand feet high.³⁵ But even on the lowest estimates, Etemenanki would've taken over ten million bricks to build.³⁶ In the time when Jehoiachin saw it, Nebuchadnezzar's dad said he'd repaired it using “mud bricks without number” and “baked bricks like countless drops of rain,” cementing them together with a flood of “refined and crude bitumen.”³⁷ Nebuchadnezzar then continued the work “using bitumen and baked brick,” and at the top, he said, he “resplendently built a holy shrine, a well-adorned bedroom, using baked bricks colored with shining blue glaze.”³⁸

A ziggurat, to the Babylonians, “represented a mountain peak close to heaven and had roots like a tree reaching down to the underworld.”³⁹ These artificial buildings were meant to bind together what was above and what was below, linking all the realms of the world. So a ziggurat was “the obvious channel of communication between the celestial and terrestrial spheres,”⁴⁰ essentially a human “hotline to heaven.”⁴¹ A ziggurat was “built in honor of the divinity that resides at the summit,” since the shrine at the top “served as the residential quarters for the god” between heaven and temple.⁴² Effectively, the ziggurat was one huge stairway for a god to walk down, descending from heaven above to the earth below to be with us.⁴³ And so, by mentioning a ziggurat, Genesis implies “the first biblical mention of polytheism,” the pagan portrait of many gods made in our image.⁴⁴

It's not for nothing that the earliest Sumerian way of writing the word 'god' was a little star, because these many gods were held to manifest their judgments through heavenly portents people could observe and interpret.⁴⁵ The peoples of Mesopotamia were famously obsessed with astrology as far back as records go, and it's often thought that ziggurats, which we now know were built to align with the heavenly bodies, hosted special rituals and also made a convenient place for priests to gather their data.⁴⁶ If so, then on the tower, “the priests, watchfully yet apprehensively, conducted measurements of the heavenly motions, on the basis of which they sought knowledge useful for the life of the city,” using “celestial divination as a source for effective policy creation” in Babylon.⁴⁷

That's what the builders have in mind when they call to “build ourselves a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). But the Babylonians had a different story about where their city and its tower came from. In the beginning, they said, the gods were at war with a monster-goddess named Tiamat, a losing battle until a strapping young god named Marduk stepped up to bat for them. Marduk carved up Tiamat's corpse to make the world, and as the crowning achievement, Marduk declared he intended to make himself a home in this world: “I will name it Babylon, Houses of the Great Gods!”⁴⁸ Out of gratitude, the other gods say they want to build his shrine of rest, and he happily accepts their generous offer: “Build Babylon, the task you have sought; let bricks for it be molded, and raise the shrine!”⁴⁹ The gods spend a whole year just making all the bricks, and then, “when the second year arrived, they raised the top of the Esagil..., they built the soaring ziggurat... and established homes for Anu, Enlil, Ea, and him. In splendor he sat down before them.”⁵⁰ Marduk welcomes the gods at last to a fancy feast, declaring, “This is Babylon, your place of residence; sing merrily here, sit down amid its joyfulness!”⁵¹ So, to sum up, the Babylonians said theirs was a city built by gods and for gods, shortly after the world was made – “Babylon, called into being by the heavens.”⁵² These same gods had built the tower of Babel, the “soaring ziggurat,” whose shrine welcomed the gods of highest heaven.

That was the mainstream story, but other Babylonians had an even more radical one: “All the lands were sea,” and then “Babylon was made, Esagil was created,” and only then, after Babylon and its temple, did the original god make the other gods, who gratefully “gave an exalted name to the pure city,” Babylon, “in which they were pleased to dwell.”⁵³ In that version, Babylon and its temple actually predated the gods worshipped in it; they were born there, which is why some called “Babylon the place of the creation of the great gods,”⁵⁴ and “Esagil: house which creates all the gods.”⁵⁵ For some Babylonians, their city was even more divine than the gods!

They called it “Babylon, the city whose brickwork is ancient,”⁵⁶ but Genesis shoots back that there was no Babel in the beginning; Babylon appears only chapters and chapters into the world's story.⁵⁷ They even called it “Babylon, the creator of god and man,”⁵⁸ but Genesis answers that it's just a city and tower “which the sons of humanity built” (Genesis 11:5). The builders of Babel may be taken by the later residents for gods, but Genesis has their number: they're the children of Adam, wayward flesh and blood. Babylon is seriously demoted.

And Babylon, Genesis says, shouldn't have gotten started. The order of events so far has been mimicking the kinds of building stories Babylonians told. First they'd start with the circumstances that led to the decision to build something, then they'd discuss the preparations that were made, and only then would they go on to narrate the construction. But in Babylonian stories, the decision to build something never went ahead without stating that the gods signed off on the project; in fact, Babylonians would tell you that any time people tried to build a new city without divine approval, it was an open invitation to disaster. Well, guess what gets pointedly skipped over in Genesis? The part where the builders of Babel get permission. It's “a major violation of divine/human protocol.”⁵⁹ The sad truth is that “they took counsel with their own judgment, not with God, to build a city.”⁶⁰

What makes it worse is why they're doing it. “Let us build to ourselves a city and a tower” (Genesis 11:4). The Babylonians may claim all this work is a tribute to the gods, may aim to pass it all off as hospitality toward heaven, but Genesis exposes their piety as a pretense for pride: “Their motivation for constructing sacred space was to bring benefits to themselves.”⁶¹ So it's really all about them, “co-opting religion in the service of self-worship.”⁶² Pagans of this character can't even help but take the names of their own false gods in vain!

A ziggurat would've been visible from many miles away, “from practically every point of the urban hinterland,” and that visibility would define a sense of territory and community.⁶³ Babylonians thought of Babylon as the center of the world, and their gods claimed it as a “place of repose for all time,” never to find a closed door or a missing welcome mat there.⁶⁴ Just like that, the builders in Genesis aim to avoid being “scattered on the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4), losing the protection and stability of this home they're building, forfeiting what they feel they've gained.⁶⁵ As if they're the gods of Babylon, they want it as their place of repose forever, there to maintain strength and safety and security through their dense crowd and thick city walls.⁶⁶ And once people accept the city and take rest in it, they'll be stamped by it, Babelites forever.⁶⁷

The builders also declare, “Let us make for ourselves a name” (Genesis 11:4). They want “to be remembered in perpetuity,” to achieve something so remarkable that it “will never pass into oblivion.”⁶⁸ They aim to be “the agents of their own eminence.”⁶⁹ That was part of the reason for a ziggurat, whose landscape-dominating power on the plain would easily “generate a sense of civic pride” within.⁷⁰ The Babylonians really did want their city, Babylon, to “be exalted throughout the inhabited world,” to have fame and influence everywhere.⁷¹ And if it were, then the whole world might forever have ziggurat minds and ziggurat hearts.

It's not for nothing that they describe a tower “with its head in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). While Babylonians think their ziggurats bind heaven and earth together, from the Bible's point of view they “transgress the boundaries of heaven and earth.”⁷² Nebuchadnezzar himself described his work on the tower as “raising the superstructure of Etemenanki to have its summit rival the heavens.”⁷³ From the Bible's point of view, that boast to 'rival the heavens' is “offensive and blasphemous.”⁷⁴ Though Babylonians never thought to use a ziggurat to storm heaven, their latent dream was “to ascend to heaven” (Isaiah 14:13), as if their burnt bricks were squared seraphim ferrying them aloft, that mortared mud and clay men might touch heaven with their earthiness,⁷⁵ and so maybe “to become like gods themselves.”⁷⁶ No wonder later Jews spoke of “the tower of war against God.”⁷⁷

The builders of Babel made a monument, “the massive structure of a building of fantastic proportions,” as the heart of an even vaster and growing city.⁷⁸ It's a perennial truth that “the human race... always longs for more and reaches out for greater things..., always lusting after more.”⁷⁹ We have “a boundless capacity to dream up grand projects,”⁸⁰ and Babel rises from the page as “the place where every human achievement was possible.”⁸¹ “This they have begun to do; and now all that they imagine to do will not be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6). “Whatever human minds conceive, they can achieve.”⁸² That's what Babel is all about.

If humanity enjoys unmitigated success here and now, “nothing will succeed in checking their impulse” – they'll run roughshod over every boundary.⁸³ We'll never believe that any no is serious, that any line should be drawn, any limit respected. And in our day especially, “the project of Babel has been making a comeback,” yielding “everywhere evidence of a revived Babylonian vision.”⁸⁴ We cleave the atoms of the universe in twain, we ape life and monkey around in genetic codes, we design artificial intelligence to slave for us and stave off a cosmic loneliness, we dream of setting foot on Mars, then colonizing heaven and her stars – but would we build anything there but a Babel above?⁸⁵ There's a frightfulness of human reach without restraint, power and genius naked of wisdom and love.

So it is in our lives. What are we prepared to build in life to avoid the things we fear? What do we do, to dreams do we chase, in our endless quests to make ourselves a name that lasts, to build a legacy that can be looked at? To what lengths will we go to advance our vision for how the world should be shaped, how life should be lived? Even the nobler ziggurats we profess to build to God are often brick-by-brick paeans to ourselves and our agendas. Unmoored, that way always “ends with us rallying all the forces at our disposal to serve whatever god of worldly flourishing we have made for ourselves.”⁸⁶

But still its builders persist. They raise their tower, “intended to pave the way for a divine entrance to the city.”⁸⁷ At this point in a building story, we expect a festival to celebrate the finished tower, where the building will be dedicated and the god is invited to come down on it.⁸⁸ No doubt they expect “the lord of Babylon, Marduk the exalted,”⁸⁹ to show up, of whom they believe that “no god can alter the utterance of his mouth,” and “when his anger is ablaze, no god can face him.”⁹⁰ But instead we read that Yahweh, “the LORD, came down” (Genesis 11:5). And Babel will find him to be a very big surprise indeed.

What they have built – and what we build – may be “so gigantic from a human perspective” that it appears in their eyes as a literal skyscraper; but God does not see as we see.⁹¹ “The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of humanity had built” (Genesis 11:5). Their lofty, impressive, fabulous tower, and their vast, lively, mighty city, which they expect to present loud and large before his face, is in his eyes “so puny,” “so insignificant,” that they aren't even visible from his heaven.⁹² They're “so far from the heavens that God must come down to see it,”⁹³ that he has to “go down in order to scrutinize the scene.”⁹⁴ It's actually an extremely funny satire, as if they present before heaven their monumental city and tower, and the Lord makes a show of grabbing his microscope and stooping to squint at their miniscule grandeur.⁹⁵

But “what could empty human presumption have achieved... even if it outstripped the whole region of the cloudy air?”⁹⁶ Every ziggurat was highly “prone to collapse” and needed constant maintenance, due to subsidence in the ground and its unstable core – and that went double for Etemenanki.⁹⁷ You can visit the site today, but you won't even have to lift your eyes; it's a little dirt hill inside a sunken square moat, hardly worth writing home about. Babylon, as an icon of human achievement, was as unstable as a house built foolishly on shifting sands (Matthew 7:26). So are the little Babels we can't seem to stop ourselves from building whenever people “follow the feelings and desires of their own heart in doing or saying whatever they please.”⁹⁸ Like the pitiful ruins in Iraq today, our labors for self are “impermanent and futile,” hardly rising before the Lord.⁹⁹

Babel was a template, and the Bible's last dizzying visions zoom out on human history and behold there one vast culture, Babylon the Great, which through the ages allures and intoxicates the world's peoples, plying them with prosperity and pride (Revelation 14:8). “She glorified herself and lived in luxury” (Revelation 18:7). This is “the great city that has dominion” within world culture even today (Revelation 17:18), for “in the spiritual sense, Babylon is the devil's city.”¹⁰⁰ And to all, she offers a drink from her “golden cup full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4). It's a nauseating picture, a genuine grotesque.

But the city that boasts it births its gods will mourn their deaths from her own deathbed. “Her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (Revelation 18:5), so “her judgment has reached up to heaven and has been lifted up even to the clouds,” higher than Etemenanki's peak (Jeremiah 51:9). “Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height,” even if Babylon achieves every dream she can muster, “yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 51:53). As for the Babylon of history, so for Babylon the Great. On that day “the great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell” (Revelation 16:19), “for here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14). “Thus shall Babylon sink, to rise no more” (Jeremiah 51:64).

But as the Lord once came down and shall come down again to see that tower and its city, so in between did the same Lord God come down, in our flesh and in our blood, to survey our sin and the monuments of our pitiful pride. He came to call us in mercy to tear them all down and to cease our construction, that we might instead move to a better “city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14), “the city that has foundations” of grace amazing, the city “whose designer and builder is God” and not the sons of men (Hebrews 11:10), “the holy city... coming down out of heaven from God,” and not trying to rise up to heaven from earth (Revelation 21:2).

St. Augustine offered these shocking words of wonder, that “all the wicked belong to Babylon, as all the saints to Jerusalem. But Babylon gradually changes into Jerusalem; and how could it do that, unless through him who justifies the godless?” The gateway to this new city is the cross by which the Lord justifies even the ungodliest Babel-builder who will only hand his brick-basket over to the thorn-crowned God who stooped to serve. Zion is Babel's only hope. So now “walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers..., that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever” (Psalm 48:12-14). It has towers – its tower is the church, raised not by human hands¹⁰¹ – but it needs no ziggurat standing tall, “for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb,” and “the glory of God gives it light” (Revelation 21:22-23).

Two cities there are, then: Babylon, grand and luxurious, and Zion, a city under Babel's thumb until her years are done. And two perspectives there are: the sight of man, in which our towers rise high and nigh unto the sky, and the sight of the LORD, in which love looms larger and mercy alone is monumental. Of such things, Babylon has not known. Which city stands at the heart of the world? Which is the center of your world? Is it the city of man, or is it the city of God? Is it the city of today and tomorrow, or the city of eternity? And whose sight do you trust? For in what you see as mountains and what you see as molehills, therein lies the vision that will guide your life. May you see and walk by the glory of God. May you climb no tower but the cross, on whom the One in whom heaven and earth are bound as one died for you, that a better city might rise again. Amen.