BAVEL BABEL Gen 11

CONTEXT: A gem of etiology for communication problems. Three word plays–in one of the shortest of stories–defy translation. “Bake bricks,” in the original is “brickify bricks,” literally, “make white.” “Bitumen” and “mortar” are different forms of the single Hebrew root, חמר, chemer, chomer. Bitumen is a naturally occurring thick, sticky substance in the low land of Babylonia.  The main pun of the story is Bavel, Babylonia, which is seen as a form of בלל, balal, “mix.”

            I have parenthesized verse 9 as extraneous, a gloss by someone concerned lest we miss what was for him the point of the story. I think the point of the story is the origin of misunderstanding and conflict.

            ¹It was that the whole land had a single language, and few words. ²It happened, in their travel from the east, people found a valley in the land of Shin’ar and there they settled.

            ³They said, one man to his fellow:  “Let us bake bricks. We’ll fire them in a fire.”

            Brick was stone for them. Bitumen was as mortar.

            ⁴They said: “Let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its head in the sky. We’ll make ourselves a name, lest we get dispersed over the face of the whole land.”

            ⁵Yahh descended to see the city and the tower that the human beings had built. ⁶He said: “Well, they are a single people with a single language for all, and this is what they start doing?  And now nothing will be insurmountable to them, whatever they scheme to do. ⁷Let us go down there and mix up their language so that they won’t hear one another’s language.”

            ⁸Thus Yahh dispersed them from there over the face of the whole land. They gave up building the city.

            (⁹That’s how the city came to be called Bavel, for there Yahh mixed up the language of the whole land, dispersing people from there over the face of the whole land.)

© Rabbi David L. Kline            http://good-to-be-a-jew.blogspot.com/