The Tower of Babel

Thomas Magbee (0:07)

Hello, and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know, a podcast about architecture such as towers. My name is Thomas Magby, I'm joined as always by Mr. Graeme Donaldson and Mr. AJ.

We are doing, oh, wait, I don't understand what you're saying. Wait, hello?

Graeme Donaldson (0:23)

C'est un no comprendez? C'est une langue différente.

What?

Thomas Magbee (0:29)

Sorry. Tu ne comprends pas? You're switching between your languages. I just can't understand any of this.

Graeme Donaldson (0:34)

It's almost as if the languages were confused.

Thomas Magbee (0:35)

They're all getting all mixed up right now. Babadaboubidi. No, that's not, nope.

Graeme Donaldson (0:42)

Thank you. Wow, look at you, AJ with his Italian.

A.J. Hanenburg (0:45)

I'm studying Italian on Duolingo, no big deal.

Graeme Donaldson (0:48)

Don't want to brag or anything. Which means you are a beautiful Italian listener. Please email us. And you want to talk to the guys.

If you want to tutor AJ in a romantic language. Mariette.

A.J. Hanenburg (1:01)

That means t-shirt.

Thomas Magbee (1:06)

Anyway, Graeme, you're leading our episode today.

Graeme Donaldson (1:07)

Camerino.

A.J. Hanenburg (1:08)

That's dressing room.

Graeme Donaldson (1:10)

Today. Oh, my word. We are going to talk about The Tower of Babel. And mainly because I wanted to talk about the literary form that it's written in, because it is a cool literary form that you can find everywhere in the Bible. But I also thought maybe it would be interesting to talk about The Tower of Babel, and the sort of the combined effort of humanity to destroy themselves.

You know, just with this AI moment we are living in. No relationship at all. I actually have a hard... I don't know why people interpret The Tower of Babel as being some kind of like anti-technology passage, which a lot of people do. So maybe we can talk about that later. But what I really wanted to do is I wanted to talk about the literary and structural form of the story, because it introduces a literary style that happens a lot in the Bible called Chiasm, and I just want to talk about the Chiasm, because I think the Chiasms are super cool.

A.J. Hanenburg (2:10)

There's like a mountaineering thing you'd fall into.

Graeme Donaldson (2:13)

Yes, exactly. You'd take a ladder to cross it. Yeah, you got to put a little ladder across the Chiasm.

Yeah, I don't know how else to make that funny. All right.

Thomas Magbee (2:25)

Incredible stuff.

Graeme Donaldson (2:28)

So in brief, what a Chiasm is, is that it comes from the Greek letter Chi.

That's where the name comes from. The Chi is an X.

So a Chiasm is where you have a passage or a story or a text, and the very first thing, let's see if it's the story, the very first beat of the story is going to mirror the very last beat of the story. The second first beat of the story is going to mirror the second last beat of the story, etc., etc., until you get to some sort of middle turning point. And that middle turning point ends up being, like, the sort of interpretive lens for the rest of the story. So the middle of the story ends up being the thing that the story turns on, or you can use that middle part as the framework to kind of interpret the motivations and the rest of the story. Does that make sense?

Thomas Magbee (3:20)

Yes.

Graeme Donaldson (3:22)

So everything is leading up to a middle point, and then from that middle point, everything is flowing out, and the leading up and the flowing out should sort of mirror each other beat for beat. So I'm just going to read. So the Tower of Babel narrative is just nine verses in Chapter 11 in the Book of Genesis. I'm just going to read it, because it's just nine verses. So here we go.

Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, behold, they are one people and they all have one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they proposed to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore, its name was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.