In the Tower of Babel story, a common language is being spoken, allowing all people to work together toward this project of pulling God down to earth through this gate to the sky. Let’s talk about that common language, because that too has layers to soak through and scratch off.

Babylon was a world center, a superpower, like New York or Beijing today, or London or Vienna or yesteryear. You can read as such, where perhaps a common language was indeed spoken, a lingua franca, as that has happened repeatedly in history wherever cities and centers of power emerged. The nation in power dictates what language is used, because it’s the language of business and trade. This movement toward one language is not even dictated so much as gravitated toward, because where there is money to be made, people come running. You can watch this happen whenever oil is discovered, or a company is started. Money is honey that draws us like flies.

The most powerful nation tends to steer the world into speaking its language, and right now that language is English because America still, for now, holds the tethers of power. In Rome, Latin was the lingua franca. In Greece, it was Koine Greek. At the time when the story of the Tower of Babel was written, it was likely Akkadian.

But if you want to get to the deeper meaning of this story, you need to think of the “common language” being spoken as not necessarily Sumerian or Akkadian or English or French or Chinese. The common language is about something much deeper. It is a language that explains why every nation, even every family, is in competition, right up to our time, even shedding light on why Russia and Ukraine are in open war this very instant.

How can I explain this?

The common language is a mindset, a way of life. If you read this story at a deeper level, the common language is not Sumerian or Akkadian. It is a worldview.

Just prior to the story of the Tower of Babel is the Great Flood story, and as soon as the flood subsides, we have a world of Noah and his family left as sole survivors. Obviously they spoke the same language or dinner would have been awkward. Now, a literal reading of this may not jive neatly with our modern concept of history and archaeology (although science is now finding that the Flood story actually does merge surprisingly well with ice age data), but that’s not what Genesis is about. As I’ve said before, you don’t go to the Bible to learn about rocks and history, even though there is something to glean there, too. This is a book about the soul, not the cell, nor is it about subjects like geology, anthropology, or philology. It can be useful for those subjects, but it’s not about those topics. This is where the disconnect happens for people as we tend to read it with “Google brain,” like machines, instead of people who consist of both a body and a soul.

Soon after the flood, we learn of Noah falling into sin (getting drunk and naked like a college student) and that’s when the family drama begins, which leads to the splintering of his sons into “the nations.” This idea of “the nations” requires a lengthy digression because of its importance in the understanding the rest of the Bible that follows, which is a thousand pages or so.

The last thing we read about before the Tower of Babel is the “Table of Nations” where all the known people groups of the world are listed. So I lied, there are subjects like geography and history in Genesis, but that is not all there is.

The “Table of Nations” in Genesis 10 is not just a purely mythical and ethnocentric story made up by an early Hebrew tribesman many hundreds of years “after the [alleged] facts.” It exhibits throughout a genuine knowledge of ancient Near East geography and culture. (Patheos)

So who cares about a list of nations that don’t match up with the names we use today?

Well, I do. But so should you. However, without a tour guide on these boring sections and lists in the Bible, my eyes just glaze over. I would have never known that Javan is Greece, or that Mizraim is Egypt, or that Ashkenaz might have been the German people. We need guides here (I recommend Fr. Stephen de Young and Fr. Andrew Damick: Orthodox priests, Bible scholars, and mythology nerds.) You need a guide or it’s too boring and abstract. We use tutors and guides like this for other things, and we should definitely find a guide through the Bible or we will miss why time itself is measured around the birth of Jesus Christ. For instance, if you go to Rome and walk through the Roman Forum, you will just see a bunch of ancient rocks that look mildly interesting and give you a sense of passing time. Without a guide, you will never realize how much history is represented in the weathered stones of say, the Temple of Saturn (which is kind of a Roman version of the Tower of Babel).

All of those boring sections in Genesis actually have more happening than we have time to learn today, which is a shame because it’s so rich in meaning. Our attention spans have shrunk dramatically. Unless you are a Bible nerd, you can’t comb through this stuff without a guide, or multiple guides, and your guides need multiple disciplines of knowledge to even traverse the vast field of information.

One great outcome of our modern academic deep dives into science and history is that we have more light shed on obscure texts. At the same time, however, we are in great danger of missing the purpose of the ancient texts when we reduce it to academic research. Studying myths and religion like academics often shoves God right off the stage. While we look for needles in the haystack, we forget that the purpose of the haystack is to feed a flock. We can easily skip over the spiritual part and just turn it into a never-ending study session. If that happens, then you forget that reading the Bible is an encounter with God. To get anything out of the Bible, you have to remember that point.

The main point that I’m trying to get across with the question of “Why Did Peter Sink?” is that he falls when he takes his eye off Jesus. Peter sinks in the water because he allows his fears and doubts to take over. In other words, he tried to walk on water independently of God, which he cannot do. He loses his peace and control because he tried to take control, allowing his fears to take over, taking back control that must be given up. This is the great paradox of faith. You must give up control to get any kind of control, to have any kind of miracle happen in your life, as Peter illustrates for us.

One last unnecessary metaphor: if we become purely academic in our reading, we will consume scripture like a stale Little Debbie snack instead of savoring it like the rich french silk pie that it is. The same goes for the Eucharist. If you don’t believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread, then it is just a flavorless wafer. It’s just a symbol, and then what’s the point? Why bother? It has to be more than a symbol, just as the word of God has to be the actual Word of God. So please, ask for faith, and keep asking. Keep walking toward Jesus. As we go, Keep your eye on the Savior, not the Baal (Ball. Get it? Stupid joke. Fine, I’ll stop.).

Noah’s family spoke the same language. The nations all came from his sons according to the story. In other words, Noah’s family history is way, way back in time. Instantly, our Google brain would like to say, “No, the first homo-sapiens were from the African savannah and they spread out over thousands of years, etc, and the nations formed from tribes and people groups, etc.” To which I would reply: is the narrative of science, at its core, all that different than the story of Adam and Eve in a garden (savannah?) as the first two human parents? And as we have much evidence of ancient flooding from ice ages, is it not reasonable that civilizations were wiped out from rising seas and rivers? Sometimes I think we are talking about the same things when we argue about science and religion, it’s just that the sacred writer of Genesis didn’t have terabyte storage to give all the details, so the writer crammed all of pre-history into eleven short chapters. Of course we have more data today. Yet somehow archaeology keeps affirming things in Genesis as we go, just as science keeps affirming the Big Bang theory, which came from a priest, of all people, and fits insanely well with Genesis.

If you are following the 30,000 year timetable of when modern people emerged across the world, then this story of Noah must be considered deep in history. My money is on 10,000 B.C. since that was the last big flood of the ice ages. Clearly “the nations” took time to develop. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 indicates that long before the Tower of Babel was built, the worship of One God, the true God, was established, because Noah had been chosen by God to build the ark.

If Noah and his family were the only people, and Noah worshipped the Creator God of Genesis, then something dramatic begins to happen after the dispersal of Noah’s sons into the world, as in, the worship of other gods. This is where the famous succession myth begins, where a god like Zeus or Baal overthrew the ancient god, the first god. In other words, along with “the nations” come the idea of local gods, because if you break off from the original, you have to create a founding myth and a god that supports the myth. In other words, the schism that forms “the nations” also is the impetus that forms the gods. In the same way, companies are formed, such as how two fired executives of Handy Dan went on to found The Home Depot. You might even say that the stone that was rejected from Handy Dan became the cornerstone of Home Depot. (I’ve gone into this succession myth stuff a lot in a previous series called About Uranus so I won’t belabor it here.)

There is a time gap in between Noah’s drunk night and the Tower of Babel. A lot happens in one chapter. It’s not clear how much time. Perhaps one hundred years, perhaps 15,000. When construction finally began on the Tower of Babel, the nations exist, but everyone is speaking the same language. Clearly, an academic or scientist will have trouble computing this: how could languages not have developed if the nations already had? That doesn’t make sense. Put a pin in that idea, because there seem to be two types of “language” being referred to here.

This is where the Tower of Babel story gets interesting. Here is where you can take the simple path of understanding it as a fable, a tale of how languages and nations came from. Or, you can read the “common language” in a different way that opens the door to far more understanding of the Bible as a whole, and why Jesus came to the earth at all.

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