Question: What about the Tower of Babel?

Question: When the tower of Babel fell, God created different languages as punishment so the people could not communicate with each other. Is this the way the story goes? If so, how does this fit in with this diversity push we have nowadays? We have 60 languages spoken in our schools. This can’t be an advantage to the students or teachers if they cannot communicate.

Your question makes some assumptions about how we read the Bible. In our book study on “Reading the Bible again for the first time” by Marcus Borg, one of the things we learn is that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are much newer than the rest of Genesis. We also learn that the stories are meant more to tell us deep truths about God and humanities relationship to God than they are meant to be factual accounts of history. The story of the Tower of Babel was most likely told in answer to the question of why different people spoke different languages. The answer given is that humanity was not yet ready to work together for the benefit of all. The story is a repeat of the lesson learned in the Garden when Adam (humanity) and Eve (the mother of all) were tempted to eat of the tree of knowledge and then be like god (small “g” intended). In the Tower of Babel story, the people were going to work together to build a tower high enough to storm the gates of heaven. The implication is that they too wanted to take over the “god” spot in the world. God then looks Way Down to see what they are doing and decides to confuse their languages because humanity has just proven they are not quite ready to work together as the children of God. Today we are still not ready to work together without someone trying to turn it into an opportunity for self aggrandizement.

The Anchorage school district is not alone in confronting a plethora of languages spoken by its students. This raises the question of how to effectively handle this dilemma. On the one hand it is not practical to attempt to teach each and every language. The cost to the school districts would prohibitive and destroy the unity as well as multi-cultural learning that takes place in and out of the classrooms. The exposure to the multiple cultures and languages brings a richness and a depth to learning and understanding that cannot be taught in a mono-cultural classroom. On the other hand, there are some populations which are large enough and whose English language skills poor enough to warrant portions of their education being in their native languages. The need is not to segregate (which when you put kids together in one school is not the norm anyway) but to help some of the larger segments of the population be able to compete on a bit more of a level playing field. My son who had had several years of French was able to experience first hand the difficulties of mastering new educational material in a language he had learned, but that was not native to him.

As we go through the process as the children of God of discovering what it means to truly be brothers and sisters in Christ, it takes a lot of balancing. There is no one language or culture that is superior. There is no one language or culture that can teach us all we could or should know. The question then becomes not what is the least we can get away with in offering a thorough education to all our brothers and sisters among us but rather what is the most we can afford to do in offering a broad and diverse multi-cultural education to all our brothers and sisters in Christ. In doing so we avoid finding ourselves on the top of the tower trying to storm the gates of heaven in our (lower case) god aspirations, and having God bending way down low to scatter us until we grow up some more.