Torah Study Blog

led this week by Columbia University Professor Emeritus Martin Meisel

Professor Meisel has long been interested in chaos, and this past August, he published a book that looks at chaos in language and uses the biblical Tower of Babel story as a good starting point.

It is human nature to fear chaos. When something happens, we feel there must be a reason. We seek pattern, or sequence, or meaning. One way that humans deal with chaos is by telling stories. These stories help us to make sense of the world. The stories may seem like entertainment or amusements – like Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories – but creating these stories is vital to us; it is a built-in human need. The Bible is full of this type of story.

The Tower of Babel story is a mere 9 verses in the book of Genesis. The story is in a “hinge” position in the Bible. Everything that comes before the story is general history of people. But everything after the story is the specific history of the Jewish people. The story is short, I will recite it here:

Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them hard,” Brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. – And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.” The Lord came down to look at the city and tower that man had built, and the Lord said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)

Imagine the chaos! This story helps us to make sense of the world. It answers the question of why there are so many people on earth speaking different languages.

There are only two characters in the story: God, and “they” which is a collective of all humankind. “They” want to make a name for themselves. They want to be remembered, to have had some meaning, to have identity and respect.

Names are powerful things. In Exodus 3:14, Moses asks God what his name is, but God responds with a phrase that has been translated as “I am that I am” or “I will be what I will be.” Our tradition says that we should not know the true name of God. There is a belief that, if you can name something, you have power over it. But, going back to chaos, when everything is chaotic, if you are able to at least name what it is, you may be better able to deal with it.

In the Bible, the patriarch Abraham was originally named Abram. God changed Abraham’s name, which symbolized Abraham’s new role. One of our Torah Study attendees mentioned that what we choose to name our children is a very big challenge. He has paused to wonder if his children would be different if he and his wife had given them different names.

In Genesis 2:18, “the Lord God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them: and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name.” People who study language have pondered if Adam made up the names in an artistic endeavor, or if he discovered the names in more of a scientific endeavor.

Now, let’s turn to God. What was God so worried about?! He says, “nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach.” The people are becoming almost god-like. But we must ask - Is he God, or is he not God? God’s thinking does not reflect the omnipotent God of our imagination.

In addition to a name, the language a person speaks is another way to identify them. When we hear a different language being spoken, we know that person is different from us, and we will often assume cultural characteristics about them. The Tower of Babel story gives more than the origin of different languages; it also gives us the beginning of ethnic

cleansing. And, from this point in the story on, the people of the Torah try to kill each other off because they have been separated.

However, another way to look at this story is to say that God is doing the people a favor. Before the flood that wiped out humanity, except for Noah and his family, the people had become wicked and, “the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth” (Genesis 6:6). Perhaps God felt that the people were becoming full of hubris and he would feel compelled to destroy humanity again. By confounding their language, God prevented the people from rising to sin.

Professor Meisel ended his session by leading a discussion on the concept of a universal language. Today the most popular spoken language in the world is Mandarin, followed by Spanish, and then English. We are in a time of accelerating change in language, perhaps on a catastrophic scale. There are 6-7 thousand languages spoken today, but it is estimated that half that amount is spoken by 3000 people or fewer. It is predicted that half of the 6- 7 thousand languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. But, at the same time that we have extinction, we also have creation of new ways to communicate through shared terms that spread across multiple languages, thanks to increased trade and the internet. Where will this all end? One never knows.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Professor Meisel taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter