I am beginning a preaching series on stories in the Old Testament that will last until Lent. We will read some of the great stories of the OT. This week, we read the story of the Tower of Babel. I have paired it with the Acts story of the early church debating how to reach out to different groups.
As I always do when I preach on a text from Genesis, I have consulted Walter Brueggemann's commentary on Genesis (Genesis, from the Interpretation commentary series, pp. 97-104). This is the best work on Genesis that I have found.
The story of the Tower of Babel often gets told as the story of humans trying to reach to the heavens and God punishing them by giving them all different languages so that they cannot work together and finish the building. Upon closer examination of the text, however, we discover something else is going on in the story. The real issue is the Israelites desire to stay in place marked by the building of this great tower that is the crowning achievement of their community. This is a problem because God has previously decreed that the Israelites should "scatter" to all the world. It perhaps grows out of God's decree that the covenant made after the flood is with "all flesh" (Genesis 9:8-11).
Of course, if you look at the biblical stories of the OT as stories told by God's people to explain the world around them, the Tower of Babel story reads as one told to explain why there are so many diverse languages in the world. If everything that plays out is part of God's plan, then there has to be an explanation related to God's plan to account for all the different languages.
We might also note that in some places (Ezekiel 11, for instance) the idea of "scatter" has a negative connotation of being sent into exile.
If we go with the idea that God's desire is to scatter to the world, then the Babel story connects with the Pentecost story in a powerful way. The Pentecost story would be the second example of God providing language to carry the gospel to all the world. Often the Babel story is told as the anti-Pentecost story because God uses language to thwart humans in the Babel story.
what are your thought about the Tower of Babel?
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