It would be difficult to have arrived where you are right now without having heard the story of the Tower of Babel. It would be as difficult as getting where you are without a single bowel movement. Everyone poops. Everyone knows this story. Myself, I keep a copy of the King James Bible on my toilet, so I do both at the same time now and then.
So, why not retell it for a modern audience? No doubt someone finds retellings derivative. No doubt, that person doesn't realize they’ve just been retelling stories, too. Ten thousand years in - at least - it is impossible not to. As impossible as it is to have never heard it.
It is a story designed to make an architect shit, much as a portrait of George Washington in an outhouse summons British shit quite involuntarily.
Every story about hubris. Each tale regarding arrogant men laid low. These are derived from this story or spring from the same ancient and perplexing human condition we still suffer, celebrate, and mourn, as occasion demands.
A benefit of the modern day is the existence and experience of the ancient day. We place less emphasis on deities, perhaps considering ourselves such, instead. But our predecessors were so similar to us, the story translates perfectly well for our age.
All that is required is replacing God - Elohim, Yahweh - with the universe itself. Or a particularly negligent architect. But I repeat myself.
Long ago, before history was written or men remembered beyond a generation, humanity was one. We all lived together in a sort of time share before Florida Man rode his hog into the garage door and cost you a deposit. Oh dip!
We all spoke the same language and we were all on the same page. We cooperated to create wonders and miracles, rather than world wars or Mellow Yellow soft drinks.
We crafted structures to challenge heaven. Challenging how is unclear, but heaven felt challenged all the same. It could have been that No Gods No Masters back patch the contractors wore when they were setting the mortar. Who knows? Dude's a jealous god and I sincerely doubt they're a Crass fan.
The slightest thing sets him off.
So, when the height of human cooperation in the prehistoric world reached its peak - say thirty feet or so tall - this jealous sky god from the desert smashed it down. Or the atheist contractors laying mortar skimped on material. It was probably that one. No regulation, you see.
The tower tumbled, all one hundred bricks, burned hard. Lives were lost. Maybe four or five. The tower wasn't very tall. Heaven was lower to the ground back then which explains why this God fellow seemed to be visiting us so often. That and I suppose maybe he was a young god, unsure of how an omnipotent and omniscient entity is to comport themselves among animals.
No one gave him a user’s manual and his own father went down the street for a pack of universes and never came back. A common story.
With the tower fallen, he then scattered us all over the world - likely by encouraging us to slowly migrate over millennia and generation - as a punishment for having discovered the art of stacking stuff on other stuff. To boot, he then took the Proto-Indo-European words out of our mouths and replaced it with garbage like Latin and English and the Legalese our intrepid contractors used to get away with it.
That last part probably just happened due to the migration thing, but it’s easier to blame a conscious entity. It also makes a great vehicle to stuff in a moral about something else. We can pretend a powerful god, familiar with the deepest and highest mysteries of the universe, was worried we would leave them if we ever reached them.
There was zero chance chattering primates were a threat. But damn if that song from the link above isn't amazing, anyway.
The point of the story is not that building a tower to reach the sky will be destroyed by a toddler double-fisting lightning bolts. The point is no matter how well planned a plan may be, once it is executed the universe and all within it has a say on its execution.
The moral of the story, as most morals, can be reduced to a single sentence. An aphorism. No plan goes according to plan. Apparently, even an omnipotent and omniscient plan. If it had, that tower would never had to have been destroyed as it never would have been built. The Soviet Union also wouldn’t have collapsed.
Hubris is generously defined as arrogance in the face of the gods. Swap out these gods or God for the universe, remove the conscious intent, and apply the idea to the real world. You end up with a stark warning that despite greatness and genius, you are just a man. Or a woman. Or whatever you like. But you're not guaranteed success even if the plan calls for it.
The universe will have its say and before it does, you’ll want to invest in insurance.
So, you tell me readers, whether the moral of this story is worth holding onto. Or whether one wants to focus on the literary and literal flair of the Old Testament.
Both are quite good, if hardly understood.
I’ll end this with a quote from our greatest American philosopher Eric Hoffer, who quite clearly understood all of this. Like myself, he knew language and architecture were not the point at all. Humans considering themselves as gods was, and that proclivity continues to this day.
“Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build “a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” and who believed that “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” - Eric Hoffer
Sic Vivitur.
Through out religious history...don't mess with the big guy!