The Very Tall Tale of Babel | The Shalom Center

The Very Tall Tale of Babel | The Shalom Center: "The tale is an ironic parody, a joke at Babylon's expense. 'Bav-El' meant the 'gate of God' in the Babylonians' own language, but the Israelite legend parodied it as 'Baffle/Babble Town.' As the Israelites told the story, the arrogant Sumerians built an imperious tower for an empire whose power they intended to rule the earth so that everyone would have to speak the same language.

Their rigid tower challenged 'YHWH,' the breezy, whirly, swirly Breath of Life.

But the Breathing-spirit of the Universe, the Wind of the World, (Ruach ha'Olam) baffled them by turning their world-language into babbling. They became Babylonians, 'Babble-onians.'

This diversity was not so much a punishment as a consequence of and a cure for their disease: Try to unify all humankind into a single empire, talking the same language so as to storm Heaven -- and the almost inevitable consequence, as well as the cure for this disease of arrogance, is that the top-heavy empire will dissolve into many many peoples, grass-roots communities of many tongues and cultures."