Babel Was Built With Bricks That Cost More Than People

The Tower of Babel did not begin with arrogance. It began with an invention. Somewhere in the fourth week of a jubilee year, in the land of Shinar, a group of men discovered that if you shaped clay into bricks and fired them in flame, they came out hard as stone. They discovered that bitumen, the black tar that seeps up from the earth and from the fountains of water in the land of Shinar, could be used to cement those bricks together. They had solved a construction problem. They were, in the narrow technical sense, brilliant.

The Book of Jubilees, written in Hebrew in the second century BCE, records this invention with a detail that the Torah's brief account omits. The bricks served them for stone, the text says, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt from the sea and the fountains of the land of Shinar. The builders had no natural quarries. They manufactured their building material through fire. There is something fitting about this, given what they intended to build and what would eventually happen to their ambitions.

But before the tower even rose to its full impossible height, something else was already underway. In the third week of this jubilee, unclean demons began to lead astray the children of the sons of Noah. The timing in the Jubilees account is deliberate. The demonic corruption did not follow the tower. It preceded it, or ran alongside it. The generation that built Babel was a generation that had already been led astray. The tower was not the cause of their rebellion against God. It was the symptom of a spiritual condition that the demons had been cultivating for years.

The chief of spirits, Mastema, had already negotiated with God for the right to keep a portion of his forces active among human beings after the flood. Let some of them remain before me, Mastema had said, and let them hearken to my voice. God had agreed, allowing one tenth of the spirits to remain, while nine tenths were bound in the place of condemnation. The demons who led the children of Babel astray were operating under that permitted fraction, doing what Mastema had argued they were necessary to do: corrupt, mislead, destroy.

The human builders, for their part, brought their own catastrophic priorities. The tower grew so tall that it took a full year to climb from the ground to the top. A brick, therefore, cost a year to replace. A human being could be replaced in nine months. The arithmetic of value that the builders used put brick above person. If a worker fell from the scaffolding, the others mourned nothing. If a brick fell, they wept. The woman who went into labor while carrying bricks simply tied her newborn to her body in a sheet and went on laying bricks. The tower demanded everything, and the builders gave it.

This is what six hundred thousand men working together at the command of Nimrod looked like, according to the Ginzberg tradition. It looked like a city where human life had been reduced to the least valuable thing on the construction site. The Lord saw all of it, the brick innovation, the demonic corruption, the inversion of values, and He said to the angels: Behold, they are one people, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be withholden from them.

The terror in that divine observation is not pride. God was not threatened by the tower. He was describing a condition that had become dangerous in a different way. A people who value brick over blood, who have been led astray by demons, who are united by a project of defiance, a people like that, left unchecked, will not stop at a tower. They will not stop at anything. The scattering was not punishment in the sense of penalty for breaking a rule. It was intervention in the sense of stopping something before it became irreversible.

When the Lord descended with the angels to confound their language, the builders did not understand why the man next to them had begun speaking differently. They asked for bricks and received water. They asked for water and received stubble. The tower, which had seemed unstoppable the day before, simply stopped. The people dispersed, each according to his language and his nation, into the cities that Nimrod and his successors would later name after the disaster. Babel: because the Lord confounded the language there. Erech: because from there God dispersed them. The very names of the cities were confessions of what had happened.

The Jubilees tradition does not let the story end as a simple parable about pride. It roots the tower in a specific chain of events: flood, survival, covenant, demonic corruption, invention, construction, destruction, scattering. Each stage follows from the previous one with a logic that is neither punishment nor accident. The builders of Babel made choices that converged toward catastrophe, and they made those choices in a world where hostile spiritual forces were actively helping them make the wrong ones. The bricks were brilliant. The project was doomed. Both things were true at the same time.