Some Genealogy, The Tower of Babel, and Some More Genealogy (Genesis 10-11)

[Gen. 10:]

Enjoy:


The quiz will be next Tuesday.

[Gen. 11:]

Toward the end of the genealogy in Gen.10 there's a line that reads, "...their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations." (Gen. 10:31) Funny that just a couple sentences later, chapter 11 begins: "Now the whole earth had one language."

Where to start, where to start.

Over the centuries there have been myriad compilers, compositors, and redactors of the Bible: the scribes of the Babylonian Captivity and the scribes from the time of Ezra, translators into and out of Greek and Coptic and Aramaic and later Latin - then a thousand-some years of medieval copyists, an edition brought out by Erasmus, then the King James Version and finally the multitude of revised and corrected translations available to the modern English reader. My point is, the Bible has had a lot of editors. Why have none of them cleaned up basic discrepancies like these?

It just seems weird to me.

I understand that conflicting data get into the narrative because there's more than one narrative: J and E and P and D laid side-by-side, all of them different writers from different periods of Jewish history. But did the editors who did the laying-side-by-side not find the result odd-looking? Is this just the intrusion of my hoity-toity modern sensibility? Why, if I could just think and perceive like a person of 200 BCE, I would pay no mind to contradictions of fact and flat-out logical impossibilities....

Bah. This was the age of Archimedes and Aristotle. Can somebody fill me in on what I'm missing here? I understand the Bible is more a library than it is a book. But do you prepare a library by just jamming all your texts together, including bits that contradict other bits?

Admittedly, this particular inconsistency is minor. But the moment seemed apropos to grouse about inconsistencies... since we have come to the tale of the Tower of Babel.

It's a short one. A bunch of enterprising men settling in the Shinar plain (presumably Mesopotamia) decide to start baking bricks and building some buildings (presumably a ziggurat). God decides that that will not fly.

Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. (Gen. 11:6-7)

Wow. As Tom Araya of Slayer so brilliantly put it, "God hates us all." We just can't catch a break from the guy, can we? His original plan for us (God's, not Tom Araya's) was apparently that we live out our lives as naked dopes - you remember how mad he got over that eating-from-the-Tree-of-the-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil incident. Not that God made it hard for man to get over the hurdle of his initial ignorance, what with his putting the tree right there in Eden and all.

Next, God goes and tries to destroy humanity in a flood, changes his mind and spares one family, afterward makes nice with the family and promises not to kill them. Good and well - the family gets on with its fruitfulness and multiplication. But then - egads! - a few of them want to put up a tall building. NO, saith Zoning Commissioner Yahweh. "Let us go down, and there confuse their language."

(Let "us" go down? Eerie. Who are these other guys God's hanging out with? The answer is that it's the council of El, the supreme deity under whom Yahweh began life as a junior associate in charge of hunting and war. But don't tell anybody I said so: that's rank paganism!)

(Hey, by the way, what's with God's tall-building-o-phobia? This Tower of Babel zigurrat, was it taller than the 88-story Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur? Because their construction in 1998 has occasioned no particular reaction from God. Any more than did the advent of Esperanto in 1887. But back in the old 1200 BCE, boy, God was no fan either of tall buildings or of linguas franca. What's changed?)

It's hard reading this (meaning Genesis so far) under any interpretation but a gnostic one - that is to say, God is humanity's enemy. Perhaps the God coming up in a moment, the one who makes a covenant with man, can be seen as a fellow with a less antagonistic agenda. But even that God seems hardly just. Why should the Jews be the chosen people? What's wrong with all the other people God created?

But I get ahead of the story.

--Chapter 11 closes with a repeat of some of the genealogy from 10, tracing the line from Noah's son Shem to a certain Peleg five generations down; and we follow the lineage from Peleg a further five steps to arrive at Abram - the very guy who's going to be receiving that covenant.