Babel, the Tower That Still Stands, and the War It Started

The rabbis could not let the Tower of Babel be a simple story about pride and punishment. Too many details in the text demanded explanation. Who said what to whom? Who was the builder and who was the laborer? What exactly did they intend when they said, Let us make a name for ourselves? And what happened to the tower after God scattered the builders? Did it just disappear? The Midrash Rabbah on Genesis, one of the oldest surviving collections of rabbinic biblical interpretation, assembled centuries of answers to these questions. Together they form a picture of Babel that is much stranger and darker than the one in the plain text of Genesis.

Begin with the conversation that started the project. The verse says each man said to his counterpart: Come, let us make bricks (Genesis 11:3). Rabbi Berekhya asked: which man said this to which counterpart? His answer: Mitzrayim said it to Kush. Two nations, not two neighbors. The project was international from the start. It required coordination across peoples who spoke different languages -- or rather, who had not yet been dispersed to different languages, because the whole point of the tower was to prevent dispersion. And yet in the phrase let us burn them thoroughly -- venisrefa lisrefa -- the rabbis heard an inadvertent prophecy. These peoples, they said, are going to be eradicated from this world. The language of their ambition contained their fate.

What actually happened to the building? The project succeeded, at least partially. Rabbi Huna taught that the workers met with such success that when a man came to lay one brick, he laid two; when he came to plaster two, he plastered four. The momentum was extraordinary. But the tower and the city were not equally completed. Rabbi Yudan argued that the tower was finished but the city was not. An objection was raised from the verse: the Lord descended to see the city and the tower -- surely both exist? Rabbi Yudan answered with the next verse: it says they ceased to build the city, not the tower. The city was abandoned mid-construction. The tower was complete.

And what happened to the tower? Rabbi Huna reported in the name of Rabbi Idi: one-third of it burned, one-third of it sank into the earth, and one-third of it still stands. If you think it is small, said Rabbi Huna, consider this: anyone who climbs to its top and looks out sees the palm trees before him as though they were grasshoppers. The tower was not erased. It remains. Somewhere in the world, a remnant of Babel still stands at a height from which the palm trees are the size of insects.

Now move to what the builders intended. The midrash preserved in the Midrash Aggadah tradition is explicit. Let us make a name for ourselves -- and there is no name in the relevant sense except idolatry, as Scripture says, And the name of other gods you shall not mention (Exodus 23:13). The builders were not merely protecting themselves from a second flood. They were organizing a replacement for the God who had sent the flood. They wanted to reach heaven not to pray there, but to wage war there -- and failing that, to wage war on earth against whatever nation carried God's name. The midrash from Midrash Aggadah says they sent fire into the sanctuary, defiled the dwelling place of God's name, and said in their hearts, Let us suppress them together, echoing Psalm 83:5: Come, let us destroy them as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more.

This is what makes Babel not a finished episode but an ongoing one. The fathers opened a door, the midrash says, and their children walked through it. Babel is not a tower that was built and then toppled. It is a posture -- the posture of a humanity that decided, at the earliest possible moment after the flood, that it would rather reach heaven through construction than through prayer, and rather extinguish the name of God than receive it. The dispersion interrupted the project. It did not end the impulse. The tower still stands, one-third of it, and the war it started is still running.