The Babel story is about the dangers of uniformity
Forget the tower. The problem is that everyone "had the same words."
The Tower of Babel story is among the best known and most frequently cited stories in the Torah. And yet most of the conventional interpretations of the narrative are, I think, mistaken.
Genesis 11 is not a simple morality tale about a human attempt to storm the heavens and displace God. Nor, conversely, is it a primitive allegory about an insecure deity who is so threatened by human achievement that God needs to wreak havoc on the best-laid human plans. The narrative is also not placed where it is in the Torah in order to explain the vast multiplicity of human languages. Nor is it a lament about some lost primeval unity. The story of Babel is, I would suggest, about something else: the importance of individuals and the horrors of totalitarianism.
The fact that the nine verses that make up the narrative are often described as the “Tower of Babel” story is misleading, since the crime of the builders at Babel is not their desire to build a tower. “A tower with its top in the sky” (Gen. 11:4) is not, in and of itself, any kind of assault on God’s authority. The term is, rather, simply a biblical Hebrew expression for a very tall building, what we would similarly call a “skyscraper”—it does not actually scrape the sky; it is just extremely tall.
