The Tower of Babel

"One language" is clear enough. Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, France, 1000s, the classic commentary on the Torah) says it was Hebrew, which he calls לְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶש, "the holy language." But what are "the same words"? The Torah does not say what the builders were saying. Rashi brings three answers from the Midrash (the Sages' teachings on the Torah, here from Bereishit Rabbah, the early collection on Bereishit). Choose one.

The Gemara (the Talmud's discussion of the Mishnah) in Sanhedrin asks the same question and gives a different kind of answer. Rabbi Yirmeyah bar Elazar says the builders were not one group with one plan. They were three groups, and each one got its own punishment.

The last line of the group cards is our own reading of the Gemara, not a quote. The Gemara itself only lists the endings.

Why does the Torah stop to tell us how they made bricks? Rashi gives the simple reason: Babel is a plain, with no stone, so they had to invent their own. It was new technology, and it made a city and a tower possible.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer (an early midrash, named for the Mishnah sage Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus) describes the work site. The tower had ramps on two sides: workers carrying bricks went up the east side, and workers coming down used the west side. And the tower was tall. Very tall. Watch the workers, then see what happened when something fell.

A mil is 2,000 amot, roughly a kilometer, so seventy mil is far higher than any building could stand. The English translation by Gerald Friedlander reads "seven mil." Either way, the point is not engineering. When a tower takes that long to climb, every brick costs days of work to replace. And once the project matters more than anything, the people doing the work stop mattering at all.

Something to think about. The builders were not cruel to each other on purpose. They were focused. Most of us have been part of a team, a company or a school where the goal slowly became more important than the people. The Midrash shows where that road ends.

Rashi asks a sharp question. The people of the Flood did not fight God. The builders of the tower did, or at least planned to. So their sin should be worse. Yet the Flood generation was wiped out, and the builders were only scattered. Why?

That is a startling claim. A world that is wrong about God but kind to people can survive. A world that tears itself apart cannot. Being together, even for a bad cause, counted for something.

So was their unity good or bad? The Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin, head of the yeshiva of Volozhin, 1816 to 1893) reads the story in a way that feels very modern. In his commentary Haamek Davar he says the problem was not what they said. It was that everyone had to say the same thing.

God had told Noach's family to spread out and fill the world (9:1, 9:7). The builders did the opposite: "so that we are not scattered" (11:4). Why were they so afraid of people leaving? Because, the Netziv says, people do not all think alike, and someone who left might start thinking differently. So the tower was a watchtower, to keep an eye on everyone. And the one who thought differently was burned.

The Netziv is pointing to the Midrash that Avram was thrown into a furnace in Ur Kasdim for refusing to worship idols. On the verse about firing the bricks, he says the Torah is hinting that it was the same huge furnace they used to fire the bricks for the tower (Haamek Davar, Bereishit 11:3). The one person who thought differently was thrown into the machine that built their unity. (That last line is our way of putting it, not the Netziv's words.)

Two readings, side by side. Here is how we would put them together. Rashi says the builders' unity saved their lives. The Netziv says it was the beginning of their sin. Both can be true. Being united is a great thing. Forcing everyone to think the same way is not. Scattering them was, in a way, a kindness: it gave the world many languages, many nations, and room for one man to think differently.

Notice the word הָבָה, "come." The builders said it twice: "Come, let us make bricks," "Come, let us build." Now God says it back. Rashi calls this middah k'neged middah, measure for measure: the punishment matches the sin.

What did it look like when the languages broke apart? Rashi gives one small, terrible picture. Press the button.

The people who would not stop work for a fallen worker now kill each other over a misunderstood word. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer says God and seventy angels came down and divided them into seventy nations with seventy languages. That matches the list of nations in Bereishit 10, which the tradition counts as seventy.

Bavel (Babylon) sounds like בָּלַל, "mixed up." The city they built to make a name for themselves got a name after all: Mix-up.

What is left of the tower?

Rabbi Yochanan says in the Gemara that the tower was not completely destroyed. A third burned, a third sank into the ground, and a third is still standing. And Rav, one of the great sages of Babylonia, says the air of the tower makes a person forget what he learned.

Read the builders' words, then turn one page to the start of Lech Lecha. The same word, שֵׁם, "name," shows up in both.

Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer applies the verse to Avram. We might draw the picture this way: a world of brick makers throws away the one stone that does not fit. That stone becomes the cornerstone of a new people.

One language again

Babel is not the end. The prophet Tzefaniah describes a future when the nations, each with their own language, are given a "clear language" to call on God together. Unity comes back, but this time it is unity around God, not against Him. Notice that the verse does not erase the nations: they are still "the peoples," now calling on God together. (That reading is ours.)