The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The story of Babel from the Bible tells of a great city who were able to accomplish much because they spoke the same language and were able to work together. The Old Testament God (who was notoriously spiteful) felt threatened by their success and to tear them down, divided them by making them all speak different languages.

I, like most modern Americans, reject the traditionally monotheistic idea that there is an all powerful man in the sky controlling everything about our world– science has all but disproved it. But that is not the point of the parable. When we stopped believing in religion, we lost the spiritual sense that we are all interconnected. The point of religion was not for us to grovel for some higher being, it was for us to be united as a people.

The story of Babel reminds me of our nation's motto “e pluribus unum”-- “Out of many, one”. The founders knew the wisdom from the story "united we stand, divided we fall". In America, we have stopped being able to understand each other across states, cultures, and social classes. We must find a way to all get back on the same page again, or divided we will regress into chaos.