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So a couple of years after the flood, maybe decades, or was it centuries, I’m not sure, I also honestly don’t care, I couldn’t be bothered to research this any further.
Anyhow, some time after the flood, the descendants of Noah aka Humanity 2.0 were wandering about the earth looking for a place to settle. Probably a century or two, given the Noah family had fucked each other enough to spawn Humanity 2.0.
So everybody’s related, your wife is your cousin or your sister (or your mother? Who knows!) and everybody speaks the same language. What a time to be alive!
They finally find a plain that seems like a decent place to settle down in. Soon enough they discover the magic of building houses. And they say:
“Let’s make some bricks of clay and bake them in the fire.” Then they used these bricks as stones, and they used tar as mortar. Then the people said, “Let’s build ourselves a city and a tower that will reach to the sky. Then we will be famous. This will keep us together so that we will not be scattered all over the earth.”
Now bear with me for a second:
Imagine you’re living with your family and your mother is your wife but also your sister and you’re all comfy, but some of you are getting bored, and you’re afraid people might start moving away because there’s nothing much to do after six pm on a Saturday. Wouldn’t you too build a tower for good measure? No? Me neither.
But somehow, according to the scribe of Genesis, this is in part the reasoning behind building the tower. Another reason is they want to be fucking famous. I’m not sure who they want to be famous with as they are the only people on the whole damn earth but if that’s what you want, be my guest. If it makes you feel better looking in the mirror, go right ahead and build that tower.
God, on the other hand, is not happy.
He comes down to take a good look at the city and the tower and pleased he is not. He says:
“These people all speak the same language. And I see that they are joined together to do this work. This is only the beginning of what they can do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want.”
Let’s take a closer look at this. God is the kind of bloke that wants people to know about him, ergo: he wants to be famous. God creates humans in his image, meaning: they share his traits. But the second humans want to be like God, in this case: be famous, he goes mental.
Also: the fact humans can build towers took him by surprise? Not much of an almighty God, really.
Be that as it may, God decides he’s had enough of these shenanigans:
“Let’s go down and confuse their language. Then they will not understand each other.”
At this point I’d also like to ask: Who’s we? Who the hell is he talking to? Is this some Gollum Smeagol type shit going on?
Why does it cry, Smeagol. Don’t worry, filthy little humans won’t have the precious for long.
So God starts inventing languages and assigns these to different parts of the happy little incest family. The construction on the city is halted and humanity is scattered across the earth. God happy.
Or maybe all that was a huge misunderstanding. According to Josephus, being famous wasn’t the motivation at all behind building that tower.
Rather, humans hadn’t forgot the flood. They remembered in vivid detail how God had let a flood kill everybody apart from their relatives. So Nimrod, the king of the humans at that time, intended to build a tower so high it would rise above any flood God would be able to send.
Sure, God had made an oath that he would never again destroy all living things. But then again: Better safe than sorry. Turns out: With God, you’re never safe, no matter what.
I’m honestly trying not to be a dick about this, and maybe it’s just me, but who the fuck is this God? This is just another one of many bible stories that doesn’t paint God in the best of lights (which is weird, given he’s supposed to have inspired the writing). In the grand scheme of things this is obviously one his more merciful punishments. But with every new story God appears more and more to be some kind of vain, petty, vindictive, insecure little bastard, torn between narcism and an inferiority complex, less of a friendly old man with a white beard and more of a pale incel penning hateful tweets from his mother’s basement.
I mean, seriously: Disrupting human development because you’re scared of their tower? Weird flex but ok.
Source: Genesis 11
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This one time God was so offended he invented languages