One Language, and the Scattering

The episode occupies nine verses. The whole earth has one language and the same words; people migrate eastward, settle on a plain in Shinar, and discover a technology, saying to one another that they should make brick and burn it hard, so that brick serves them for stone and bitumen for mortar. The stated purpose of the building is twofold: to make a name for themselves, and not to be scattered over the face of the earth. God comes down to see the city and the tower that the humans are building, observes that this is only the beginning of what they will attempt if nothing is done, and confuses their language so that no one understands his neighbour. The building stops, the people are scattered, and the place is named for the confusion.

The narrative is doing at least two things at once. It is an account of why the world speaks many languages, placed immediately before the call of Abraham and after a chapter listing the nations by their tongues. It is also a description of a Mesopotamian stepped temple tower, the ziggurat, built of the fired brick and bitumen the text specifies rather than the stone of the Levantine highlands, and the name it plays on is that of Babylon. Whether the scattering is read as a punishment for pride, as an undoing of a dangerous uniformity, or as the fulfilment of the earlier instruction to fill the earth is left open by a text that never states which, and all three readings have long histories.