May 15, Day of Pentecost: Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21

We hear in today’s Genesis selection an ancient story—what scholars call an etiological myth—that explains to a rural people the origin of the multiplicity of human languages. Perhaps the story arose after a small community began to encounter traders who spoke foreign tongues; perhaps it was after tent dwellers saw a ziggurat for the first time. The storyteller ties together the Hebrew root bll, meaning “to confuse,” with the name of the Babylonian city Babel, and the legend as enshrined in the Pentateuch can comfort its hearers with the sense that at least they still speak God’s original language, the one with which God conversed with their ancestors. And at least their tribe continues to live and worship close to the ground, since it is God alone who dwells in the heavens.

The story might also broaden the ethical life of the community, since the tale claims that at the beginning, all humans were one. God’s intention was a unified human species, a people who could talk with one another. For the insiders who hear this tale, God has saved them yet again, this time from the arrogance of the outsider, from the confusion posed by hearing foreign languages, and from the misuse of the raw materials of God’s creation. Centuries later, Abram and Sarai still live in a tent and have the words to speak with God.

It is the theological underpinning of the story that retains its importance for contemporary Christians. According to Genesis 3–10, sin originates with the very first humans, spreads to their children, is washed away in the flood, but then reappears in Noah’s son. According to the tower tale in Genesis 11, this sin has now spread throughout “the face of the whole earth.”