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 and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that they 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. (Genesis 11:1-9 TNIV)

Our story begins with a technical advance: people have learned to make bricks. Immediately, they use this new technology to strengthen their unity and their autonomy. Cities, in the Book of Genesis, are places where people hide behind walls to protect themselves, since they no longer feel in harmony with the whole earth (see Genesis 4:17). And building on the plain a tower “that reaches to the heavens,” just like one of those high mountains where people used to go to encounter the divinity, is an excessive act whereby human beings imagine that they are the Source of life.

Under these conditions, the unity they so deeply desire is perverted from the outset. Significantly, it is expressed in negative terms: “...so that we may not be scattered....” People prefer to be strong by standing side by side in an attitude of opposition to what is outside, rather than to fulfill their mission to receive and communicate God’s blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Note that the story offers no positive reason for this attitude of self-defense: it is as if, with no real enemies, humans feel obliged to invent imaginary ones to strengthen their identity “against someone else.”

At that point God enters the story, first as an observer. He finds that a unity imposed “against others,” and implicitly in rivalry with him, God, does not correspond to the reason for which he created them. For that reason he decides to bring their foolish plans to naught. His desire to keep humans on the right road is once again seen as a punishment. Blinded by their apparent power, the builders of the tower imagine that by scattering them, God is acting against their aspirations. In fact, he is protecting them from the consequences of their illusion. Their inability to communicate will have a positive and paradoxical result: it will lead them to fill the earth and develop to the full all their potentialities.

After a long detour, the human desire for unity will be achieved unexpectedly, in a way that is a thousand times better. The miracle of Pentecost (see Acts 2) displays a unity which, far from being a forced uniformity, is a communion in diversity, retaining all that is valid in every nation and in every person. Such unity without violence is cannot be the result of human activity. It can only be received as a gift, one brought by the Spirit of God arising from the depths of the human being. The project of Babel (or Babylon, see Apocalypse 17-18) becomes the symbol of all human totalitarianism; it represents a pursuit of efficiency which skips steps and neglects the necessary times of ripening.

 Must technological progress and the search for efficiency always work against listening to God and caring for others? What enables us to combine these two realms?

 What is the difference between uniformity and unity? What examples do we know of a life together that does not abolish diversity?

 In what ways does the story of Pentecost (Acts 2) form the counterpart to this text?