For most of my life, I thought of the first chapters of Genesis as the Bible’s painful warm-up act. Adam and Eve sin and lose paradise. Cain murders Abel. God wipes out humanity in the Flood. A mob builds a tower in Babylon. Disaster after disaster after disaster. And then, thank God, comes chapter 12. God calls out to Abraham, and the real story begins.
The older I get, the more I realize how wrong I was.
Take the Tower of Babel. Most of us categorize it as “background information.” It explains why humanity speaks so many different languages, and it warns us against the arrogance of trying to be God. Nine verses, and then on to Abraham.
Today marks thirty years since the passing of my teacher, Rabbi Yehuda Léon Ashkenazi. The son of the chief rabbi of Algeria, he was wounded fighting the Nazis in World War II and became the leading Jewish thinker in France after the Holocaust. He moved to Israel right after the 1967 Six-Day War, and quickly built a following of students.
Rabbi Ashkenazi taught that the Tower of Babel is not mere “background” to the story of Abraham. It is the foundation of the entire Bible! Everything that follows, from Abraham to the prophets, is God’s answer to what happened in that valley in Babylon.
How can a strange little story about a tower be the foundation of the entire Bible? What really happened in that valley four thousand years ago, and why does it still matter today?
The builders state their goal in their own words:
Why were they so afraid of being scattered? If a few families moved to the next valley, what harm would it do?
Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the great 19th-century Bible commentator known as the Netziv, finds the answer in the very first verse of the story:
“One language” is clear enough. But what does the phrase “the same words” add?
He explains that the people of Babel all believed the same things, and they demanded that everyone else believe them too. Nobody was allowed to think differently.
The Sages tell us what happened to anyone who tried. As a young man, Abraham smashed the idols in his father’s shop. His father, Terah, handed him over to Nimrod, the king of Babel. When Abraham refused to bow to the king’s gods, Nimrod told him: “I bow only to fire. I am throwing you into it. Let your God come and save you from it!” Nimrod threw Abraham into a fiery furnace, and God saved him. That is what Babel did to independent thinkers.
Now the tower makes sense. It was not a monument. It was a watchtower. The leaders of Babel were terrified that if people moved away, they would begin to think for themselves. The tower kept everyone in one place, where they could be watched. Like the communists of the twentieth century and the woke Democrats of the twenty-first, Babel allowed only one opinion.
Unity is a beautiful thing. But Babel did not believe in unity. They believed in uniformity.
So God stepped in:
This is an enormous moment in human history. In the chapter just before the tower, the Bible lists the nations descended from Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. They add up to seventy. Today there are almost two hundred countries, but in the Bible, “seventy nations” means all of humanity. And those nations exist only because God scattered humanity at Babel.
So was the scattering a punishment or a gift?
In one sense, it was a gift. Different nations do different things brilliantly. Greece gave the world mathematics. Rome built a sophisticated legal system. Japan built a culture of teamwork and discipline so powerful that its car manufacturers came to dominate the global auto industry. One way of thinking can only produce one kind of greatness. Seventy nations can develop human greatness in seventy different ways.
But the scattering was also a tragedy. God confused their language “so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” The problem runs far deeper than different languages and the challenge of translation. After Babel, each nation holds only one piece of the truth, and each struggles to understand the others. Humanity now sees the world in seventy different ways. What we do not understand, we fear. And what we fear, we eventually fight. The scattering of humanity led directly to war between nations.
How does that war between the nations unfold? The Bible maps it out for us in a dream, and fittingly, God sent that dream to a king of Babylon, the very land where the tower once stood. The king was Nebuchadnezzar, and he dreamed of a huge statue. Its head was gold, its chest and arms silver, its belly and thighs bronze, its legs iron, and its feet a mix of iron and clay. Then a stone struck the feet, the whole statue crumbled to dust, and the stone grew into a mountain that filled the earth (Daniel 2:31-35).
Daniel explained to Nebuchadnezzar that his dream is a blueprint, a map of all of human history until the final redemption comes. The four metals are four empires that will rule the world one after another. The Sages identify them as Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. The stone is the kingdom of God, and the people of Israel with it.
All four empires chased the same goal: to undo the scattering of Babel and bring all of humanity back under one rule. But not one of them understood what real unity means. To each of them, unity meant that everyone must speak their language, worship their gods and live by their laws. Each empire held one piece of the truth and tried to force it on the rest of the world. Anyone who refused was crushed. These empires did not repair the Tower of Babel. They rebuilt it.
Nebuchadnezzar commanded all “peoples, nations and languages” to bow to his golden statue or burn in a fiery furnace (Daniel 3:4-6). Persia looked tolerant, until Haman told the king that the Jews’ “laws are different from those of every other people… it is not in the king’s interest to tolerate them” (Esther 3:8). The Greeks tried to make the whole world Greek and banned the Sabbath and circumcision in the Land of Israel. Rome imposed its law on every nation from Britain to Babylon and crushed whoever refused.
And the pattern did not end with Rome. The French Revolution promised liberty, equality and fraternity, and within a decade Napoleon’s armies invaded half of Europe. The Nazis tried to force their racial ideology on all of Europe. The Soviets tried to force communism on half the planet. Today radical Islam dreams of bringing the entire planet under the rule of Allah by the sword. Human history is the story of one nation after another trying to conquer the rest and make them all the same.
But Nebuchadnezzar’s dream does not end with the statue. It ends with the stone:
The Bible’s list of seventy nations does not include Israel. That is no accident. Israel is not one of the seventy because Israel is God’s answer to Babel. That answer begins the moment the tower story ends, when God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house and go to the land He will show him.
And why does God’s kingdom come last in Daniel’s vision, after all four empires? Because humanity must first exhaust itself. Only after the nations fail again and again to make everyone the same will they be ready to hear what true unity means.
What is the true unity that Israel will bring to the world? In the end days, every nation will stand united before the God of Israel, the Creator of heaven and earth. But how each nation lives, and how each nation serves God, will remain different. Each nation will keep its own language, its own culture, its own music and its own gifts. Every nation, Rabbi Ashkenazi taught, is a different flower in the bouquet of nations, and God treasures each one. Israel’s job is not to make the other nations Jewish. Our job is to be the rubber band that holds the bouquet together.
Isaiah saw that day: “Many peoples will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may teach us His ways and we may walk in His paths.’ For instruction will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:3). The day is coming when the corrupt United Nations in New York City will be torn down, and the true United Nations will be rebuilt in Jerusalem, at the house of God, where nations will finally learn how to live in peace with one another.
It is a beautiful vision. But anyone who spends a week in Israel knows how far we are from it. Israel itself is a highly complicated and diverse country made up of Jews from all over the world with different customs perspectives, and we argue about everything. How can a people this divided teach the world to live in unity?
The answer goes back to the very beginning of the nation. God did not build Israel out of one tribe. He built it out of twelve, each with its own character and its own gifts.
That was no accident. Before Israel can teach the world what true unity means, we must achieve it ourselves. The twelve tribes of Israel are God’s laboratory. If we can fight the bad ideas of some of our fellow Jews while still honoring their unique gifts and greatness, we will be ready to show all of humanity how to do the same.
Babel demanded that everyone be the same. Jerusalem will show the world how to be different, together. May God help us get there soon.
