The Word Come Turned in God's Hand at the Tower of Babel

They had walked out of the east with one language in their mouths, and in the valley of Shinar they stopped. The ground there took fire well. They dug clay, packed it into molds, and burned the bricks hard until stone was a thing they no longer needed. Bitumen served them for mortar. Brick on brick on brick, they laid the floor of a thing that had never been built before.

One man turned to the man beside him and said the word that started it. "Come," he said, "let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The word went down the line. Come. It passed from mouth to mouth like a torch. It sounded like power in their throats. It sounded like a summons they were issuing to the whole earth, a command that began with them and answered to no one above them.

The Single Word They Thought Was Theirs

They were not building blindly. Among themselves they had done the arithmetic of fear. After a thousand years and six hundred and fifty-six years, they said, a flood comes again, the heavens totter, and the upper waters break loose to drown the world a second time. So they reasoned aloud in their one shared speech. Come, let us raise pillars to brace the sky, so that when it sags it rests on what we made and not on us.

Others among them wanted more than a brace. One faction said, Let us climb to the top and live up there where the water cannot reach. One faction said, Let us climb up and set our idols in the height and bow to them in the very face of the firmament. And one faction, the boldest, sharpened axes and said, Let us climb up and split the dome of the sky with our blades, so its waters gush out, and then go up and make war on the One who keeps them. In the Land of Israel they would later laugh at these axe-men and ask why, if a hole in heaven was all they wanted, they had not simply built on a mountain. But in the valley no one laughed. The brick kept rising.

The Lord Came Down to See

The tower grew so tall that a man carrying bricks to the summit needed a full year to make the climb. Death high up cost nothing. But when a brick slipped from a hand at the bottom and shattered, the whole line wept. A man was bricks. The work was the thing that mattered.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the children of men had built. He stood over the work and over the word. He had heard the syllable run along the scaffolds. "Come," they had said, as if the calling belonged to them. He let the word hang in the air a moment, that one bright arrogant sound, and then He closed His hand around it.

The Word Turned in His Hand

"You said Come," He answered them, though no ear among them was tuned to hear it. "By your lives, with that very word I will descend upon you." The summons they had thought was theirs was His all along. "Come," He said back to them, "let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." The same two letters that had lifted the first brick now bent the whole tongue of the world.

The change was not a thunderclap. It was worse. A man at the top called down for mortar and the man below heard noise. A foreman pointed and shouted an order and the words came out as the speech of a stranger. The one tongue that had made them a single will broke into a hundred unrelated mouths. A man asked for a brick and received water flung in anger. A man asked for water and was struck with a brick. The scaffolds filled with quarrel that no apology could reach, because apology too had stopped meaning anything.

The Tower Split Three Ways

What they had built against scattering became the engine of their scattering. The very thing they had raised so they would never be flung across the earth flung them across the earth. From the valley of Shinar the Lord scattered them over the face of all the land, and they ceased to build the city, and the name they had reached for they never got. They got a name they had not chosen. Babel, the place where He confounded the speech of the whole earth.

And the tower itself He divided into three. One third of it the earth opened and swallowed, so that it went down into the ground that the builders had dug. One third of it fire came and burned away, the same fire they had used to bake their bricks now turned against the bricks. And one third He left standing, a stump of a thing, a ruin against the sky, so that the boast would have a corpse.

The Ruin That Still Stands

The factions went to their measured ends. Those who had said, Let us climb up and dwell there, the Lord scattered from there. Those who had said, Let us climb up and worship idols, there He confounded their speech. And those who had sharpened axes and said, Let us climb up and make war, those He did not scatter and did not merely silence. He turned them out of the shape of men. They became apes, and spirits, and mazzikin, and night-creatures that haunt the dark, things that climb and gibber and never again say a word another creature can understand.

The standing third never fell. It waits in the plain of Shinar, taller than it has any right to be. They say a man who climbs to its broken top and looks out at the palm trees of distant Jericho sees them small and crawling, like a swarm of locusts on the ground. The air around the ruin is heavy. It thickens the mind and steals a man's learning out of him, so that he comes down forgetting what he knew, scattered inside himself the way his fathers were scattered across the earth. One word built the tower. One word unbuilt it. The word was the same word, and only the hand that held it had changed.