God's Challenge To Mankind

There is an educational exercise in which a group of people (it can be children or adults) is given a pile of old newspapers and a couple of rolls of masking tape and, in competition with another group or groups, has a limited period of time in which to build the highest free-standing structure. It is an exercise which is meant to encourage teamwork and co-operation, an exercise which separates leaders from followers. And the educator facilitating such an exercise cannot help but be fascinated by the level of interchange and creativity which is engendered.

It would seem that the Almighty, however, took a rather less pedagogical view of such human co-operation and creativity when it came to the construction of the biblical Tower of Babel – a curious ancient story which was read in synagogues yesterday as part of the annual reading of the Five Books of Moses. At this stage of its development, according to the authors of the early chapters of Genesis, human beings all spoke the same language and used the same words. This made it possible for them to work collectively on such a venture – and God appears to have been profoundly threatened by the prospect of humanity working together in this way.

‘If this is how human beings with a single language propose to act,’ muses the Almighty, ‘then nothing they might seek to do will be out of their reach.’ So what? One would have thought that any teacher or parent, divine or otherwise, ought to be delighted to see his or her children striving towards new achievements and co-operating closely with one another in order to get there. And without wishing to go into great detail, it seems reasonable to state that God’s attitude to humanity as manifested in religious traditions too numerous to mention can generally be described as a desire for humanity to construct a just society in which all are treated fairly and a world in which there is peace and harmony between different groups of people.

It’s true that we’re not given much information about the nature of the society which sets about building the tower but it’s clear that they are perfectly able to co-operate with one another and work together and that they are not seeking to destroy each other. At least, not until God stepped in and muddled up everyone’s language and confounded their speech and scattered them all over the earth. So what on earth was God playing at?

Clearly on one level, the story of the Tower of Babel is simply an explanatory device for human beings living several thousand years ago who were just beginning to look beyond their own limited borders which framed their view of the world. It offers an explanation as to why there are peoples with different languages and cultures living adjacent to – and presumably further away from – their own settlement. People who basically look the same but whose language is different and who have a different (though probably not that different) culture.

But the theological question, however abstract, still remains. Why would God, the divine parent of all the builders of the Tower of Babel and their subsequent descendants deliberately frustrate the attempts of early human beings to work together by creating a multitude of languages and scattering the speakers of those languages across the planet? Was it some manifestation of divine mischief? A large scale social experiment to see how long it would take for the speakers of the various languages to find one another, learn to communicate and eventually to return to the point where all of humanity could speak with a single language?

A closer look at the story of the Tower of Babel reveals two things. Firstly, the builders’ main purpose in constructing the tower was to make a name for themselves lest they were scattered all over the world. This suggests that the construction of the tower was a defensive and a protective measure – an attempt to shut the world out rather than to confront it and come to terms with it. Secondly it’s also worth noting that what can be perceived as a very negative divine point of view changes somewhat when set alongside this first observation. It might well lead us to a simple but obvious conclusion: God stepped in because the divine perception was that humanity was not ready, not wise or perceptive enough, to be able to make such achievements.

And so began the journey from that valley in the land of Shinar to the East of Eden in which the construction of the Tower of Babel was begun and then frustrated. A journey on which humanity would be confronted with numerous challenges, with leaps forward and slides backward. A journey on which it would regularly encounter fellow descendants of the team of tower builders whom it would stubbornly refuse to recognise as part of the same human family, preferring instead to do battle with them to establish a sense of tribal, racial, ethnic or national superiority.

One cannot help but wonder whether God had cause to regret the destruction of the Tower and the subsequent dispersion of its builders across the globe. God may have been concerned by the what people might achieve if they all shared the same language; one can only guess at the divine dismay at what people were able to do to one another and to the world once those languages had been changed.

Nevertheless, this reality did present humankind with a series of possibilities which were not available to it in those simple, good old days when we all spoke the same language and wanted to build a tower and a city to keep the world out. The journey which saw the people scattered across the world was one which challenged humanity’s creativity and will to an extent far greater than settling for a tall building made of brick and bitumen. A journey of exploration, of self-discovery and of discovery of the world, its dangers and its possibilities.

And here, today, we celebrate one of the many manifestations of that journey. A university, an institution dedicated to the extension and development of human knowledge, the very task which lay at the heart of the divine dismay and intention when the construction of the Tower of Babel was brought to a halt. The confusion of languages, the confounding of tongues, the reality that we lived then as now in a world of many tongues and cultures was made clear to our ancestors then. It was and is a world of which it was our divinely charged duty not to be afraid but rather to respond to with curiosity and courage, to build edifices and institutions which will not, as that biblical tower intended, protect us from the world beyond us but rather to give us opportunity to explore it, challenge it and be challenged by it.

And what a challenge it was. For it could still be argued that God was determined to continue to confound the process of human development, humanity’s education and learning about itself and the world. After all, if we believe in the claims of various religious groups to have been the recipients of divine instruction in the form of some revelation, then God remained keen to ensure that the development of humanity to the point at which it was once again ready to co-operate as it had done in the days of the Tower of Babel would be slow and would receive many setbacks. For nothing has contributed more to the failure of humanity to recognise fellow human beings as partners in the work of perfecting the world than the belief of various groups that they are the sole guardians of divine truth and that any other group is wrong and must be shown the error of its ways.

Here, then, is our divinely charged task – the true purpose of the educational venture which was instigated at Babel and continued in institutions such as the one we celebrate today. To uncover through learning and study the mysteries of our world and of our place within it; to fashion a society, a world, built upon wisdom, not ignorance, upon certainty, not superstition; upon mutual trust and understanding which accommodates and values the differences in our cultures rather than hiding from them in bland, ignorant uniformity. And an occasion such as today, celebrated by members of many different faiths, acknowledging the value of an institution as noble as the University of Edinburgh takes us a step further from those biblical days and a step closer to fulfilling the divine purpose as set out in chapter eleven of the Book of Genesis.

For the secret of understanding the story of the Tower of Babel is to recognise that its message lies in the fact that God confounded the speech of the various participants in the exercise of construction to complicate the human venture in order to make its eventual success more valuable, more lasting. Anyone can work together to build a tower if they all speak the same language and have the same understanding of themselves and the world. The real challenge is to achieve that same task when there are literally hundreds of different points of view, hundreds of different ways of expressing it and hundreds of different languages in which they are being expressed.

That is, and always has been, God’s challenge to humankind. The secret of its success lies in our ability to acknowledge the value of the contributions of others rather than remaining convinced that we are the only ones with the correct answer. The search for truth, the quest for wisdom and understanding has always been at the forefront of human endeavour, no matter how often it has been thwarted by those with narrower points of view. May this institution, those connected with it and all those who are committed to the continued progress of humankind and its triumph over that which has always threatened to arrest its progress continue to thrive and, unlike that biblical Tower of Babel, bring not frustration but rather joy and hope to humanity and its Creator. Amen.