13...BABEL: DESERT HIGHRISE
(Based on GN 11: 1-9...Read more there.)

Sticking up from the desert sands is a ramped tower, reaching for the heavens. Though it may  answer questions like, ‘How is it we don’t speak the same language people from other places speak, & we can’t understand each other?’ our tale of a city & a tower & those building it from other such answers we’ve explored. Questions like this one raises must have risen early in human history, but this tale was almost certainly developed centuries later when many of the Hebrews had been taken captive to Babylon. (More of this in later episodes.) In Babylon the Hebrews find high, ramped, temple-towers of mud brick seemingly ‘reaching to heaven’. To the captives these towers represent the arrogance of a people daring to take YHWH’s own people captive. (Perish the thought, but maybe the possibility that even YHWH was now captive to their false & foreign gods is in their hearts too!) The Hebrews cannot over-throw their captors physically, but they can do it symbolically in a great story. Their tale then winds its way back into the collection of their earliest stories we’re exploring!

The tale of desert high rise is a fitting follow-up to the story of the great flood. A warning not to take God & God’s mercy for granted! The Hebrews have to learn the hard way that YHWH hasn’t been left behind back in Palestine. PS 137, for instance is a poignant lament for earlier days. A group called Boney M sang part of this Psalm to a catchy tune & made it very popular back in the late 1970s in their version. Another version goes:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat & wept when we called Zion (Jerusalem) to mind.
We hung our harps up on tree branches
Rather than sing songs that reminded us of Jerusalem, 
When our captors persisted in asking us to sing them songs from back home.
How could we possibly sing YHWH God's songs in a foreign country?

In exile the Hebrews also questions, like: ‘Why has YHWH let this happen to us?’ ‘Will we ever see Jerusalem again?’ ‘Is YHWH here in Babylon with us or still back in Palestine?’ During the exile one of the religious teachers known as Scribes looks at the temple-towers reaching high into the air & spins a yarn about people once all speaking the same language on the face of the earth, & a minstrel composes PS 137. The tale of the tower & city of Babel are clearly protests against their fate & their captors’ pride in their temples & the sheer size of their city. It’s only a short step to telling of YHWH frustrating their plans by scattering the would-be builders of tower & city as the Hebrews have been scattered, & replacing their common language with a confusing ‘babble’ of different tongues. Thus bringing to a dramatic & symbolic ending this arrogance against YHWH & His people!

Though questions about language differences must have existed a long time, such an imaginative tale like this one set in Babel at a later time gives us a new spin on the outcomes of pride & arrogance: people making a lot of noise but confused & with no understanding of the consequences of what they’re doing! Moral: Let's not get too big for our sandals, boots, slippers, or whatever else we wear down there on our feet or we may find ourselves cut down to size too! But that's another story...14…STARRY STARRY SKIES

Question: What's the biggest question we've never found an answer to?