Tower of Babel: A tale of two
cities
Genesis: 11:1-9
A
mother was holding her five -year old little kid, trying to make her child
sleep. She narrates Tom and Jerry stories narrating their funny fights. After
she finished telling the story the kid asked her “Mummy, when dad and you fight
with each other, who is Tom and who is Jerry?” Tales are not simple as they
seem. Every tale makes an impact on some lives because evey tale contains a
life and its content in focus. Therefore every tale is an opportunity to
witness the consciousness of the land and people of the time. As a tale, Tower
of Babel also is embedded with life and meaning in its narration. What makes
this tale significant and relevant in our time? What are the possibilities to
consider this tale as a paradigm to re-imagine our
socio-political-religious-cultural context in India? Let us step in to this
tower tale.
Before
moving to the interpretation it is essential to review the background of the
text and its place in the Old Testament narrations. Tower of Babel is a part of
the wider pericope of Genesis 1-11. Genesis 1-11 known as the primeval history,
refers to the first section of the Old Testament.[1] It is also considered as
the prologue not only for Genesis alone but for the whole Old Testament.
Tower
of Babel has been traditionally interpreted and understood in two ways. Firstly,
it explains the origin and the cause for the existence of diverse languages or
cultures. Secondly, traditional Jewish Christian interpretations offer an idea
for the existence of multiple nations and languages. It is understood as an
outcome of God’s angry judgment on human desire for crossing their creaturely
limits and for attempting to challenge His supremacy. The Book of Jubilles also
has this idea. Philo’s allegorical approach sees the story as a reflecion of the
inherent evilness in human and its consequences. Josephus
reads it as human attempt to be free from dependence on God.
Another
line of interpretations from Bernhard W. Anderson and Theodore Hiebert completely
shift away from the pride and punishment paradigm and focus on the theme of cultural
diversification. They consider the text as a narrative of the origin of the
world’s culture. I would like to consider ‘Tower of Babel’ as an event[2]
that happened in post -flood context of the people.
Tower of Babel: An event of building
the city of the empire
How
do we understand an ‘event’? we can call a natural disaster like Chennai flood as
an event, the victory of Modi as an event and many more. Events may be classified
into material and immaterial events, artistic, scientific, political and
intimate events, etc. I tried to incorporate Slavoj Zizek idea of events[3]
to read this periscope. For Zizek Event is like a Trojan horse, which
comes with a mission but no one knows it because of its appearance and claim. In
this periscope we can consider the building of the city and tower as an Event
because this Event has a hidden mission. In order to problamatise this
hidden mission i am using Zizek’s theory on Event.
The
building project begins by gaining the interest of people. In order to achieve
this they need to create Events induced pseudo realities which offers ‘possibilities’ of
life,’growth’ and ‘developments’. There is ‘knowledge’ behind every Event. ‘Making name’
and ‘reaching high’ are the keywords of
the knowledge proposed in the event of building the new city. The one who is
going to get benefit from this event and its knowledge and the product of the knowledge(city) is the empire of the time. Through the setting of an event and the knowledge
of the event the emperor channelizes the human effort and consciousness
towards his majesty. Most scholars note that the bulding projects in the
Babylonian cities are the effort of claiming ‘sacred’. It is normally known as Ziggurat, a term derived
from the Akkadian Verb Zaqaru, meaning “to build high”. Through the making of the Big towers the empires are
trying to relocate the sacred mountains to their towers and claim the status of
God. So the whole purpose of these Ziggurat Events
is to develop the Emperor as ‘Author’ and ‘Authority’ of human life.
In the Exodus narratives we can see a new Pharaoh
beginning his task of oppression:”Look,
the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly
with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise, in the event of war, they
may join our enemies in fighting against us and go up from the land”(Ex.
1:9-10). As presented in the text, the pharaoh's logic is hard to discern.
His solution to the problem of Israel's increasing population was persecution
and enslavement, rather than exclusion or genocide (Ex. 1:11). If they were too
many, why not just kill them? Later Pharaoh order the killing of all the male
babies born to the Hebrews, but only after his first policy resulted in an
Israelite population boom (Ex. 1:12, 16). Why was Pharaoh afraid that they would
leave the land? He should have welcomed their departure. He was able to justify
his subjugation of the Israelites with this pretext, but the lack of logic in
his reasoning suggests that his true goals were elsewhere. The intention was making a land of slaves in order to make
his memories alive against the memories of their God and diversities of life. The
idea of empires city is an Event to fulfil this task.
We
can notice the Events as the arrival of Emperor in silence. Events help the
empires to establish their interest by creating a pseudo reality. In our own
context we can identify the arrival of empires in events such as ‘IT parks’,
‘Express ways’, ‘Dam projects’, ‘Nuclear power plants’, ‘Airport projects’,
‘cultural nationalism’ etc. In every event such as these the production of
knowledge is evident which offers the city with
‘glittering future’. The new city
which comes out after the event of building the tower is a city which witnesses
the memories of the Emperor. Building projects are often associated with human
pride, and Nebuchadnezzar is reputed to have had his name stamped on every 50th
brick to commemorate his building programme in Babylon. The pride that he
showed was reflected in the book of Daniel 4:30. Therefore, the Proposed city of the Empire is
a city which make the name of the Emperor high and his memories active forever.
But the empire failed in his mission
when God comes with the idea of an alternative city.
Tower of Babel: An ‘Event’
which reveals the face of God and the alternative city of God
Tower
of Babel reveals the face of God who faced most criticism over the centuries as
an interrupting and intervening factor. We see a God who is jealous of people’s
endeavour to reach his majesty through the building of tower. Is reaching or seeking God’s ‘space’ an
offence? There are some other characteristics of the face of God revealed in
this narration which is important to notice. God says : ‘let us confuse them’ Why
does this God need to confuse the people? Why does this God want to shatter
them over the surface of the earth? What makes
this God upset and ‘punish’ his people’s intention to reach him?
The
face of the God leads us to reimagine an alternative city through the ideas of ‘confuse’,
‘shatter’, ‘sending out’. God tried to reorient people with these three
concepts. We need to consider these words as God’s resistance over the ‘event’
of the empire. The emperor’s act creates
a pseudo oneness in order to achieve his authority over the land and people.
The element which creates the ambience of oneness is the sameness of language
they share. What are the concerns they need to understand together? This
question will bring the politics of this ‘oneness’. What they share and they
understand is only about emperor’s mission’. They need to understand the task
of the empire well and share the spirit of this task. This is evident in their
brick making process. They are making the brick without knowing the purpose(v.3).
The purpose is revealed later after they finish making bricks(V.4). This
sequence is not accidental but intentional and carries out the hidden task of
the ‘Event’. So the oneness is not the realisation of justice because this understanding
never brings forth the truth to the people. When church says we are part of one
body and one blood does it make any sense to the life of the people? I would
say no because every body receives respect and dignity according to the colour
and standard of the body. Therefore, we need to always problematize the claims
of ‘oneness’ because a collective oneness hides an event within. Through the
development of one language and one mode of sharing the emperor limits the
possibilities of alternative sharing and communication. In the development of this one language
mission people lose their ‘little world’: the ‘little world’ of their
knowledge, joy, stories, celebrations, and consciousness and many more. They
are part of the Empire’s language means they are in the consciousness of the Empire’s
‘Mega World’. This is a way of developing an exclusive community without having
diversities. Absence of other language or modes of sharing signifies the
absence of the ‘manyness’ of the communities. Therefore the face of God
revealed in the narration ‘confused’ them as an act of resistance against the
dangerous face of ‘oneness’. He ‘scattered’ them in order to move from the
unethical utilitarian nature of the emperor. He ‘sent them away’ to build their
life in liberation rather than baking bricks for unknown reasons. Liberation is
not just freedom rather a state of reclaiming our own consciousness. The
Kannada Writer D R Nagraj talks about “Protest as a consciousness” and the face
of God revealed in the tower of Babel is protest of God . Liberation of enslaved consciousness is the task of God. The need of the hour is
to bring back our consciousness as a church in the midst of empires of our time.
We identify ourselves as the liberated community but are we liberated in our
consciousness? Where is our consciousness in the struggle for the land? Shall
we find a theological community in kudumkulam or other struggles for land or issues
of our land? We as a called out
community need to ‘shatter’ ourself from the ‘unknown oneness’ the
pseudo-reality of the emperors city which overlook the diversities of
life. We need to ‘interrupt’ the knowledge
of the emperors’ events to build the ‘city’ of alternatives.
Dear
friends, the Pharaohs of our time who limit our life and its possibilities in
the events are nameless. A "Pharaoh"
is only the designation of an office, or a political position. The Hindutva
ideologists, development policies favouring the privileged, and multinational
companies are some of the emerging and existing emperors of our times who try to
question the identity and well being of the communities of God. The life and
dignity of the Earth communities, the minorities, justice of the Dalits and the
Adivasi communities all are facing challenges in the city of the emperor of our
times. Church as an interruptive movement needs to ‘come down’ in order to break the Events of the emperor and envision the new city of justice, peace
and well being. In the tale of the tower of Babel we can see the vision of the
new city as an alternative against the
city of the empire. As Martin Luther King Jr states “Let us not seek to satisfy
our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred” because
freedom is beyond this. Let us stop bricking for the unknown goals of the
events. Let us ‘shatter’ and ‘confuse’ ourselves and the community to
experience freedom and joy of living in our own consciousness.
[1] John J. Scullion, “New
Thinking on creation and sin in Genesis i-xi,” in ABR, Vol.22 (October, 1974), pp.2-3.
[2] I consider event as a philosophical
category and try to elaborate it by
incorporating Slavoj Zizek’s idea of Event.
[3] He states that the classification of events into different types
ignores the basic features of an event, the surprising emergence of something
new which undermines every stable scheme. The only appropriate solution is to
approach events in an evental way, to pass from one to another notion of event
by way of bringing out the pervading deadlocks of each.
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