The concept of the Tower of Babel still makes no sense to me to this day. The story is very clear and easy to understand, but the actual concept is something that I still struggle with. To recap the story in about three sentences:
The people of Babylon built the tower so they could get to heaven.
During this time everyone on earth spoke the same language.
God destroyed the tower due to the peoples pride and caused all the people to speak different languages, thus explaining where all the languages of the world came from.
Yep, three sentences. Very simple, direct, and to the point story, don’t you think?
The problem with the Tower of Babel is that it’s all rubbish. I will state for the record that yes, there was a Tower of Babel. But the biblical rendition of this tower and the events surrounding it, including the explanation of where all the languages came from, began back in the early 10th century by a monk named of Rex.
As Rex was scribing the book of Geneses he came across a few short verses about the Tower of Babel and how it was the pride of the people that lead to their destruction. This was one concept that Rex had scribed many times before and was very use too. Hell, anyone that has ever read the holy bible knows that the second a group of earthlings begin getting as proud as my old man He wipes them out faster than a lion could eat a goldfish. In my personal opinion, I think God hates the idea of people thinking they are as important as He thinks He is.
The existing bible story of the Tower of Babel started with Rex’s new neighbors. Like any good Christian at the time, he went over to give his new neighbors a loaf of bread. The main reason this was the Christian thing to do was it gave Christians the opportunity to make sure their neighbors were Christian. See if you were a professed Christian is was a simple life at that point where you lived in fear and spied on everyone waiting for the opportunity to witness an evil doing so you could sentence your neighbor to death by reporting to the church what you saw, and thus getting blessed in the process. And if it was discovered that you weren’t a Christian, then you had the fortunate pleasure of agreeing to become a Christian or accidentally getting murdered by “natural causes” in the near future.
In speaking with the new neighbors, Rex became a little curious and afraid as to why he couldn’t understand anything they were saying. He did note that they smiled a lot and appreciated the bread, but after he left the flat, Rex followed his first impulse and visited the head monk Sigmund requesting that he to perform an exorcizism on these new neighbors or give Rex the “Kill the new people to protect the Christians” ok. Sigmund explained that they were new converts from some southern desert land and were there on an exchange program to learn “Gods chosen language” so they could return to their home land to teach and convert their fellow countrymen. It was from this little sit down with Sigmund that Rex learned the world was full of people speaking different languages.
With this new information about the world, Rex wanted to know why, if God was the creator of all things, why there where so many different languages? Well, naturally the simplest explanation to these types of questions is that it’s a result of the people of the earth sinning. But what sin was responsible for such a worldwide flux in language? That’s right the tower of Babel.
Rex came to the conclusion that in order for a building of such magnitude to be built, outside contractors would need to be brought in to help complete the project. The key problem with contractors in those days is that they were strong supporters of slave labor. No literally, they invested in slaves to do the work. So with this mass collection of different people, building this tower set up the perfect situation where all these different languages could be created in one destructive afternoon, and that’s the angle Rex went with.
The following Thursday around 1:15 p.m., Rex added a few tangents of explanation where, during the building of the Tower of Babel, the Lord appeared, made everyone speak different languages, and during this process, destroyed the Tower and killed all the contractors. This way the newly freed slaves still had the weekend to get home and teach everyone of their racial nationality the new language that God had taught them during in the split second it took to destroy the tower. Thus the mixing of the tongues was designed to keep the earthlings humble and keep them from creating a worldwide support group where everyone could communicate freely and as a result become so proud that God would have to kill them again.
Through multiple editing processes, Rex ended with what is now the story of the Tower of Babel, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. I was in Babel at the time the tower was being constructed and I can tell you exactly what happened, and no the tower was not my idea, well not entirely. Ok here’s what happened.
