Babbling in Babylon

After the flood Yahweh was good to Noah and his family.  He encouraged them to have lots of children so they could increase the population of the earth, since there weren't any people left after the flood except Noah and his family.

Yahweh told Noah that from now on, “Every animal on earth, all the cattle and the wild beasts, every bird in the air, everything that crawls on the earth and all the fishes of the sea shall be afraid of you.   I give them all to you, along with all growing things, to be your food.  But there is one rule you must obey when you eat animals.  You must drain their blood before you eat their meat.  The life of the animal is in the blood, and you must not eat their life, only the meat of their body after the life has been drained from it.”

Yahweh continued with an additional instruction for Noah.  “You may not take the life of another human being.  A man's life is in his blood. The blood belongs to me.  If any man takes the life of another, I require that his life be taken also.  Whoever sheds the blood of another, his blood must be shed, for I made man in the image of the gods.” 

After the flood Noah became a farmer.  He planted a vineyard and raised grapes for wine.  After the harvest he made wine from the grapes he had grown in his vineyard.  It was good wine so he drank a lot of it and he got drunk.  He was lying naked on his bed in his tent when Ham, his youngest son, walked into the tent and saw his father lying there naked and went outside and told his brothers. 

The older brothers, Shem and Japheth, put a blanket over their shoulders between them and walked into the tent backwards so that they would not see Noah naked.  They laid the blanket over Noah.  Soon Noah woke up from his drunken sleep and realized that his youngest son, Ham, had seen him naked.  He was very angry, and to punish Ham, he spoke a curse to Ham's son, Canaan.  The words of a curse have the power to bring about the curse.  So Noah cursed Canaan, saying: “You will become a servant to the servants of your brothers Shem and Japheth.”

Noah's children, and their children, populated the whole earth and became the founders of the various nations of the world and established great cities.  Everyone on earth spoke the same language. 

Descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, journeyed to the east and settled in the land of Sumer in the plains of Mesopotamia.  They built the kingdoms of Babylon and Assyria.  The people who lived in Babylon said to one another, “Let us make bricks, and burn them in the fire to make them hard like stone, and let us use mud for mortar, and let's build a city with these mud bricks and let's build a high tower in the city that will reach up into the sky to the heavens. We will become known as great builders of a powerful nation so that other nations will fear us—because if they are afraid of us they will not try to conquer us, or take our lands or scatter our people far across the earth.”

The Lord Yahweh heard the commotion from their large construction project and came down to see what the men of Babylon were building.  Thousands of men were working to build the new city.  Yahweh saw the tower they were building projecting high up into the sky and he was worried.  “If they succeed at doing this,” he thought, “then nothing will be beyond the ability of men to do.” 

So the Lord Yahweh and the other gods developed a plan to stop them.  “Since they all have one language, they can work together, and they can accomplish anything that they can imagine.  So let us go down there and cause them to speak different languages so that they cannot understand each other.”

The Lord Yahweh caused the people to speak many different languages so that they could not communicate with each other.  The people could not work together because they could not understand each other's language so all the work on the city and the tower ended.  Then Yahweh scattered the various peoples speaking different languages into different places throughout the world.  Yahweh called the place of construction “Babel” because the confusion of language left all men babbling among themselves and no one could understand them.   

  

This story comes from the time in the history of the Hebrew people after they returned to the land from which they had been taken as prisoners to Babylonia years before.  This was a period in which the priests of the land of Israel were becoming important and there were religious rules and rituals created as part of their religious observance.  This story provides an explanation for why blood must be drained from meat before it was cooked, why the death penalty was justified for the taking of a life, why the Babylonians had built a huge stepped tower at Ur, and why people speak different languages.