You know, you just can’t get good algumwood these days. I blame Wal*Mart.
Lots more, if you believe the Ethiopian legend. 
600 wives, 400 concubines, and the horndog still had to have a little on the side . . .
There’s the fun bit where King David recaptures it, then leads the procession dancing around so that his tunic is flying up and all the people can see his bottom (and possibly his genitals?) so his wife gets cross at him for exposing himself in public. That’s CRUCIAL to the Ark “story”, I think you’ll find. 
SecondJudith, I thought that procession and David’s crazy-ass bare-ass dance was specifically when the Ark was finally conveyed to Jerusalem after it had been resting somewhere else for Far Too Long. (During which time the Philistines periodically got bored and played “Swipe the Box.”)
It was always my understanding that God wasn’t afraid they would reach heaven, but more that they had the pride to believe they could and/or that it was built as an act of defiance against God.
Your interpretation is an obvious one, but it is only an interpretation, and the plain text reads otherwise. For whatever reason, God did not want the people to be able to achieve anything they wished.
I can’t find a cite for it anywhere, but when I was much younger, I remember a particular teacher expounding on that verse for a stretch of Sundays with a theory that the Jewish people had seen either the ziggurats or the pyramids, and were bummed that they didn’t have anything like that in their own culture. Resultingly, they essentially handwaved a story about God smiting people in the “way misty past” therefore preventing their great cultural building achievements.
My obvious question was if God had really smitten everyone ‘way back in the misty past’, how then did the pyramid and ziggurat builders get theirs built to inspire the envy?
It’s funny the unfounded ‘theories’ that get thrown around.
Being older now, I also wonder if that whole theory even deserves that much limited questioning, because I seem to recall the Israelites being a nomadic warfaring people, and spending your time conquering all your neighbors doesn’t exactly lend itself to great building projects.
I always took it as simply an explanatory “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” myth – a way to account for the fact that people speak different languages. The Tower was used just because the Hebrews were vaguely aware that Mesopotamian ziggurats existed – and, perhaps, that Mesopotamia, at all times after the early Sumerian period, was a land of many tongues.
Actually the Israelites were not ever a nomadic warfaring people, that almost certainly was part of a consciously invented national mythology (so is Exodus), but that’s another discussion.
Remember, the people who build the Tower were neither Hebrews nor Jews, being pre-Abraham, so I doubt the legend has anything to do with the lack of big buildings in Jerusalem. I agree it is a just-so story, and the root of the tower legend was no doubt someone coming back to Jerusalem and singing
Everything’s up to date in Babylon City
They went about as fur as they can go
They went and built a temple, 20 stories high
That’s as high as a temple ought to go.
[peeve]
Cliff’s Notes. Notes belonging to Cliff Hillegas. No crags involved.
[/peeve]
Oh, and, the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia. (We have to take their word for that, because nobody is allowed to look at it but one caretaker monk who is never allowed to leave the room.)
Sorry. I sometimes type fast and if spellchecker doesn’t catch it, I often let it go.
Hi, thanks for all the great input, so it seems as if I have quite a mixup of all possible sources of all the fragments that I remember, so it’s not Biblical at all but rather Fictional…
Yes, and sometimes people would intermittently trip and fall against it and BE SMITED. It was a jolly time all right!
For most of the parts you’re talking about, it’s pretty much the same thing.
LOL
Yeah but some of those other “maybe” artifacts are doozies. Along with the boring stuff like Aarons staff, some traditions place 5 golden hemorrhoids and 5 golden rats in there as well. The ones given by the Philistines when they captured and returned the Arc after having 50,000 of them die from the hemorrhoids.
Yes, if “trip and fall” means “reach out and touch” and if “sometimes” means “once.”
The ark was a holy object and Uzzah knew that touching it was forbidden, that’s why it was carried with poles or on a cart.
This particular story always stunned me. Uzzah tries to protect the Ark from falling and getting damaged, and Yahweh smites him for that, on principle. He could be such a prick sometimes.
:eek: I’ll take the bubonic plague, thank you!
Commonly taken as that the Bible does not state that and leans more towards mis-communication between people of the same language. The translation is usually ‘confuse their language’.