This morning I gave a Sunday Zoom talk on "Coming Into Agreement." The talk will be posted in a couple of weeks with the audio files on our website: hillsidesource.com but I am posting a segment here to consider today.
One of the great world myths found in the Bible (Genesis) and other religious sources, addresses this issue of why humans have such trouble with agreement: The Tower of Babel. t is a story of how God decentralized the great kingdom of Babylon's power and authority. We are told, the people of this kingdom, at a time of great renown, all spoke one language, and in Genesis, this extends to whole of the earth or at least the known earth. A popular movement arose with the idea of building a tower to that would reach to Heaven. The fame and power of the Kingdom would expand, and it's people would never leave. But God 'came down' and saw that if they achieved it, nothing could restrain their power; they would do anything without his command, so he vowed to confuse language so they could no longer understand each other, and then he scattered them across the Earth.
Various versions are found in other texts. In the Torah, which gives more details, the Tower is spearheaded by Nimrod, the great grandson of Noah, with some interpretations suggesting Nimrod was resentful of the Flood and didn't trust God, so he strove to expand his own power. A Greek version, 'Apocalypse of Baruch' details a vision by a scribe and disciple of the prophet Jeremiah. In the vision, he sees the punishment of the builders of the “tower of strife against God,” who "smote them with blindness and confusion of speech." In the Qur’an there is mention of an official called Haman who built a great tower in Egypt with miraculous bricks under orders of the Pharaoh, who wanted to reach God. Because Islam's teaching that language is a sacred gift and that God taught Adam all languages, with Arabic as the most sacred of the Qur'an, the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel is seen as false. From Sumerian culture, within a story of two warrior-kings building competing temples, there is the story of a rivalry of gods in a utopian past, where multi-ethnic peoples of Mesopotamia all spoke the same tongue and worshipped the same deity, Enlil. Possibly out of jealously, the god of wisdom and mischief caused humanity to separate and speak in varied tongues.
In this myth, the root of disharmony is differing languages. We know people identify with their language as a fundamental structure of their culture, and take offense when someone refuses speak it, or ridicules it. What a metaphor for our emotions and our belief systems, our points of reference, our own sense of relationship or competency. Even within a culture and shared language, we misinterpret another's words and meaning. Learning another language is humbling; you make mistakes; others--the foreigners-- know more than we do. Yet, the need to speak another's language, pushes us to enter, to some degree, another's mind-set, different from ours.
The world's story is still in process from the various ancient myths of the Tower of Babel to 2022; perhaps this myth is not all punishment. To me, it is about the beauty and necessity of diversity. Nature exhibits diversity, an overwhelming abundance of variation of whatever theme is expressed. The people of the Earth too, come in abundant varieties. Diversity doesn't just separate; diversity provides a rich field of exchange and exchange increases our options for creativity, adaptation and survival. The tellers of the myth left out a crucial piece of meaning, the gift hidden in the scattered and divergent. The global scientific and medical exchange of the Pandemic--flawed and limited it may be--has saved lives. The global climate change debates and negotiations is another exchange in process. These kinds of efforts toward world-wide problems are not about coming into some universal collective mind, or world religion, or even unification. We are of one planet, but with diverse minds. It's astounding when you think of the varieties of microbial, plant, and animal life on Earth, and then turn to human expectation and demands that we all look alike, think alike, believe alike, or that we can rank the rich resource of variety that is humanity. What appeared as one thing centuries ago, may be something entirely different in life's unfolding. Scrambling the language and scattering the people was a good move. (Susan Nettleton)