The Tower of Babel
from Archbishop Cranmer:
This is the sixth contribution to His Grace’s emergency team ministry during the coronavirus pestilence. It comes from the Rev’d Robert Jackson.
Over 3,000 years ago, a man, who might or might not have been Moses, wrote down an account that someone today, if sufficiently academic, would refer to as an etiology. Someone else might call it a ‘just so’ story after the manner of Rudyard Kipling. By way of explanation, if Kipling might want you to know why a whale has a small throat, Moses wanted you to know why there are so many languages on earth. As far as Kipling is concerned, a whale has a small throat because a sailor who it swallowed built a raft in order to partially block the throat, so as to prevent the whale from swallowing anymore people. Likewise, the reason the world is full of people who speak different languages is because, when they had just one language, they built a tower which God objected to, and who, as a result, gave them different languages.
I sometimes wonder which account is more likely to refer to a real event. And in light of this, you may well be wondering why on earth I’m going on about the Tower of Babel at a time when not just our nation but our planet is in the vice-like grip of a tiny virus that is exercising a power way beyond anything we’ve witnessed for many a decade… and maybe, right now, I’m wondering why as well! But I’ve started, so I’ll press on.
Heading back to the Beginning, having created, God takes a day off and lets Adam and Eve get on with it. Unfortunately, it goes wrong, and because they decide to ignore God’s prohibition and forge their own path, Adam and Eve are ejected from the Garden. The seriousness of this disobedience is made plain when Cain murders his brother. We then encounter a lengthy genealogy that feels pointless as one reads it, but does in fact offer up the opportunity for there to be a lot of people in the world. This numerical proliferation then confirms that when humans get on with it, the result is untold suffering all round. God decides he’s had enough and prepares to get rid of the problem. But lo, there is one righteous individual who ought to be spared, and so there follows an ark, two-by-two animals, and a flood of epic proportions. As the floodwaters drain away, a rainbow appears to signify no more floods, and then two things happen: God, echoing his charge to Adam, instructs Noah to be fruitful and fill the earth, but then Noah gets drunk, his sons behave badly, and mankind gets on with it.
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