All-In [29860]

TigerPulse: 100%

Posts: 8837

Joined: 10/31/10

Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

May 10, 2022, 9:01 PM

…..
The Burj Kalifa (no relation to Mia), or “Tower of the Ruler.” The modern embodiment of the Tower of Babel. Not a tower to a god, but a tower to commerce and wealth.

…..

…..
Frank Lloyd Wright designed a hypothetical mile-high tower called “The Illinois” in 1957. No word if there was a mile-high club on top.

…..

…..
Close-up of the Burj Kalifa. In 2022 we’re already half way to Wright’s hypothetical. The Burj Kalifa tops out at 2717 feet high, more than half a mile high.

…..

…..
And we’re working fast on making that one-mile benchmark. This is the Jeddah Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, under construction. It will be 3281 feet high, the first 1 kilometer (or a “click” for Nam Vets) building ever constructed. The contractor is the BinLaden Group.

…..

…..
Jeddah Tower when completed

x

…..

…..
And others want in on the race…

…..

…..
This was the World Height Champion for 4,000 years

…..

…..
Until it was surpassed by this monstrosity. The Eiffel was so unpopular when it was built that one critic ate lunch there every day. When asked why he ate at a building he hated, he said “Because it’s the only place in Paris I can be without seeing it on the skyline.”

…..

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We had some more great discussion after last week’s post. It was so good that I decided to take another slight detour and take a look at one of the things that came up, the famous Tower of Babel.

…..
Will the real Tower of Babel please stand up? Do your plans show this thing as being square?

…..

….
Or round? No matter. Either way we’re certain they used arches on it.

…..

Almost everyone has heard of the story. It’s quite vivid and and it’s very short, so we can really get into the weeds on it and take a close look at what this little gem is all about.

…..

…..

Now, when I was just a little tyke giving my Sunday School teacher headaches, she explained to me it was a story about a group of people who thought too much of themselves and had to be reminded they should be humble. And that’s certainly one reading of the story.

…..
Sometimes, the church athletic group would even let us bring our pets.

…..

…..
I even won a donkey once at a church raffle but mom made me trade it for a plastic fire truck. I was cool with that.

…..

Like all good stories there’s much more to the Tower of Babel than you might see at first glance. Sort of like good cartoon movies that are fun for both the kids and their adult parents. Different messages for different viewers.

…..
x

…..

The Tower of Babel story is only 9 lines long, easy enough for even a child to read, and so easy enough to break it down line-by line in a couple of posts for a microscopic look.

As with all things context is also important, and so I’ll also take a look at the story in the context of the both the Bible and in history, and it’s at the intersection of the two where it really sings. So, a deep, detailed look.

…..

…..

In some ways the story of the Tower of Babel a bit of a mini-mystery novel, and so the basic questions of both private eyes and journalists all apply here...the Who, What, When, Where, and most importantly, Why and How was it written? Perhaps there is something more we can uncover in this seemingly simply story.

…..

…..

The first thing you’ll notice is that the story of the Tower of Babel gets a front row seat in the Bible, in Genesis chapter 11, right after the Creation story, the Garden of Eden, and the Flood. In fact, it’s actually IN the Table of Nations, which describes how the world was divvied up and settled by the flood survivors and their offspring.

…..
The Table of Nations

x

…..

That puts it right before the Call of Abram and his trip to Egypt, and so on. So it’s pretty prime territory as far as laying out a narrative goes. But the Bible is not always chronologically consistent with the stories it tells.

…..
Abram’s Journey. Lots of great towns along the way, and lots of great archaeological finds in them, too.

…..

The entire Book of Genesis is one continuous, 50 chapter story starting with the creation of the universe, through the establishment of covenants with Noah and Abram, down through the death of Joseph and the promise of a Promised Land for the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. But even though the story is continuous, that doesn’t mean that all the parts of that story were written at the same time.

Sometimes, the stories in the Bible are repeats, told from different perspectives and with different agendas. Take Kings and Chronicles for instance. Kings is primarily interested in both Israel and Judah, and Chronicles primarily only with Judah. But they share a lot of the same stories. And, Chronicles presents the kings in a much nicer light – a clear difference in the writers’ political agendas.

So not only is it best to think of the whole Bible as a library as opposed to a book, it’s helpful to think of even the individual books as mini-libraries themselves. It can be a task to sort it all out. We’ll get a lot more into that down the line.

…..

…..

With that we’ll take a look at another thing about the Tower of Babel story that jumps out pretty quickly besides its prominent placement. And that is that it’s really not necessary to that 50 chapter chronology at all. The story works perfectly fine without it.

Now, a 9-verse morality tale is a very nice addition to that overarching chronology, but it’s not essential to the story. In fact, it sort of feels a little tucked in.

Nothing at all like this…

…..

…..

It’s almost like it was slipped into the story an afterthought, or in a later edit. And, if you look at it really closely, there’s literary evidence that it might have been.

The very first line is a clue. I’ll use the NIV translation here because it’s an easy ready, but the meaning is the same in the KJV and other Bible translations. That’s not always true with every version of the Bible, though, and I’ll point out cases where they differ. Differing translations makes interpreting text even harder.

So, here we go:

Genesis11:1 “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.”

Simple enough, apparently. But hold on. Let’s back up just 2 verses, to Genesis 10:31-

“These are the sons of Shem by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.”

…clans and languages? Whoa. So is it one language or many languages?

…..

…..

And if you back up further, you get

Genesis 11:20 “These are the sons of Ham by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.”

And Genesis 10:5 “From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.”

…..

…..

On the surface, that’s about as glaring of a contradiction as you can get. The world can’t be speaking in one language if the clans all split off into their own languages. How could it be both?

Now, one could do all types of gyrations to try and explain away such apparent contradictions in the text. You could quibble over what the word “language” means and how the definition in one case is not the same as the other case.

Or, you could say “Well, the world spoke one language when Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel walked the earth (unless they were bilingual). And over time multiple languages developed, and in the time interval between Genesis 10:32 and Genesis 11:1 all those languages vanished and collapsed back to one.

….

….

But I don’t think any of that matters, really, and I don’t think it did to the people who wrote and composed the Bible either. Because to me the “reason for multiple languages” piece of the story is the most insignificant part of it. Whether people spoke one language or many doesn’t really affect what I think at all, from the possible existence of God to whether a ham sandwich tastes better than a chicken sandwich.

It’s just the simplest level of that multi-leveled cartoon I spoke of earlier.

…..
x

…..

The simplest answer is that the Tower story is similar the pair of creation stories and the dozens more “doublet” examples in the Bible. Simply put, multiple people, or groups of people, were telling a similar story in the way they each saw it. So, to one regional writer, everyone in his “world” did speak in one language. And another, more wordly writer, had been exposed to multiple languages. It still doesn’t really matter, but the two-author possibility opens up another explanation.

What makes this example so jarring though is that instead of presenting two viewpoints separately and apart from each other, in this case one story is literally wedged right into the middle of the other.

So to me, the 9-line Tower story was simply edited right into the longer Table of Nations narrative. Shift Copy-Insert-Shift Paste.

…..

…..

Now, you can bet the apparent contradictions are not a mistake. They’re too obvious to miss, especially for trained scribes or seasoned theological scholars, across who knows how many translations through the centuries.

Someone wanted that morality story told, and they wanted it told right where it’s at, and they wanted it told exactly they way it is. Apparent contradictions and all. But who, and why?

…..

…..

Another clue is that it’s inserted right AFTER the genealogy of the Semites and right BEFORE the Shem family line, specifically. It could have been placed anywhere. So why there? Now it’s really getting fun. We’ve got ourselves an ancient mystery going on.

Once you begin to realize how the Bible was really assembled, you begin find examples like this all over the place. The Four Gospels are another an obvious case of the same story being told multiple times with slight differences.

I mean, was Peter going to tell Paul what he experienced, how he experienced it, and how to write about it? Or vice versa? I doubt it. So, we get both stories. Inconsistencies and all.

Clearly, in those cases, some of the specific details just didn’t matter either. Each writer(s) wanted his story told EXACTLY as he experienced it, and he didn’t really care how anyone else experienced it. You tell your story, I’ll tell mine, and we’ll just include them both (or all 4) all together in the final product.

…..

…..

And this is kinda important. Because despite the fact that “language” was important enough to mention in BOTH of the stories we are looking at independently, it wasn’t important enough to reconcile the difference when the two stories were merged.

One author (Genesis 10 and the second half of Gen 11) is interested in telling a genealogy tale, and the other author (the first part of Genesis 11) is interested in telling a morality tale. The question of where multiple languages came from is seemingly secondary to both authors’ primary purpose in telling their stories. So what is really going on here?

And so the plot thickens. And that’s where we’ll pick up with line two, next time.

Genesis 11:2 “As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

…..
Shinar was the ancient term for southern Mesopotamia, specifically the area between Babylon and Ur. And if you were a sheep herder used to seeing nothing taller than a blade of grass, a ziggurat would have been an impressive tower, indeed.

…..

…..
The plains of Shinar. Flat as a fritter now, and then. But the Mesopotamians could build low, as well as high. This is the site of the oldest known bridge in the world. It was built about 3000 BCE outside the town of Girsu, Iraq.

…..

…..
The area around Girsu. Home of brick bridges and brick ziggurats. The light blue lines are canals. Useful for irrigating crops, and getting away from the violent river’s edge.

…..

…..
This satellite shot shows the Mesopotamian basin beautifully. Look at the drop off right about where Baghdad is. If you lived south of that point, it was like you were living in a bathtub, with a faucet above you ready to fill it up at any time.

…..

…..
A close-up of the Girsu bridge. It looks like it was intended to channel water right-left in this aerial, and bridge the swale north-south

…..

…..
You can find the same thing all over the American West if you get a chance to roam around some. Dry bridges just waiting for the flash flood to come. Because when it does, you ain’t gonna have time to build a bridge then.

…..

…..
With brickwork that would have impressed even the Romans.

x

…..

…..
How many bricks did the Mesopotamians use? Mountains worth.

…..

…..
But they also made fine art. A gold, carnelian (red), and lapis lazuli (blue) ring also found at Girsu. 3000 BCE. Exquisite beauty.

…..

…..
More exquisite beauty. Mia Khalifa (no relation to Burj)

…..

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

I almost commented that every person of wealth had a scribe. It think Adam was capable of reading, writing, math and science beyond what man view as knowledge was something man discovered on his own.

God had promised not to use water to destroy mankind again so confusing man's tongue was a good preventive measure. It could be reasonable to think God disrupted their efforts as a good father would take a BB gun from a child who participated in a war with the neighborhood kids.

I know at least two reasons God forbids sin. It is contrary to His will and angers Him; that is the definition of sin. It is harmful to the sinner which hurts God's loving heart. That's the hard part for one who is redeemed. Though God cast His judgement upon Himself while He was in the body of our Christ and no longer is angry with us, He continues to be hurt by watching us suffer in the aftermath of sin.

"Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption...' Eph chpt 5. I got a fair warning from that verse but I sowed for many years. I behaved as if the rain would not fall but it fell. I behaved as if the Sun would not shine and warm the soil then nurture the crop but it continued and the crop matured. I have hoped and prayed that the harvest would soon be over and that time gets nearer every day.

"“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Romans chpt 8.

God does not punish during this the dispensation of Grace. Yet even when our sin punishes us God makes it work to our benefit. The concept of reaping what you (plural) sow and God being able to make it benefit you (also plural) are as immutable as the laws of thermodynamics.

"Today's word is 'TANGENT,' boys and girls. Can you say 'TANGENT?'"

Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Interesting that you'd bring up the written language.

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

Re: Religious Pron - The Tower of Babel 1

TigerBoard POTD