from “You’re a lemur.” Even the appearance of mutual
understanding may be deceptive; after all, God uses the word “die”
in a deathless world without bothering about being understood. And
while the biblical redactor is noncommittal about whether the
humans understood their God, the poet John Milton in Paradise Lost
was unequivocaclass="underline" they did not because … how could they?
This occlusion of understanding may be why there is only a
modicum of conversation in Eden, very little of it quoted. For
example, whether Eve actually speaks to Adam is anyone’s guess,
since she is never directly quoted in conversation with him. After
Eve eats the fruit, the doings that follow—sharing the fruit, donning
leaves, hiding out—occur speechlessly, in a quick dumbshow of
shame that ends in the first rhetorical question: “Where are you?”
God asks, and the ensuing duet of inquisition and blame isn’t much
of a conversation either. In the cascade of divine curses—on man,
on woman, on serpent—speech travels in one direction, from power
to powerlessness, and after Adam renames “the woman” Eve
(Genesis 3:20), he will never name anything again, ceding the
naming of his sons to their mother. At best, Edenic conversation is a
lopsided affair; at worst, it’s sabotaged, whether by divine
commandment or serpentine deception.
By the time we reach the story of Babel in Genesis 11, whether
God and humans speak the same language is almost beside the
point; they barely speak to one another. After the flood, when the
smoke from Noah’s sacrifice rises, God, for the first time, can be
heard muttering to himself: “for the imagination of man’s heart is
evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). What takes God by surprise, in
the Babel story, is that humans have connived to do something in
concert and on their own initiative. After the fiasco in the garden
and the fratricide in the field, after all the quotidian murders, rapes,
and betrayals, one wouldn’t have thought so: “And they said, Go to,
let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven;
and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the
face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). Their project—manifold and
complex, like so many human undertakings—was hotly debated by
the rabbis of the Talmud. Some apologized for Babel’s builders,
whose aim, they reasoned, was to climb up and slit the tent of
heaven where another unjust flood awaited innocent and guilty
alike. Other rabbis staunchly defended God. For them, the builders
were a concatenation of sinners with various motives: to colonize
heaven, to worship idols, to lay siege to the kingdom of God. And
accordingly, they argued, God meted out fierce punishments to the
builders, some of whom were turned to apes and others to
phantoms.
But perhaps the rabbis overlooked a different provocation:
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower,
which the children of men builded. And the LORD said,
Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language;
and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go
to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another’s speech. (Gen. 11:5-
7)
What exactly was their offense? This was not the first time human
beings “imagined” evil plans repugnant to God. In Genesis 6, when
the “sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,” he’d conceded
that “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and … every
imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”
(Genesis 6:5). What was new to Babel was the builders’ plan to
“make us a name,” for to name oneself is to usurp a divine
prerogative. And since the punishment at Babel was to avenge the
human will to “make … a name” for oneself, God doomed each of
the builders to speak only unto himself—to speak without being
understood by another. God might have punished the builders of
Babel by constraining the power to build, to rule, or to go to war,
but he did not. Nor did God ram unintelligible phonemes into their
mouths. Instead, having direly misestimated the power of human
conversation, God blunted the human capacity to understand others
and to elicit understanding.
In fact, the biblical narrative says nothing about the
multiplication and dispersal of languages. The proverbial name for
the story, from the Middle Ages on, is “the confusion of tongues”
(confusio linguarum), not “the diffusion of tongues.” In fact, the
Hebrew word for “language” (safah, a lip rather than a tongue) is
always singular in the story, as it is in the Latin Vulgate and the
English King James Version. The “curse of Babel” renders all
language as opaque as if it were what we call “foreign” language,
and though “the same language and the same words” spoken at the
beginning are spoken after the tower falls, translation has become
necessary, even for speakers of the same tongue. If mortality is what
it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding—to speak perpetually
in need of translation—is what it is like to live after Babel.
But the ruin of understanding was only one consequence of Babel.
After destroying the tower, the builders’ hedge against being
“scattered abroad,” God scattered them throughout the world. What
better way to punish their arrogation of peoplehood for themselves,
their choice to be a people? To give God his due here, we can
imagine God’s weariness, his exasperation with humanity. “I will
never understand them,” God might have thought. “I made them
Eden, they sinned; I dried up the flood and they sinned again. Twice
I filled their lungs with heaven and twice they spent my breath in
evil. I have tried twice, twice, to make humans.
“Now I will make Israel.”
When God renamed Abram Abraham, the curse of Babel was
complete; with one carefully interpolated syllable, an idolator’s son
became the first Israelite. God’s crowning revenge on the builders of
Babel was the choice of Israel, and there, on Israel, God’s attention
rested, leaving the rabbis of the Talmud to finish off the builders of
Babel. Which they most certainly did, declaring “the generation of
the scattered” personae non gratae in the world to come.
The Tower of Babel story is not only a myth of misunderstanding;
it is also a myth of the diaspora as an existential condition. From the
Babel myth, Zamenhof intuited that the perpetual impulse of
humans to stake “a name for themselves” on a piece of territory
only compounded the problem of misunderstanding. And while
Zamenhof accepted misunderstanding as part of the human
condition, he refused to accept its human costs: lives lost to
tribalism, anti-Semitism, and racism; pogroms just yesterday and
perhaps a war of empires tomorrow. Instead, he set about to
convince misunderstood and scattered human beings that they had