2/ Briefly, the people of Bavel decide to build a tower with its head in the heavens; God punishes them by causing everyone to speak a different language. Work on the tower ends, and the people disperse over the Earth.

3/ You may have some questions. For example, what exactly was so terrible about the people’s attempt to build the tower that it warranted divine punishment? Are we supposed to regard this as some kind of sinful act?

4/ It's worth pausing to consider that at the beginning of Genesis we see two examples of humans receiving divine punishment: 1st, Adam & Eve were punished for eating from the tree of knowledge; 2nd, Cain was punished for the murder of Abel.

5/ In these two cases we have two paradigms for crime and punishment: (1) In the case of Adam & Eve, the act of eating the fruit was not itself morally problematic; it only became so because it had been explicitly prohibited by God. It was the disobedience, not the...

6/ ...eating that was the problem. (2) In the case of Cain, there was no disobedience involved (God had not yet said "Don't murder anybody") but the text makes it plain that Cain knew he was doing something wrong; otherwise, why feign ignorance of Abel's whereabouts?

7/ So an act can be worthy of punishment because it's clearly immoral, or because it's morally neutral but nevertheless prohibited. In the case of the Tower, which category are we in?

8/ Perhaps needless to say, God never explicitly prohibited anybody from building tall towers. And the act of building a tower "with its head in the heavens" does not (to me) seem like an obviously immoral act.

9/ At least as far as the text has it, nobody is reported to be harmed in the process. (Midrash describes the process as a brutal and bloody business in which workers were dehumanized and treated as disposable -- but the Torah itself is silent on that point.)

10/ Now you may be thinking: Wasn't the motivation for building the tower to reach heaven and challenge God for supremacy, or something? Doesn't that fall into the category of "obviously sinful"? To which I have two responses:

11/ First, the Torah doesn't say a word about this. The people of Bavel are quoted as expressing a desire to build a tower with its "top in the sky", but there's nothing about what if anything they expect to find up there or what they plan to do there.

12/ 2nd, even if that really was their intention, why would God even care? Are we supposed to think this absurd plan was an actual threat to God, so much so that he needed to take action to stop them?

13/ Wouldn't a better punishment have been to just let them build, and build, and build, never reaching their goal, never finding the creator, until their own folly overtook them?

14/ The truth is we don't have to wonder why the building of the tower was a sin. We just have to read the text closely, and let go of some of our preconceptions about the story.

15/ The first of which is that it's not actually about a tower at all.

16/ The Hebrew word for "tower" is "migdal". But "migdal" also means *fortress*.

17/ The people of Bavel are quite explicit about their intentions: they want to build "a city, and a *migdal* with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

18/ That last part is key. The stated purpose of the migdal was to prevent the people from spreading over the world. At the beginning of the story, we are told that everyone in the world is living in one place — the plain of Shinar. The explicit purpose of the migdal...

19/ ...was to keep it that way - to make sure nobody left.

20/ Normally we think of a fortress as designed to keep people OUT. But there is nobody outside the wall! Literally everyone in the world is inside it. This fortress was designed to keep people IN.

21/ Why is this important? Because twice previously God had given the express commandment to “fill the Earth” (first in Gen 1:28 to Adam and Eve, then repeated in 9:1 to Noah).

22/ The people of Bavel are trying to prevent themselves from being “scattered all over the world” — disobeying that commandment.

23/ Their fear of being “scattered” seems tied to their same-ness: “everyone on Earth had the same language and the same words”. Fundamentally, the people are afraid of becoming diverse, of not being all one people. So they build a wall around themselves.

24/ From this perspective, the ultimate punishment - the confusion of languages - makes perfect sense. Afraid of becoming a diverse, scattered people, their punishment is to become precisely what they feared, thus fulfilling God’s plan.

25/ Now I want to step back and address what I said at the beginning of this long thread, that this is a story about the current political moment.

26/ The impulse behind the building of the Fortress/Tower was, as I have suggested, xenophobia - not in the usual sense of “fear outsiders/others” (because quite literally there WERE no others, no one existed outside the wall)...

27/ But rather in the specific sense of “fear of BECOMING OTHER”. They are terrified of losing their homogeneity, of becoming a diverse people.

28/ They want, in other words, a monocultural ethno-state. So they Build A Wall.

29/ And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this pathological xenophobia expresses itself in a mania for building great towers. Both are expressions of malignant narcissism, of self-worship taken to toxic extremes.

30/ We have seen it throughout history: In Egypt, the Pharaohs turned ethnic minorities into chattel, while building monuments to their own glory. We saw it in Rome. We saw it in Nazi Germany.

31/ People who engage in self-worship love to build tall towers and put their names on the top in shiny gold letters. They always have.

@RotationlSymtry @threadreaderapp unroll please

@RotationlSymtry @AriLamm good for thoughts. I really like the idea. In addition, it makes sense with Shechem ( whole plot of being inside or outside of the city) and Egypt ( were not able to go outside of it)