From Babel to PentecostVariations on the Theme of Human History

Carmen Fotescu

Babel – the Story of a Text

The “Babel tower” syntagm has for centuries entered the vocabulary of our languages as a common noun or has been approached as a literary, musical and artistic theme. It is enough to follow the semantic proliferation of the term to real-ise how deeply it is rooted in man’s imaginary. It has aroused an entire symbolic tradition around itself, as the outcome of later hermeneutical readings. Yet, beyond what we have, throughout time, made out of this motif, the Babel tower is first and foremost a text, a biblical account whose origin, contours, content and history need to be sifted through the sand of time. It is this history that we are going to closely follow hereunder. We intend to deal first with the question of textual criticism or the technical aspect of the text, focusing on its syntactical ana-lysis, followed by a semantic investigation that would enable us to move on to the reflection on the deeper meaning of the text.

I. Form and Structure

Although very short and showing no obvious connection with what comes before and after it, the account of the Babel tower seems to be inserted as an independent episode within the lar-ger context of the Flood story. The syntactic and semantic ana-lysis that will follow below will reveal both the homogeneity and

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balance of the narrative and the several composite elements oc-curring in it and whose connection is not always a logical one.

Scholars have been divided over the question of the ele-ments making up the story, as well as over the events inspiring it. There is however one general agreement they share, and this is the fact that the account belongs to the Yahwist source and whether the story may have been assembled from separ-ate motifs and themes or not, the final outcome of the narrative is still an amazing overall unity. This is as far as the scholarly consensus goes; beyond it various hypotheses have been furthered to explain both the unity and the heterogeneity in the text’s composition.

One of the earliest views, belonging to Hermann Gunkel1 and formulated at the beginning of last century, distinguishes between two redaction sources, two separate narratives, one focusing on the building of the city, the other, on the building of the tower. This approach, exclusively based on literary criti-cism, holds that the narrative combines disparate themes from multiple sources, passed on through oral transmission, and tries to elucidate the presence of doublets, such as:

— people’s double enterprise: building a city and a tower; — their double purpose: avoid being dispersed and making a

name for themselves; — Yahweh’s double descent, first in verse 5, to see the tower

and the city, secondly in verse 7, to confound people’s lan-guage;

— His double action: confounding the language and dispers-ing the people.

Gunkel’s assumption in this case was that the story is the product of at least two separate narratives, one concerned with the building of the tower, the other with the building of the city. The dissociation tower/city is not however supported archaeolo-gically, since the excavations made in Mesopotamia concluded that the building of a city triggers ipso facto the building of a tower or ziggurat. However, despite its limits in providing a sound explanation for the composite elements of the Babel nar-

1 H. Gunkel, Genesis (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht 1917), p. 12.

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rative, Gunkel’s arguments are still valuable in that they shed light on the parallelisms underlying the texture of the narrative.

There is a number of scholars who argue in favour of the historicity of the account, showing that it does not only make reference to architectural and cultural realities, but that it actu-ally narrates a historical event2. Added to these, some voices refer to the theological message of the story3, emphasising the sin-judgement-grace theme and thus placing the text in a lar-ger net of correspondences with other Old Testament texts. Whatever the arguments sustaining the origin of the narrative and its compositional structure, biblical scholars have agreed so far that there is no genuine parallel to the Babel story out-side the Bible, although motifs of it turn up here and there in the folklore of many unrelated peoples.

Thus, S. Kramer4 was able to discover a Sumerian version of the Babel episode, gathered from Ashmolean fragments and telling that the language of people, which had once been one, was confused by divine intervention as a consequence of a rivalry between the gods Enkil and Enlil. While the Genesis story has no polytheistic reference, but focuses on the relation between man and God, the Sumerian version has in common with it only one single motif, the confusion of language. In con-clusion, no single account has been found so far that would replicate, even to an approximate degree, Genesis 11: 1-9, though it is true that separate motifs of it are to be found in ex-tra-biblical sources as well. The fact may account for the argu-ment that the Babel episode was built as a combination of dis-parate motifs and themes into a structurally unified story, des-pite the occurrence of elements that do not perfectly articulate themselves with the rest of the narrative.

2 While G. Livingston in his The Pentateuch in Its Cultural Environment (Grand Rapids, 1971) suggests that the account is broadly historical, G. Aalders in Genesis (Grands-Rapids, 1981) sets on proving that the histor-icity of the Babel narrative extends to the details as well.

3 Gerhard von Rad, Le Livre de la Genèse (Genève, 1968), p. 14. 4 Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Literary Texts in the Ashmolean Mu-

seum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

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The story reveals a circular structure, its beginning and end being marked by an inclusion: “the earth was of one tongue” (v. 1) and “the language of the whole earth was confounded” (v. 9). We also notice here the opposite parallelism: while the beginning of the account emphasizes the unity of language, we witness in the last verse the shattering of this initial unity through the confusion of people’s unique language. We can distinguish three narrative sequences, one referring to space, another to people’s actions and the final one to Yahweh’s reac-tion to them. The overall structure can thus be divided into the following parts5:

Introduction – (v. 1)

Scene 1 – mankind’s journey and settlement in the Sennaar plain (v. 2)

Scene 2 – mankind’s decision to build a city and a tower (vv. 3-4)

Scene 3 – Yahweh’s visit (v. 5)

Scene 4 – Yahweh’s decision to thwart people’s plans (vv. 6-7)

Scene 5 – fulfilment of the divine decision: mankind is scattered and the building of the city is stopped (v. 8)

Conclusion – the meaning of the name Babel (v. 9).

The whole story can equally be arranged in narrative paral-lelisms distributed (I) between the characters of the story, man-kind and God, or (II) between sets of key words, as following:

5 We have closely followed here, with slight changes, the division of the narrative according to Word Biblical Commentary. Genesis 1-15, vol. 1, gen. ed. David Hubbard (Texas: Word Books, 1987), p. 235.

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(I) Mankind— movement (from the east towards the land of Sennaar): v. 2— decision to take action (“Come”, “let us make brick”, “let us

make a city and a tower”, “let us make our name famous”): v. 3a-4a6.

— the action (“And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar”): v. 3b.

— the reason of their action (to make their name famous, not to be scattered into all lands): v. 4b.

Yahweh— movement (descent): v. 5. — assessment of people’s action (“and they have begun to

do this, neither will they leave off from their designs, till they accomplish them in deed”): v. 6.

— decision to take action (“Come”, “let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech”): v. 7.

— the action (“And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands”): v. 8.

(II) The set of key words helps us organise the whole nar-rative in opposite parallel panels:

one tongue, the same speech (v. 1)

vs Babel, confusion of the language (v. 9).

people’s settlement in Sennaar (v. 2)

vs people’s scattering into all lands (v. 8).

“each one said” … “Come, let us…” (v. 3)

vs “Come, ye, let us go down…” (v. 7).

“and they said” … (v. 4) vs “and He said…” (v. 6).

6 Verses 3 and 4 have been divided here in two parts to better illustrate the separation between the imperative to act and the outcome of the action or its reason. We have thus distinguished between 3a: “And each one said to his neighbour: Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire” and 3b: “And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar”; 4a: “Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven and let us make our name famous” and 4b: “before we be scattered abroad into all lands”.

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one tongue, the same speech (v. 1)

vs Babel, confusion of the language (v. 9).

“Come, let us make a city” (v. 4) vs “they ceased to build the city”(v. 8).

“let us make our name famous” (v. 4)

vs “the name was called Babel” (v. 9).

“before we be scattered” (v. 4) vs “the Lord scattered them…” (v. 8).

According to this distribution into opposite parallelisms, the narrative can be seen as an extended chiasmus, having at its centre verse 5. Yahweh’s decision to descend and inspect people’s building project represents the turning point of the narrative, its climax and the reversal of human history. The same verse initiates the inversion of the human action, having God undoing what mankind set on achieving.

II. Semantic Analysis

The three narrative sequences identified in the structure of the Babel account correspond to three semantic registers. The dynamic or spatial field covers all that is movement, direction, location, topography. The field of action comprises two diver-gent, opposing activities: on the one hand, the human enter-prise of building a tower and a city, on the other, Yahweh’s re-action to it. Finally, the field of enunciations or the linguistic one refers to all that is language, discourse, communication, dia-logue. It is difficult to draw clearly cut boundaries between them, as they intersect one another within the economy of the text. Thus, the register of dialogue overlaps that of action in verse 3 or that of movement in verses 5-6. They are all inter-woven to convey a great sense of unity and dynamism within the narrative. Reference to them shall be shortly made in the attempt to elucidate the significance of the Babel account. We shall focus first on an inventory of semantic clusters, groups of interrelated words, either synonyms or antonyms that are com-mensurate to the semantic registers highlighted above. They

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confer the account its vivid dynamism, by pointing to two dia-lectical movements: the constructing human endeavours and the divine deconstructive response to them.

The first such semantic cluster, one tongue – same speech – language opens the narrative and confronts the reader with the image of a primordial unity of language shared by the en-tire mankind. It is nevertheless deconstructed in verse 7 and verse 9, where the Lord responds with the confusion of the lan-guage, triggering the dispersion of the once one people. The present group of synonyms is interlaced with other two clusters, both emphasizing the idea of unity in terms of space: the earth – the whole earth, significantly occurring in the first and the last verse of the story, and in terms of the inhabitants of this space: they – the children of Adam – one people. As with the cluster circumscribing the reality of language, these two subsequent groups are also reversed or counterbalanced by their opposites. The disruption of the space unity is re-vealed, on the one hand, by the group all lands – all countries (vv. 4, 8, 9), suggesting the fragmentation and division of the immensity of space into smaller units. On the other hand, quite subtly and ironically as well, the pair city – tower (vv. 4, 5, 8) points to a reduction or diminishing of the whole of the space to suit the human size. Yet, the action of building is conflated with the ambition to make so high a tower as to reach heaven (v. 4).

We must point here to the use of the imperative come, let us make (vv. 3, 4). It is repeated twice to emphasize the need for human consensus in achieving the project of building and has, as a counterpart on the side of divine action, the same imperat-ive, yet slightly different, come ye, let us go down (v. 7). The narrator seems to lay stress on the divine action of descend-ing, as in came down – let us go down, ironically opposed to people’s enterprise of the tower reaching heaven. The sugges-tion is that there is still room for Yahweh to descend and watch the human project of building.

The unity of human action in the group of make – build is equally thwarted by the divine action of scatter (vv. 4, 8, 9), supplemented by cease to build (v. 8). It is also noteworthy to pay attention to the way the dramatis personae of the narrative

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are designated. Mankind is referred to in the cluster they – the children of Adam – one people – all, yet it strikes one to notice the author’s heavy preference for the impersonal they, occur-ring no less than 9 times. The other character in the story does not remain an abstract deity, but is designated by the Lord, the very name of the unique, almighty God.

Two final semantic clusters require equal attention. One has to do with the building materials and organises itself in oppos-ite parallels brick and stone, and slime and mortar, the former elements of each pair supplanting the latter ones in mankind’s action of building. The mention is not at all randomly, as it sug-gests technological advancement, but also discontinuity of matter, which is no longer in its natural state, but “processed”.

The other semantic cluster we will mention here is our name – the name – Babel and we notice here mankind’s disposses-sion of their name intended to be a famous one in the move-ment from our to the, and finally to Babel, interpreted as the name of confusion. From this moment on mankind will stand under the sign of incomprehension and dispersion.

III. Towards an Elucidation of the Babel Story

Both the narrative structure and the semantic analysis of the Babel episode have revealed so far a strong antithesis operat-ing at the very heart of the text: the condition, location and ac-tion of mankind versus the divine retort that reverses the hu-man plans and endeavours. The unity present in the opening verses of the account, in terms of language, space, purpose and action ends up in confusion of language, dispersion and abandonment of the great building project under the divine in-tervention.

Our intention here is to closely follow the text itself, in order to grasp the manner in which its meaning and message weave their way into the texture of the narrative. The way to do it is to re-read the text, paying attention to the relations and interac-tions established among the various semantic registers already

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discussed above, as well as to the web of meanings underlying the semantic clusters listed earlier.

In the Beginning

Before we delve into the text to elucidate its message, it is of significant importance to follow the context wherein the text is embedded. We have already mentioned the fact that the nar-rative seems an abrupt insertion into the larger frame of the flood episode, ending with the table of nations in Gen. 10. The Babel story following it seems incongruous. Yet, a close read-ing of this narrative will reveal the secret connections it estab-lishes with other texts in the book of Genesis, being placed in a dialogic relation with them, sending forth to one another and shedding light on their significance in a reciprocal manner.

The verse opening the Babel account sends the reader back to an illo tempore, a primordial time when the whole earth, that is, all its inhabitants, were speaking one language. The actors of the story are not of interest here, as they are mentioned collectively by “earth”. Instead, it is the theme of a monogenesis of languages that comes to the fore to outline the vision of primordial unity and harmony. The repetition “one lan-guage”, which in Hebrew literally means “one lip”, followed by “the same speech”, is intended to emphasize the unity of lan-guage that binds all people together.

With the next verse we seem to leave behind this golden age and plunge into history. We witness the movement of man-kind, yet the direction is not very clear. The Hebrew syntagm refers to people’s migration “in the east”, or eastward, while some translations render it as a movement away from it (“and when they removed from the east…”). Whatever the case may be, verse 2 provides us with a geographical point of reference that has acquired a highly symbolic significance throughout time. East or Orient is the place of man’s origin (after God fashioned Adam in the image of Himself, He placed him in the Garden of Eden, “which is in the East” – Gen. 2:8), as well as the place where light is born. The counter-oriented movements referred to in the Hebrew original and in its subsequent transla-tions, and having the Orient as a meeting-point, are however

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imbued with symbolic significance. The journey towards Eden, eastwards, implies a movement of recovering something lost through the fall. The opposite movement, away from Eden, sends us back to the divine judgement inflicted upon Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:24; 4:16) and their rambling through the world after turning their back onto the gates of Eden.

The mention of similar journeying here may be intended as a reminder that mankind bears the seal of the same divine sen-tence. André Neher’s view introduces another possible inter-pretation; it is not about either eastward or away from the East that people travel, it is about dis-orient-ation.7 This movement triggers ontological implications as well, for mankind breaks away from its original point of reference, the place and condi-tion intended for them since creation, and sets off to find anoth-er of their own, which they take as the land of Sennaar. It is here that they settle and establish their project to be pursued: building a tower and a city.

Nomads or Settlers

The second verse of the Babel narrative ushers in several narrative motifs interlaced together to weave the description of the first group of actors in the story, such as: the passage from nomadism to a sedentary way of life, the act of building, its why and how, the way of communication and the function of language in this particular circumstance.

The major polarisation we notice here is that between the nomad versus the settled way of life, in terms of the changing relation each of them establishes with the space. The narrator, who points to the vast undertaking of a sedentarised mankind, further sustains this. Historically, the story reflects here the im-pression made on the Semitic nomads by the majestic monu-ments of the Babylonian civilisation, achieved only due to buil-ding a flourishing sedentary life. The symbolic undertones, however, can easily be felt emerging from the deep surface of the narrative, as such. For there seems to be a subtle criticism and reflection implied in the author’s rounding up his story with

7 Cf. André Neher, De L’hébreu au français (Paris: Klincksiek, 1969), p. 43.

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the image of a huge failure. Going back to mankind’s different conditions of being-in-the-world, the ontology they configure is strikingly contrasting. For the nomad, this being-in-the-world is a continuous becoming, an incessant movement that does not allow him to take the time to grow roots in one place and start building. His reference points are always trans-contingent; he moves within the outside space towards an inner centre that does not belong to this very world. The space becomes, thus, a dimension that bridges and articulates two different realms, or better, the visible interface guiding towards an unseen infinity.

The settled way of life plunges into the danger of horizontal-ity, with man starting to take space in his possession, as he perceives it hostile to him, and ending up being enclosed and suffocated inside it. A sedentary life dramatically changes man’s presence in space and time. He grasps both of them as transient, fluid and slippery, and tries to oppose their elusive-ness by placing boundaries, appropriating, building, in order to make a name for himself and thus, enter history. It is the fear of being annihilated that pushes man to grand undertakings.

The same fear of being scattered as nomads leads to the tyrannical uniformity of the Babel people who decide to settle down and start building an illusion: a name supposedly recov-ering the original lost unity through a mere tower built of bricks and bitumen. Feeling swallowed by the immensity of the space, they try to colonise it in order to get rid of the anxiety caused by the unpredictability of history. Not only do people fear space and its invitation to refuse boundaries, but they also feel as the dwarfs of time. Their daring enterprise is seen as the guarantee of entering history, of not being washed away by its tides, a diffuse longing for immortality. In their huge project however, they manage to call history by another name than its own, understanding it as mere organic growth and not as event. As such, they fail to give history a meaning by accepting its challenge and are instead lived out by history, devoured by their own enterprise.

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Bricks and Bitumen

The third verse of the Babel account is the knot created by the intersection of two semantic fields, the field of action and that of speech. The decision to build follows the collective im-perative: “Come, let us make bricks […] Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower […].” We notice the tiring and empty redundancy here, levelling out any potential individual dissension in front of a common project, emerging from the fear of being dispersed. Language is used here to reinforce unity, yet we sense it comes in stark contrast with the state-ment opening the entire story, bearing a sort of inescapable nostalgia for a lost linguistic unity of the whole earth. What we witness here in fact is the devaluation of language to a repetit-ive mechanism used to impose an artificial consensus, a “tau-tological nightmare”8.

It is noteworthy to point here to the author’s minuteness in telling us the materials people decide to make, without estab-lishing first the destination of their usage. The phrase is men-tioned elsewhere to refer to the Hebrews making bricks in Egypt (Ex.5: 7) and functions as a comparison between the building techniques of Israel and Mesopotamia. The precise mention of the materials acquires however more than a histor-ical meaning in the economy of the account, pointing to a de-tour of matter, which is “processed” and alienated from its nat-ural subsistence. It highlights the discontinuity of matter, es-tranged from its inherent destination through technology. Man and nature become alienated from each other, due to the former’s drive to possess and manipulate creation. We can also read here the beginning of man’s captivity under the bur-den of his inventiveness and technique.

A City and a Tower

Verse 4 turns our attention to the deliberations in Senaar. We now learn about the destination of the people’s brick manu-

8 I refer here to G.Chéreau’s article De Babel à Pentecôte published in Nouvelle Revue Théologique 1/2000, where he cites M. De Launay’s expression, “cauchmar tautologique dépourvu de négativité”.

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facture: to build a city and a tower. Several scholars argue that the phrase is most probably a hendiadys and this is supported by the archaeological findings, revealing that the city and the tower are two inseparable elements of the Mesopotamian urb-an reality. The emphasis here is clear: the tower whose top is supposed to reach heaven is the dominant motif of the human building enterprise and the author’s evaluation of it can be eas-ily read in the account. The project amounts to no less than the arrogance and defiance man launches against the divine tran-scendence. The creature boasts to besiege and conquer heav-en by his powers, relying on an advanced building technique. There are also symbolic undertones in this project, wherein we can easily notice how the horizontal line of the city intersects the verticality of the tower. We can recognise here man’s dis-tortion of his nostalgia after the primordial unity he lost and wants to recover.

Both the city and the tower stand here for mankind entering an atrophied history because it is lived as stasis and not as dy-namism and furthermore, because it is built on an alienating separation and antinomy between an inside and an outside. It is the age of social and political organisation wherein con-sensus is reached by razing out individual quest and aspira-tions under the oppressive imperative of “let us…”

Making a Name

Beyond the bricks and bitumen of their city and tower, the people seek to build themselves, that is, to build an identity, a name for themselves. Another gesture of defiance, for it is God alone who gives man a name and the Babel people are again attempting to usurp divine prerogatives. It is fear that motivates them in this arrogant desire, fear of being dispersed all over the earth and their decision to settle down in one place can be seen as a trespass against the divine command “to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). The sharp irony in this episode is that people seem to have forgotten they already have a name in virtue of the fact that they are living beings; secondly, they simply ignore that a name is not only a datum, but also something individual, unique and irreplaceable.

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What they want to build for themselves as a name is not at all discovering the call, the vocation inscribed in it, but provid-ing a collective designation for an anonymous entity of people, as a fragile evidence that they had once marked their presence in one place. We may see this futile and diffuse desire for im-mortality as the anti-climax of mankind’s ontological degrada-tion and the source of it lies in forgetfulness: of the One who called them to life and gave them an individual unique name, of their very name and therefore, essence. We witness an alien-ated mankind both from its Creator and from its call in the world, subject to the chaotic whirl of history, which it tries to resist. It is forgetfulness that men fear the most and it is pre-cisely forgetfulness that defines their condition in the world.

Receiving a name is, in fact, possible in virtue of a dialogue, a relation, of being called by another, outside oneself. The name already shapes a living relation with this other, but when man pretends to create his own name, he shatters the very re-lational dimension that defines his identity as a person. He turns himself into a univocal being, a self-sufficient system able to name itself and live by itself, in other words, he signs his own death-sentence. He crams his entire being into the narrow boundaries he traces for himself, such as a self-made name and a self-made space which he inhabits. This is the hopeless name and history he seems so proud to build.

The Beginning of the End

We reach now the turning point of the story. The action shifts to another dimension, heaven, and to another actor, Yahweh. From here on the narrative starts sloping down towards its dénouement. We witnessed so far the business of people and their actions motivated by fear and pride. Now we turn to a character that kept silent all this time, although he has been ever present. In verse 5 God takes a step on the stage of the story. The author’s narrative brilliance reveals itself again and along with it, heavy irony. He tells us that Yahweh decides to pay a visit to the world below and watch the tower and the city the people had built. We already get a hint of the failure of their project: after all, God could hardly see their tower that was

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thought to reach heaven. From that height it seems insignific-ant, so the Lord has to come down to see it. The end God puts to the human undertaking appears disconcerting, at least at first sight. Could it be that Yahweh becomes jealous on people’s grand project and fears them as a threat to His power? He places the limit exactly at the point where man’s desire to reach the limitless seems so close to be achieved. We are left with an obsessive question in the end: what would have happened, had God not intervened and shattered the hu-man project? The intriguing element here is that Yahweh does not destroy either the tower or the city the people had built, but intervenes at the level of language. It is to this issue that we turn now.

One Language or Languages?

God’s response to people’s action in building a name and a tower is a double one: on the one hand, He confuses their lan-guage, on the other, He scatters them all over the world. The question of language sends us back to the beginning of the text and places itself in a sharp contrast between its primordial unity, as the sign of harmony intrinsic to a past golden age, and its plurality, leading to incomprehensibility and separation. Moreover, at this point the story opens itself again towards dia-logue with other texts. If we look at the beginning of Genesis, the relation between language and the sacred comes to light in the episode of Adam naming the animals. The passage is not only an indication of the harmony between God and His creature or the gifts He makes him partake of. It equally re-veals us more about the nature of language, not a simple ac-cessory or channel of communication, but the very mould of man’s existence in the world. Gershom Scholem argues that the Aramaic version of the book of Genesis says that when God breathed His breath into man’s face, He did not make him “a living soul”, as in the Septuagint, but “a speaking soul”9. In other words, to be alive and to have the gift of language, rep-

9 Cf. Gershom Scholem, Le Nom et les Symboles de Dieu dans la Mystique Juive (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983), p. 65.

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resent for man two simultaneous effects of the same cause: di-vine creation.

Language is the very disclosure of the one who uses it to ini-tiate a dialogue, is the encounter of people’s breath of life. Not so with the Babel people, who turn language into a false and lifeless consensus, or better, into a stiff monologue. The confu-sion of language appears here not as a divine punishment or the very end of language, but the impulse for its rebirth, the breaking through the débris of the violence man inflicted upon it. The multiplicity of languages is an invitation to an incessant quest for the One, the unsaid, through the dialogic dimension of speech. It refuses the deadening trap of empty, false agree-ment and it opens in front of the mystery of the Unutterable.

God’s “punishment” equates with man’s release from his own bondage. Inside the walls and fortifications of his city, speaking the tyrannical and oppressive language of collective consensus, man would have ended up suffocated by a terribly narrow world, bearing his name. It seems that, in the end, Yah-weh comes to man’s secure by tearing down the walls he builds around him and addressing him the great challenge of incompleteness. There is nothing alienating in the divine dis-persion of people, but on the contrary, the promise of a future fulfilment.

The author’s conclusion is definitely not that of the story, as well. If his narrative is first of all motivated by explaining the ori-gin of the name Babel, and he does it so in a polemical dia-logue with the Mesopotamian civilisation, the Babel story goes on, it does not end here. It offers us a theological vision of the history and of the dialogue between man and God. It reminds man of his way of being in the world and of the danger of living without an ontological point of reference. In the end, God adds a new significance to it and thus, transforms the Babel story into a fascinating paradox. Babel is no end of the history, but its incessant resuming.

The narrative itself is unusual among all the others in the Bible. Few display such a tight, unified structure that can be distributed without effort into a mathematical diagram. It strikes the reader through its symmetrical structure, literary technique

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and ingenuity of form and it fully deserves being considered an accomplished literary work of art. Beyond this, its significance opens to ever-new horizons and questions all ages man lives in. Babel does not belong to the past; it may be even more contemporaneous with us than we would be able to admit.

Pentecost – The Remedy of Babel?

The end of the Babel story gives its reader the sense of fail-ure: the great human undertaking of a tower and a city is sus-pended and remains unfinished, while people, unable to under-stand one another, scatter all over the world. It seems as if God teaches people a bitter lesson yet, no further than the next chapter of Genesis, He initiates a history of hope through His reiteration of the life-giving call Adam had experienced in Eden, this time addressed to Abraham. With him God re-dir-ects people from the disastrous outcome of human action to-wards listening. The dialogue is possible again and the people’s rejection of movement is deconstructed by the re-sponse of one individual, the nomad Abraham. He sets man-kind again on journeying within a spiritual geography which God draws Himself. The open-ended character of the Babel story allows for the hope of a remedy. We believe this is to be found in the event of Pentecost narrated in Luke’s Acts 2. The same threefold semantic distribution of the text present in the Babel story is to be found here. The spatial, dynamic one fo-cuses on a movement of gathering, while the field of action structures around God’s theophany. Finally, the linguistic field or that of speech centres on Peter’s address to the crowd of people. Before analysing the elements of these fields closer, there are still some things to be said about the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of the Pentecost event.

While keeping in mind the ambiguity of the Babel story, in terms of both time and space (except for a clearer reference to the land of Sennaar), the other way round is true about the Pentecost event. At the temporal level we plunge into a sacred time of the Pentecost Jewish celebration. Unlike the anonym-

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ous time of the Babel story, the Pentecost time is, on the one hand, living anamnesis, because it commemorates a moment when God descended in the human history and delivered a people – the fiftieth day after the Jewish Passover and the an-niversary of the law-giving at Sinai; on the other hand, this sac-red time is always future-oriented, pointing to the plenitude of eternity. The celebration of Pentecost also defines a certain re-lation people have with God. The silence surrounding it at the beginning of the Babel story and then unfolding the chasm between the anonymous people and Yahweh is counteracted in the Pentecost event by this very reference to a celebration that restores bridges between them, through a covenant. The actors are no longer lost in anonymity and confusion about who they are and what their name is, but receive their identity as God’s people.

In terms of space, the event is placed in Jerusalem, the epi-tome of Israel’s unity and of its unique allegiance to God. All these elements framing the event of Pentecost, such as time, space, actors, are all integrated within a coherent history that God initiates after the Babel dispersion. It is not a man-made history threatened by chaos and the temptation of demagogic illusions, but one guided by God and pointing towards a future.

Pentecost: The Bridge of Renewal

A first look at the opening verse of Luke’s Pentecost ac-count (Acts 2:1), seen in comparison with the first verse of the Babel story, reveals a significant parallel in the way the two texts are structured. While in Gen. 11 the emphasis is on space, unfolding the horizontal dimension in which the Babel people get ossified, the Pentecost event has time as its refer-ence point, and not just any moment in time, but a specific cel-ebration. This is, in its turn, the commemoration of an en-counter between people and God, allowing us to glimpse the vertical dimension underlying the whole account. It already sets a polarisation with the Babel narrative, where the action seems trapped into the horizontal, though there is there the failed attempt to artificially rise to the vertical, through the build-ing of a tower reaching heaven.

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The dramatis personae in the Pentecost event are not an anonymous crowd of people, but the apostles themselves, sur-rounded by “devout men from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). Their identity is clear: they do not embark on grand building projects in an attempt to make their name, for they re-ceive their identity due to the vertical relation they have with God.

In terms of time, both stories are placed at the beginning of some age in the human history: Babel inaugurates mankind’s plunging into the human horizontal history, Pentecost, the dawns of the Church. The two texts are not necessarily set in utter opposition, but in continuity. The Pentecost seems to pick up the narrative thread right where the Babel narrative left it. The closing picture of people’s dispersion because of the con-fusion of language in Gen. 11 is continued by the opposite movement in the Pentecost story, where we see people “from every nation under heaven” gather around the apostles re-united to celebrate Pentecost. The dream of a unique language is abandoned in front of the gift of glossolalia. The diversity of languages is no longer the sign of incomprehension and the germ of dispersion, but the expression of a superabundance ir-reducible to a unique gift. If in the Babel story people take the initiative and act, at Pentecost it is God who descends and manifests Himself. What people experience in this theophany involves both auditory and visionary elements, as well as ec-static speech. Wind and fire as manifestations of God are typ-ical of theophanies within the Jewish tradition. The former is a familiar analogy with the divine pneuma, whereas fire is the predominant element in the traditions regarding Sinai.

After touching the ears of the people gathered for celebra-tion, the Spirit becomes visible as tongues of fire that separate, so that each of the apostles receives a gift and a mission of his own. The Babel levelling out of unique individualities to enforce consensus is reversed here in the picture of each of the apostles being in-dwelt, filled with the Spirit of God. The tongues of fire separate, but the principle of their multiplicity is the same Spirit.

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The efficacy of the gift is immediate: they “began to speak different languages as the Spirit gave them power to express themselves” (Acts 2:4). This is where we find the remedy for the Babel struggle to maintain the same language, as the bind-er to keep people together. Their blindness lies in their inability to see that one can be thought of as a multiple. Luke insists here on the universality of God’s gift, which does not resort to one single language. Instead, the glossolalia witnesses the ir-reducible plurality of human histories and cultures that live out of reciprocal exchanges. No language or culture alone is en-titled to claim monopoly over the whole universe of significance embedded in life. On the contrary, any of them cannot reveal but just one part of the mystery.

The Pentecost event reveals to us that the Spirit is the bond between language and life and the source of their meaning. It is in Him that they find their vivifying principle. The value of lan-guage is revealed here: it is not an instrument or a mere exer-cise of communication. Language is like air, that is, vital, the breath of life. Its value is, therefore para-linguistic, simply be-cause language can communicate the incommunicable, the in-expressible.

The quest for meaning cannot be separated from life, since it places the quester on the path leading to the transcendent. The Babel people tried to fill in the void of meaning in their life through a lifeless material building, forgetting that their name does not lie outside their being. It is not in man’s power to fo-ment significance for, as the Pentecost event unfolds this, meaning is something given, received. Its source is the Spirit. This is why the Babel project went to ruins in the first place, be-cause the world thought of itself as self-sufficient and closed it-self inside its walls, rejecting anything coming from beyond or above it. Men too often forget that they are not an end in them-selves, because they exist in virtue of Another’s wish to call them to life. As such, the essence of their existence lies in their being oriented towards this Other.

When the Babel people become dis-oriented, they lose the bond that confers meaning to their life and shapes their iden-tity, and this bond is a living relation with their Creator. But hu-

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man history does not end here. There is always a Pentecost to continue and counterbalance Babel. People will not remain blind forever; there will always be a small number of them re-jecting the barriers and walls of the world to remain open to the divine Spirit. They will acknowledge the living principle of their life as a gift coming from outside their narrow world. Finally, they will understand that the essence of life is not something they possess in themselves, but lies in remaining open to what comes from above them.

Pentecost answers all the dead ends and dilemmas of the Babel people: the question of recognising one’s identity, the language as one or as a multiple, man’s place and role in the world. What the apostles understand, following their vision, is that their identity is an open one that is fulfilled in a dynamic way. Life is not stasis, but growth, movement, flowing. Identity is, therefore, the name of man’s vocation in the world; it is not something external, institutionalised, nor is it conferred by mere external action. It is imprinted in man’s being as a dy-namic reality incompatible with the act of settling down, becom-ing fixed and rooted in the world. This is why God’s dispersion of the Babel people is in no way to be seen as a divine punish-ment coming from a jealous God, but a re-launching of human history on the right tracks: moving forth in the world to escape its temptations and conditionings. Subsequent to the Pente-cost event, the apostles understand that the gift of the Spirit sets them on the move and each receives a mission. That they remain faithful to it can be seen throughout the book of Acts, which evokes their missionary travels that initiate a new begin-ning in the human history: the birth of the Church. This is the reversed Babel, because it does not aim at erecting a tower to reach heaven, but it recognises that it is the gift of the Spirit that unites the divine and the human in one dynamic reality. There is no need for a single language to keep the people of the Church together. All-inclusiveness instead of exclusion ful-fils the universality the Babel people failed to achieve. Luke stresses this by offering a long list of people of various nation-alities that witness the apostles’ gift of glossolalia:

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“Parthians, Medes and Elamites; people from Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya round Cyrene; residents of Rome – Jews and pros-elytes alike – Cretans and Arabs, we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God” (Acts 2:9-11).

These all are part of a new people founded not on layers of bricks and bitumen, but on the gift of Jesus’ life.

Receiving a Name

The struggle of the Babel people to make a name for them-selves epitomises the struggle of us all to define our identity, individuality and life. Pentecost is the locus and founding event of a new history and a new people. Who are they? In what terms is their name defined? The text in Acts 2 that we are analysing here does not provide us with the specific answer, although this is implied here if we read it attentively. In Peter’s address to the crowd after the ecstatic vision, he praises the name of Christ, whom he acknowledges as the Lord. It is only in Acts 11 that the new people built through the outpouring of the Spirit will receive their name: “It was at Antioch that the dis-ciples were first called Christians” (Acts 11:26). It is not a name they make for themselves, as the Babel people had striven to, but one they receive because they accept to follow their Lord. The name “Christian” provides them with their identity, that of being disciples, which is a dynamic reality, because it implies an incessant uprooting in order to follow their Lord.

Instead of Conclusion: Babel – Pentecost, Two Moments of the Same History of Grace

While reading the two stories of Babel and Pentecost, we have plunged into the reality of human history, living in the ten-sion of its two poles. At one end there is Babel, the reminder of collective anxiety, of a no name people with an empty onto-logy, all of which find their expression in a dry, sterile and re-dundant language. It is an open-ended story that does not fin-ish when people are dispersed all over the world. They will

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take with them wherever they go the aspiration of starting again, somewhere else this time, another Babel tower, and an-other “name”.

Each age falls prey to the illusion of building its own name, taking itself as the measure of all things. Babel is definitely not in the past, but yet more present here and now than we would be able to grasp it. It stays as a burning baffling question mark: how are we to avoid dissipating our energies in indefinite quests? Where are we to find the shield protecting us from the risk of frenzy that makes us rely exclusively on our power? How are we to grow without armouring ourselves behind the fortresses we build all the time? So many other questions are there that Babel continues to challenge us with. Yet, all its de-sires and aspirations are not in vain, in fact they are part and parcel of the dilemmas of the entire mankind yesterday, today and tomorrow: the longing for universal communication, for be-ing saved from death, and finally, the longing for being recog-nised as a unique individuality.

The Babel people strove to achieve all these in and by themselves, forgetting their limits and the precariousness of their condition. The end of their wreckage was altogether deliv-erance. In G. Chéreau’s words, “the dreaded exile is a time of trial whereby faith is internalised and strengthened”.10 The deep human longings expressed in the Babel episode begin to be fulfilled in the outpouring of the gifts of the Spirit. The time of desolation and dispersion is continued by a time of renewal and consolation when God communicates His healing gifts to the whole mankind.

The lesson that Babel teaches us is a tough one: we should stop any illusory human enterprises that end in drying up the sources of life – one single language for all, arbitrary power, in-definite identity. The lesson that Pentecost in its turn teaches us is more comforting and given as a mission to be fulfilled in the world: language is a living reality that exists, is expression of plurality and has to circulate to maintain dialogue both at the

10 The quotation is from G.Chéreau, “De Babel à la Pentecôte”, Nouvelle Revue Théologique 1/2000, p. 34: “L’éxil redouté est temps d’épreuve où la foi s’intériorise et s’affermit”.

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horizontal and vertical level. A new people is built at Pentecost, out of men and women scattered all over the world who recog-nise one another because they share a common bond: the same Lord. This is the people of a new space and a new time: a new creation vivified by the gift of the Spirit, living a future-oriented life that integrates the promises of the past and the present of their faith. Its name is the Church and its unity is the outcome of people and Spirit working together.

The story does not end here, however. In a sense both events, Babel and Pentecost, refer to us all who live today and tomorrow. We are also witnesses of tribulations of history, of moments of crisis in which the inescapable why of existence becomes all too tantalising. These are moments that warn us not to lose ourselves in the horizontality of earthly life, but al-ways remember that the two elements of our path are: follow-ing our Lord by being his disciples, and living in the presence of the Spirit. Babel and Pentecost point to two landmarks in our lifetime journey in this world. They define man’s condition, hov-ering in-between heaven and earth, eternity and history, yet a state marked by the invisible gift of the divine grace.