Blogging toward Sunday

The story of the Tower of Babel seems to have such enduring and diverse cultural resonance that when it shows up in the lectionary, I have a hard time leaving it alone.

The Tower, according to Tarot card readers, is the scariest card in the deck. It means that the foundations of someone’s well-constructed world are about to shatter. In the Yu-gi-oh deck, it is a “trap” card. (My son couldn’t explain to me what that means, but it seemed worth noting.) According to Ernest Becker, skycrapers are blatant expressions of humanity’s futile attempt to deny death. Franz Kafka has been called the modern heir of the Tower of Babel story because he writes about huge life-sucking systems, including institutions that consume everything and everybody in a futile enterprise from which there is no escape.

This is only ten chapters away from the garden, where God has created life and all is fruitful and multiplying and lush and teeming with species. But in Genesis 11, the people have arrived at a flat plain and there is one language and few words and they say to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and burn them hard and build a big tall hard tower.” As a preacher I would juxtapose the garden’s loamy fecundity with hard, kiln-baked bricks. In Exodus, after all, the people will become slaves and one of their tasks will be to make bricks. The prophets will lament that the people serve gods of stone, the work of men’s hands that neither see, eat, nor smell. The envy and fear in these later stories seems to me deathly when compared to the aliveness in the garden.