The Tower of Babel is a story that often presents a challenge to contemporary readers—a straightforward reading leaves a number of unanswered questions. Is this really how diversity of language arose on the Earth? Why exactly was the Tower built? And what was so problematic to God about the building of the Tower that He felt the need to intervene in such a direct way? Most secular scholars see this narrative as ancient mythology that puts forward an origin story on how the diverse languages of the world arose. The book of Genesis, where this story resides, is famous for its brevity in storytelling. As most Western readers lack a historical or Middle Eastern cultural context for these narratives, it can be particularly challenging for us to “fill in the details” on things in the Torah or Old Testament narratives that the writer assumed the listener or reader would already understand. While there will always be scholarly nuances to debate about this 3000+ year old story, there are a number of fascinating elements with real relevance for our own modern lives. The Confounding of Language First, while the story comes across as an origin story on the languages of the world when divorced from the rest of the larger book of Genesis, from a strictly textual perspective this cannot be the case. The story does indeed say that God confounded the language of those building the city/tower to disrupt their work, but in Genesis 10:5, even before the story of … Read More