Weirdness: The Tower of Babel

¹ Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. ² And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. ³ Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. ⁴ And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” ⁵ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. ⁶ And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. ⁷ Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” ⁸ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. ⁹ Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. (Gen. 11:1-9, NKJV)

The Tower of Babel has always been, for me, among the more vexing accounts in scripture. Now, I have no problem with God's supernatural power, so his confusing of the language is an easy pill to swallow.  It's "just" another miracle that God produced--not willy-nilly like a parlor trick-- but as part of his overall redemptive plan, a plan that would take advantage of if not require, millennia later, the existence of many diverse nations. (I believe Gen. 10, the descendants of Noah, includes the timeline of the Strange Incident at Babel.) God needed a chosen people, so in order to have an in-group he is here setting the stage for an out-group.

The problem I had with the account has never been the supernatural, but the natural. I had always imagined, influenced by both the words and the Cecil B. Demille depictions, that the people built a tower with the actual intent of reaching the heavens. How did a Bronze Age (at best) culture have the technology to build a tower that "reached the heavens?"

I don't think they did. I think a tower that "reached the heavens" was both hyperbolic and relative to other construction of the age. I suspect that they were indeed employing bleeding-edge building techniques which to the populace would have been worthy of the hyperbole, but the actual height of the tower was probably on the order of, at most, 100 ft, not the thousand or so feet of my imagination. One age's "reaches the heavens" is another age's "meh."

It's pure speculation, but what may have happened at Babel, in addition to the sowing of seeds for a multicultural, multinational earth, was, as a bonus, the curtailing of a nascent version of "We don't need God" secular humanism. Nipped in the bud in a most efficient manner, although in truth (and alas) only placed in abeyance.