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Where we talk about the world’s first messy skyscraper

By Juniper

It is a goddamn Babel!

Very evocative expression. You may have heard or pronounced it, or something very similar. For example, a more creative and more vulgar version, removing the almost polite nowadays “goddamn” and enriching the sentence with another colourful lexeme. Whatever the case, let us not focus on the vulgar part of it, but on the biblical quotation.

For each one of us language lovers, the story of the Tower of Babel is simply fundamental, as it stands there in the Bible to explain why the populations of the world do not speak only one language. Wouldn’t it be nice if we spoke one common language, all around the globe and that was it? Well…it would be easier…but I would be jobless, so do not even think about it and let’s thank God we have thousands of languages. Indeed, in the Bible it is God the one we have to thank for the pure existence of the need for translators.

Nevertheless, the origin of every language, big and small, on the planet was not meant to be a blessing, but a punishment (and every high school student will share this view on the subject). So, gratitude or retribution, let us all go through the story of the Tower of Babel.

The story (Genesis 11; 1-9) goes that after the Great Flood the human race spoke a single language. Migrating eastward, they got to the land of Shinar (southern Mesopotamia) and there they decided to found a city and built a massive tower, tall enough to reach Heaven. The Lord one day came down to Earth to see the city and the tower and confounded their language so that they might not understand each other anymore. God then scattered them all over the planet and they ceased to build the great city.

Now, let us consider that growing up in a traditionally catholic country, I got a traditional catholic education. I think that at least 85% of children in Italy have attended Catechism: it was designed as a complementary subject, but it used to be so common and widespread, that our minds conceived it to be as mandatory as official school education. It was a crucial, social element of our lives: all my friends went to the neighbourhood Youth Club and attended Catechism. We listened to the priest, preacher, or educator for one hour, and then off we went to buy an ice-cream and play football or hide-and-seek. Knowing the audience, and its attention span, the complicated concept of theology had to be simplified and filtered in order to convey the basic principles of Catholicism. Therefore, complex parables were deferred to an older age, and fairy tale-like passages were to be preferred. No offence to religion meant. It was simply obvious for everyone that to make a group of 7-years-old understand a theological issue was easier when speaking of a great tower, or of a giant whale. At the end of the day, the Old Testament always won for its abundance of catchy narrative features. Thus, we get to me, reading the story of the Tower of Babel for the first time.

To my eyes, utterly linguistic-free back then, the Bible provided a comprehensible and riveting explanation to all those strangers who did not speak Italian (DON’T BE JUDGIMENTAL, I was only 6 years old!). Now, I consider it to be one of the most interesting pieces in the Bible and the Tower of Babel deserves a decent explanation. How would men build such an appalling skyscraper thousands of years ago? What did it look like? Why was God so irritated by their attempt?

I do not dare investigate and analyse the stylistic features of the Bible, but it is interesting to see how humankind has depicted the Tower and interpreted the passage in the centuries that followed. The basic message of the biblical story is that the men who designed and put into existence the Tower had to be punished for their arrogance and foolish overconfidence.

Their hubris condemned us all, and as God is a very creative God, he chose to deprive people of their mean of communication, thus preventing any collaboration between the sinners. Please try to imagine the building site of the Tower: engineers and workers wandering around shaking bricks and trowels, uncapable of understanding each other.

Let’s recognize that the Lord has style.

When I was about 15 anyway, I came up with a question to my religion teacher: why is it so bad for men to want to reach God? I understood that being LIKE God was bad, but WITH God? Why would it be so wrong if I wanted to reunite with the creator? Researching and studying, an answer was found: a very contemporary interpretation of the episode tells us that the tricky issue is not men reaching God, but how many men can reach God. To understand we must go a little bit off-topic and talk about architecture.

What do you see if you try to figure in your mind the Tower of Babel?

Well, luckily for those completely ignorant about historical architecture like me, figurative arts can lead us through the path of transformation in the iconographic representation of the Tower. Back to the time of its construction the concept of tower was very different from now: forget the tall, narrow, linear building we learnt from medieval art and embrace the curious but likely vision of Peter Bruegel the Elder. The Dutch painter gave birth to the iconic representation of the Tower as a round building, raising spiral-shaped and covered in arches, niches, and alcoves. Good old Bruegel found inspiration in our beloved Colosseum, but it must be recognized that the shot was quite precise, as in his paintings (three in total, of which only two got to us) the Tower is depicted as a sort of truncated cone.

As a matter of fact, old civilizations did not have means and technologies to build thin, slender buildings; towers used to have wide basis, and got more and more narrow raising up. The more the tower grows, the “slimmer” it gets. As a result, on the first floor there will be room for X persons; on the second floor there will be room for less; and on, and on, and on till our massive ancient skyscraper reaches the sky and there is room for only one single person. Here is the sin. Christendom is a very democratic religion, and the idea that only one person (and let’s be honest, that person would have been a king) should reach for God is deeply erroneous and against the very founding principles of faith.

Very reassuring, isn’t it?

Now that we have gone through some of the main distinctive traits of our story, myth, call it as you like it, the question is:

why Babel?

The origin of the word itself is misty, as the phrase “Tower of Babel” never appears in the Bible, but theologists and linguists have then figured out many theories about the etymon of the term Babel.

First of all, it could derive (and I would like to highlight the conditional, as no theories have been confirmed) from the akkadic term bab-el, that is the gate of God. The myth may have been inspired by the Babylonian immense ziggurat Etemenanki, which in Babylonian was called Bab-ilu (literally “Gate of God” but also known as “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth”).

On the other hand, in Hebrew, this huge building was called Babel, or Bavel. Sticking to Hebrew, the noun could descend from babal, which stands for confusion, indicating the great havoc of noises or voices consequence of God’s punishment. If we make one step away from the theories and tried to look at the picture in an all-encompassing perspective, we could start to get a glimpse of the stylistic, linguistic masterpiece that the name Babel is. As a matter of fact, it wink to the city of Babylon, where early Israelites would be captured later in history and disparages it and its inhabitants. At the same time, it vaguely and indirectly refers to the chaos that followed the punishment of the Lord as the similarity in pronunciation of Babel (proper name of the Sumerian city) and babal (“to confuse”) led to the play on words in Genesis where we actually read for the first and only time the term Babel: “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.”

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, the composer of Genesis was using a multilingual pun to outline one of the most iconic episodes of the Old Testament.

Amen.