So I mentioned a couple of posts back about the Tower of Babel, I wanted to kind of ramble and explicate my thoughts on that to you guys. I'll be doing this with the parts of the bible I find particularly interesting. If you'd like to, then you can find the story about the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. It's really quite short.
The Tower of Babel (though never called that exactly) was built by some folks who wanted to either sneak into Heaven (though it doesn't say this; it says "the heavens", not the plural form and the small h), or to get in on some godlike powers. Depends on who you ask.
The exact reason they built this tower isn't so important to me, really. What's more important is the cause-and-effect of the parable. The humans want something that they shouldn't have, and that would upset the (for lack of a better phrase I'm going to call it) natural order of things (would God/gods be considered natural? Purely hypothetical.) And in response they are punished in an interesting way, by splitting them into separate peoples by giving them separate languages.
This story is amazing. It's a two-birds/one-stone kinda parable. One of those birds is hubristic. The other is etiological (I just learned that word and had to use it). Which is to say, it's both a warning and an explanation of a phenomena. And it's only nine verses long.
It's a warning against trying to be like God/gods (God says 'let us,' make of that what you will), and at the same time an explanation of a phenomenon (that's what the word etiological means). The phenomenon in this case being multiple languages.
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