Genesis 11.1-9, the story of the Tower of Babel. A story of pride and punishment. A story of a people who wanted to be like God, and so built a huge tower, reaching high into the heavens, trying to bridge the gap between Heaven and earth. A people whose natures were so tainted from the original sin of Adam & Eve in the garden that they thought they too could attempt to become like God. And so they built the tower…a simple and evident symbol of their pride. And God comes to earth, and punishes them by creating different languages and scattering them all over the earth. This is their punishment…
…or was it?
For my Sin & Salvation course, we read an article by Ted Hiebert entitled Cultural Diversity: Punishment or Plan? (you can read the .pdf here). Hiebert writes:
"According to this alternative approach, the story is not about pride and punishment at all. Rather, it is about one culture and many cultures. It describes the human inclination to create a single culture with a single language in a single place coming into conflict with God’s plan to create a world of many cultures with many languages in many places. The cultural diversity with which the story ends, and which the story was in fact told to explain, is thus presented not as a punishment on the human race for their sin or pride, but as the way God intended the world to look in the age following the great flood, the age in which the story teller, the Yahwist, and we, his most recent audience, both live."
It was interesting to take a look at specific verses in Gen 11 and see whether it was clear that they promoted the more traditional understanding of the text, or this new alternative reading. I think both have fairly good support from Scripture, but I am leaning toward this newer interpretation. In the alternative reading, the sin of the LORD’s people is homogeny – the attempt to stay together, to stay the ‘same’ to keep one united language, etc. Whereas it appears that God truly desires diversity, God desires difference. What does everyone think? Do we lose anything in this new interpretation? What do we gain?
**The God/ess in the title is Rosemary Radford Ruether’s take on how we should "name" God. In a reaction against the patriarchal use of God the Father, and against a total swing back the other way to only call God Mother, Ruether finds that God/ess is the way that works best for her to name God.
