What did God have against man creating the tower?
He was just being a dick. He was going through a lot of heavy shit and dealt with it by taking it out on others. Later, he felt bad about being such a jerk and let us kill Jesus to make up for it.
According to the story, God thought that if humans were unified and had only one language, they would become too powerful. That “nothing would be impossible for them.” There is also an implication that tthey might be able to “touch heaven.”
Some people interpret the Babel story as God punishing hubris, but that’s not what the text says. The text says that God thought they would become an unstoppable force. God was a-scared.
He didn’t have a problem with the tower itself, he just wanted it rezoned so that mid-Babylon traffic wouldn’t be such a nightmare and parking rates wouldn’t go through the stratosphere.
Even when I was a religious kid I always thought there was a lot of data missing here. The people of the ancient world didn’t have access to our information but they weren’t stupid, and they certainly knew that their resources (labor and even bricks) weren’t unlimited, and while they may not live in site of mountains they surely knew oftheir existence within a few days walk. They also would have known that it would be absolutely impossible to build something higher than a mountain (the base would have to stretch for miles on each side) and and while they might not have had the technology and equipment to scale the mountains to the peak they certainly could have gotten high enough to know they weren’t in the heavens. The tallest ziggurat on record (one that some scholars believe was the inspiration for the ToB) was only about 25 stories high- extremely impressive for people without motorized cranes and earth moving equipment but not even 1/20th of a mile high and certainly far lower than they had been able to climb in the mountains.
Add to this that the Sumerians never claimed to be trying to rise into the heavens or bring all people together (under their control perhaps, but not together). They were building gi-normous monuments to inspire awe in their own people and other and to please their gods and I’m sure the military uses of being able to see for many miles away wasn’t lost on them.
This always sounded, even when I was religious, like a major case of tribal envy of civilization. Also since the early ones were built of mud bricks which even if hardened don’t last forever, so there would have been any number of impressive ruins visible to the writers of Genesis and a mad god is a lot more interesting than gradual erosion and decades or centuries of neglect, plus you have the fact they can’t understand you when you speak to them.
In a way the ToB myth started my skepticism, because its origins are so obvious and then that made me think “what else likely began as a simple explanation or cautionary tale?” (if not in those words).
From the quote Dio helpfully posted, I’m not 100% sure it was the tower; they say they want to build themselves a city (with a nifty tower) so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the earth. The big guy comes down “to see the city and the tower” when concluding that, yep, they’ll just keep on succeeding unless this whole thing gets nipped in the bud.
Obviously we’re putting primary emphasis on the tower, to the point of almost ignoring the city. What happens if we put primary emphasis on the city while almost ignoring the tower?
It was the way man was building the tower, a representation of men suppressing and enslaving men in order for a very few to rise to the heights of God, with Satan at to top. The tower was made of bricks, which is fired clay, or at least dried out clay. Clay is also what man is described of, we are clay in God’s hands (Ro 9:21) so He can shape us into beautiful works of art. The devil tried to just make us into bricks (note the Israelites making bricks in Egypt, basically forced to make their own children into slaves for Pharaoh, also relates to the Pink Floyd song anther brick in the wall ). The removal of water is what allows us to form into these hard structures, God wants to give us water freely (Zech 14:8, John 4:14), but the devil makes us pay for the little water we get (Lam 5:4).
I believe the tar instead of mortar, is sin itself which holds us in place.
The tower was destroyed because God hated the oppression of man Satan was using, enslaving mankind so the devil could rise up to the level of God. Destroying Satan’s system of enslaving humanity would have the effect of destroying the physical tower, as the tower is a physical manifestation of the spiritual system of enslavement.
The devil’s next plan was the pyramid, with a much wider base to raise himself up.
That’s clearly not what God says in the quoted section. Is there a time when He said otherwise?
Fallen Archangel, born before time, witness to the creation of the cosmos but unfamiliar with structural engineering.
So apparently the Devil is a moron.
The scriptures are all interrelated, God is good and cares for His children, the wrath of God is God removing some of His protection The story is the same in scriptures, the oppressed cry out and God topples the oppressors.
You almost have to read the scriptures as if Satan was relaying the message in order to make God look bad and Satan look good, which makes sense as Satan was given dominion over the whole world.
Killing God’s Son, yes the Devil is a moron
kanicbird’s religious often have little or nothing to do with what’s written in the Bible. That doesn’t make them righter or wronger but it should be kept in mind when reading his opinions about scripture.
But there are any number of points in the OT where, as a matter of scripture, the oppressed cry out and God topples the oppressors. They’re certainly not shy about mentioning it – or specifying when the devil is in fact operating behind the scenes – when that is the case; why not mention it this time?
Again: sometimes, sure. But this time, it’s quite explicit that God didn’t remove any protection; He decided to ruin what men were doing because He didn’t like what they were accomplishing without His protection.
You, uh, read that in the scriptures, did you?
Kind of like how, when The Beatles became too powerful and claimed they were “bigger than Jesus,” God sent them Yoko Ono.
It’s the same story over and over, told from a differing perspective each time. They combine into a single story, the redemption of man by Lord Jesus. The plagues of Egypt, are the plagues of Revelation, the mark of the beast in Rev is in Deut 6:8 while Ez 9:4 shows the mark of the servants of God as described in Rev. And in those 2 you can see the two paths, Satan’s, holding people under the Law, and God’s looking only at the heart of His people.
Why is it not the same every time, because it’s different perspectives, some will include aspects that others leave out.
Why didn’t He like it? The only reason that agrees with the unbroken scripture, would be that it would hurt His children. To God we are like 2-4 yr olds, Satan is like a teenager trying to fool us into hurting each other then having us the young children fight each other while turning to Satan for help to have more power. God allows this till one of His little ones starts to cry, before this we would not turn to God, because we think we can handle it ourselves.
It does say that the evil one has blinded men to the truth of God. The truth of God would be God’s Word. So yes.
It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that contrary to popular belief, God did not destroy the tower in the story, he just confounded the people’s language so that they became disorganized and “scattered,” and stopped building the tower on their own. This gives the story the earmarks as a just-so story for not only for multiple languages, but possibly for an unfinished (or unfinished looking) ruin of a tower somewhere. It wouldn’t be the only time a myth was spun to explain an ancient (ancient even relative to the writing of the Hebrew Bible) ruin. They did it with Jericho, for instance.
Even with being a John & Yoko shipper, that made me laugh.
I 'unno. Toronto?
IIRC, Jericho was inhabited alongside the ancient Hebrews. The Babel story is cleary a “history” myth meant to explain the origin of things. As a record of early oral histories, the Bible is unusual in not having them, but there are some.
It’s a juste si story, is all.
As stated upthread, it’s clearly a “just-so” story explaining the multiplicity of languages, and perhaps the prevelence of ruined cities containing ziggurats. Note that in Sumeria, the tops of Ziggurats were symbolically magic places, and linked with the connection of heaven and earth:
Thus, it may not have originally meant a tower that literally reached as high as heaven, but one that symbolically or ritually did so - in that it contained a shrine of the gods that existed in a sacred space, that is, the “heavens”; that connected the world of men (the earth) and the world of the gods (heaven). Perhaps the original story-tellers, or redactors, heard of this, and misunderstood the notion - the tower in the story became one which literally reached as high as the heavens.
The notion that God is afraid of humans becomming too powerful (and messing with them so they won’t) is a common biblical theme. The same idea is found in the Adam & Eve story.
Genesis 3:22: