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The crazy part of the babel myth is that it tells a store of what seems like the first time in human history where people of all backgrounds came together, live

• jfengel 2y ago
  Yeah, it's a really surreal bit. The key verse is Gen 11:6: "The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." The use of "the LORD" at the beginning pegs this as a "Jahwist" passage. It was written fairly early on, when Judaism was much less of a monotheistic religion. The next verse is "Let us go down"..." There are various interpretations of "us", but it suggests that it was written when "Jahweh" was one creator deity among others. The same author also wrote the bit about the fall from Eden, the story of Cain, and the story of Noah. In general, it seems like a deity that was big on making judgments about people, and keeping them separate from the realm of the deities. It's a very classic kind of deity, personifying real traits of the world. We've always been "dumb, scared, and fractured", and somebody wanted to tell a story about why that is. There's a weird kind of hope in it: we really could be god-like if we just pulled together. But God really hated us and so he gave us Facebook and Twitter.