God Descended to Babel and the Angels Came With Him

The Torah says, in three spare words, that God came down. He saw the tower, He came down, He confounded the language, He scattered the people. It is over almost before it begins. But the Book of Jubilees, composed in Hebrew around 160-150 BCE and preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, lingers at Babel and tells us something the Torah chose not to say: that when God descended, He did not descend alone.

We descended with Him, the text says. We. The angel speaking in Jubilees, the angel who delivered the book's contents to Moses on Sinai, uses the first person plural without apology. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built, and the angels were with Him in the descent. The confounding of language at Babel was not a solitary divine act. It was a mission, with God and His council moving together through the air above the plain of Shinar.

The Jubilees account of the descent gives the divine intention in direct speech: Go to, let us go down and confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech, and they may be dispersed into cities and nations, and one purpose will no longer abide with them till the day of judgment. The phrase till the day of judgment is significant. The scattering at Babel is not permanent in the ultimate sense. It is a condition of the current world, an arrangement that holds until something larger resolves it. The unity of language that Babel sought to preserve by building a tower is not gone forever. It is postponed.

What the builders had said among themselves, according to the earlier layer of the same text, was this: Come and let us build for ourselves a city and tower, the top of which shall reach heaven. And in the Midrash Aggadah tradition, a darker version of their intentions surfaces: some of the builders wanted to wage war with those in heaven, others wanted to set up their idols and worship them there, others wanted to break open the firmament with axes and let the water of heaven pour down. Their unity, which was real and dangerous, was unity in the service of defiance.

God confounded their language and He changed their form, according to one version. They became unable to recognize their own brothers. They asked for bricks and received water. They asked for water and received stubble. The builders who had worked as one organism, who had created the fire-baked brick and the bitumen mortar and the year-long scaffolding, suddenly could not coordinate a simple supply chain. The sophistication of their achievement turned against them the moment the common language was removed from it.

What happened next, the Jubilees text says simply, is that they ceased then to build the city and the tower. There is no great collapse. No dramatic fire from heaven. The tower was simply abandoned, mid-construction, because the people building it could no longer speak to each other. And then they dispersed, into their cities and their nations, each group carrying the language that had been given to it in the moment of scattering.

The city of Babel was given its name, the text explains, because the Lord did there confound all the language of the children of men, and from thence they were dispersed into their cities, each according to his language and his nation. The Midrash Aggadah traditions add that seventy languages were created in that moment, one for each of the seventy nations that the table of nations in Genesis would enumerate. Nimrod stayed in Shinar and rebuilt his kingdom among the remnant, naming his cities after the disasters that had struck them, carrying the shame of the tower in the very nomenclature of his empire.

The angel who tells the Babel story in Jubilees to Moses on Sinai knows that Moses is standing on the mountain that Jubilees identifies as one of the three holy places created from the beginning of the world. Sinai is inside Shem's portion, inside the sacred geography that Noah's lots had assigned to the ancestors of the people Moses leads. The scattering at Babel dispersed Shem's descendants along with everyone else. But the holy center of Shem's inheritance, the mountain where Moses now stands, was never part of the tower project. That ground had been given to a different kind of unity, not the unity of brick and ambition, but the unity of covenant and law.

The apocryphal account of Babel ends with a detail that carries its own weight: for this reason the whole land of Shinar is called Babel. The name of a catastrophe became the name of a place, and the place became the name of an empire, and the empire became the name of a word in almost every language that descended from that original confounding. Babel. Babylon. The tower that was never finished gave its unfinished name to the world that came after it.