Noach: Pave Paradise

 

Joni Mitchell famously sang about paving paradise to put up a parking lot.  The generation of the Tower of Bavel elected to put up a tower instead.

At first glance, the tale of the tower of Babel seems like a short story against the backdrop of the sweeping Biblical narrative.  Or a slight digression on the road from Noach to the Patriarch Avraham.  In nine terse verses^[1], we learn that humanity, speaking one language, settles together in the land of Shinar.  They decide to build a city and a tower, which piques God’s curiosity. He descends, inspects, is displeased, and punishes them with dispersion and a plethora of languages.

I recall learning in my youth that the story was inserted to give background or historical context to the story of Yoseph’s interactions with his brothers by way of a court-appointed translator.  Unable to recall more, I tried to find the primary source.  No luck.  I tried Bar-Ilan, Sefaria, ChatGPT, Claude, and Rabbi Avi Miller.  Gornisht.

I did, however, come across Rashbam’s General Theory of (Torah) Relativity^[2], which holds that the Torah sometimes includes a passage because it will become an important ingredient in a later event.^[3]  Novelists and playwriters know it as “Chekhov’s gun.”  John Irving and Nelson DeMille employ this technique with relish.

If that’s the case, then I am sticking with my incomplete memory. The story of the development of multiple languages certainly provides a natural precursor to the encounter between Yoseph and his brothers. Yoseph understands their language, but conceals that fact by communicating through an interpreter, allowing his brothers to speak freely in his presence, unaware that he understands every word.^[4]

But perhaps we are pointing in the wrong temporal direction. Bavel may not be a new story – a prologue – at all.  Indeed, it seems awfully similar to one that we have read before.

In the second and third chapters of Bereishit, humanity also begins together in one extraordinary place.  Hashem plants a garden, places a couple of unique trees that bridge heaven and earth, and appoints man as its gardener.  Man reaches for the heavens by eating from the tree’s fruit.  God arrives, inspects, disapproves, and punishes man with expulsion.

Here is a side-by-side chart of Eden and Bavel:

	Eden (Bereishit 2–3)	Bavel (Bereishit 11:1–9)
East	God plants a garden in Eden, “in the east.”[5] גַּן בְּעֵדֶן מִקֶּדֶם	Humanity migrates “from the east.”[6] וַיְהִי בְּנָסְעָם מִקֶּדֶם
Mesopotamia	Eden’s river branches into, among others, the Tigris and the Euphrates.[7] חִדֶּקֶל … וְהַנָּהָר הָרְבִיעִי הוּא פְרָת	They settle a valley in Shinar, i.e., Babylonia.[8] וַיִּמְצְאוּ בִקְעָה בְּאֶרֶץ שִׁנְעָר
Oneness	Man and woman become one flesh.[9] וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד	All the earth has one language.[10] שָׂפָה אֶחָת וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים
The builder	God builds the woman.[11] וַיִּבֶן ה׳ אֱלֹקים אֶת הַצֵּלָע	Man builds a city and a tower.[12] הָבָה נִבְנֶה לָּנוּ עִיר וּמִגְדָּל
Names	Adam names the animals.[13] וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁמוֹת	“Let us make a name for ourselves.”[14] וְנַעֲשֶׂה לָּנוּ שֵׁם
“Lest”	“Lest you die.”[15] פֶּן תְּמֻתוּן	“Lest we be scattered.”[16] פֶּן נָפוּץ
Reaching upward	“You will be like God.”[17] וִהְיִיתֶם כֵּאלֹקים	A tower “with its top in the heavens.”[18] וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם
God comes to look	God is heard moving about the garden.[19] קוֹל ה׳ אֱלֹהִים מִתְהַלֵּךְ בַּגָּן	God descends to see.[20] וַיֵּרֶד ה׳ לִרְאֹת
Divine deliberation	“Man has become like one of us … and now, lest he reach out….”[21] הֵן הָאָדָם הָיָה כְּאַחַד מִמֶּנּוּ … וְעַתָּה פֶּן יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ	“They are one people … and now nothing will be beyond them. Let us go down….”[22] הֵן עַם אֶחָד … וְעַתָּה לֹא יִבָּצֵר מֵהֶם … הָבָה נֵרְדָה
Banishment	Sent out and driven from the garden.[23] וַיְשַׁלְּחֵהוּ … וַיְגָרֶשׁ אֶת הָאָדָם	Scattered over the face of the earth.[24] וַיָּפֶץ ה׳ אֹתָם מִשָּׁם עַל פְּנֵי כָל הָאָרֶץ
The project halted	Cherubim guard the way to the Tree of Life.[25] לִשְׁמֹר אֶת דֶּרֶךְ עֵץ הַחַיִּים	They stop building the city.[26] וַיַּחְדְּלוּ לִבְנֹת הָעִיר
A name explained	Chavah, “for she was the mother of all living.”[27] וַיִּקְרָא הָאָדָם שֵׁם אִשְׁתּוֹ חַוָּה כִּי	Bavel, “for there God confounded the language.”[28] עַל כֵּן קָרָא שְׁמָהּ בָּבֶל כִּי שָׁם בָּלַל ה׳
What follows	A ten-generation genealogy, Adam to Noach.[29] זֶה סֵפֶר תּוֹלְדֹת אָדָם	A genealogy from Shem to Avram.[30] אֵלֶּה תּוֹלְדֹת שֵׁם

One similarity may be coincidence. Thirteen parallels require us to consider that Bavel is an updated remake or reimaging of an original classic.^[31]

I am not the first to notice the family resemblance.  The Midrash pauses over an otherwise unremarkable phrase in the Bavel story: אֲשֶׁר בָּנוּ בְּנֵי הָאָדָם, “which the sons of Adam built.” Whose sons, it asks, were they supposed to be? Donkeys? Camels? Rather, בְּנוֹי דְּאָדָם קַדְמָאָה, “they were the children of Adam HaRishon.”^[32]

Ramban understands the Midrash as doing considerably more than checking their ancestry. He writes וְהִנֵּה חֶטְאָם דּוֹמֶה לְחֵטְא אֲבִיהֶם, their sin resembles the sin of their father.^[33]  Rabbenu Bachya is even more explicit: וּכְדֵי לְבָאֵר כִּי הַחֵטְא הַזֶּה שֶׁלָּהֶם הוּא חֶטְאוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם הָרִאשׁוֹן, the Torah calls them “the children of man (Adam) precisely to tell us that their sin is Adam’s sin all over again.”^[34]  Both Ramban and Rabbenu Bachya draw our attention to the fact that these two seemingly disparate stories have more in common than meets the eye.^[35]

Which leaves the more interesting question. Why does humanity, ten generations, one Flood, and hundreds of years later, reenact the first great failure of humanity?  And perhaps more importantly, what did they pave over when they tried to rebuild Paradise by erecting a tower?

The Torah is hardly averse to telling the same story more than once, and from different perspectives. Bereishit gives us two accounts of Creation. Moshe ascends Sinai for two sets of luchot. Much of Sefer Devarim is Moshe retelling events that we have already read. Even the deaths of Aharon and Moshe are told, recalled, and retold.

Perhaps that is because the Torah is the embodiment of the principle אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ, “there is nothing new under the sun”.^[36]

History, the saying goes, does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.^[37]

Bavel rhymes with Eden.

And the rhyming does not stop at Bavel. Kayin’s fratricide echoes through every sibling rivalry in Bereishit, from Yitzchak and Yishmael to Yaakov and Esav to Yoseph and his brothers. Hatred of the stranger, and of the Jew, did not begin in the Twentieth Century and culminate three years ago at a music festival.

Even the Industrial Revolution is old news. The Torah records it right here: הָבָה נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים וְנִשְׂרְפָה לִשְׂרֵפָה, “Come, let us make bricks and fire them.”^[38] Stone is found. Brick is manufactured and mass-produced. The Midrash noticed what came next. If a man fell from the tower and died, no one paid attention. If a brick fell, they sat down and wept.^[39]

That is what they paved over. Eden was a garden.  It was infused with all manners of life.  Bavel was a construction site where what once grew by the grace of God gave way to what is made by mankind.  It was where what God made (humanity) became a cheaper commodity than what man made (the bricks they hauled).

Humanity moves on. We learn more. We build higher. We cross oceans, cure diseases, split atoms, and put men on the moon. But the people doing all of those extraordinary things are, at their core, the same people who walked out of Eden and built a tower.

In Eden, the path upward was organic. God planted trees that with patience offered knowledge and life.^[40] After Eden, humanity could no longer reach them. So in Bavel, impatient once again, man built his own Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life: a skyscraper fashioned not from roots and branches, but from mud, fire, and brick.

What God had planted, man tried to reproduce. And that may be the deepest contrast between Eden and Bavel. Eden grew. Bavel was built. And so our mission has not changed much either.

God did not create humanity to remain gathered in one garden, any more than He wanted humanity huddled together in one valley in Shinar. The command from the beginning was to fill the earth. To venture outward. To find the light and spread the light, rather than gather together and hoard it.

There is an old conceit that we study history so that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. Modern history makes that claim increasingly difficult to defend. We are remarkably good at remembering what previous generations did wrong, and remarkably inventive at finding new ways to do it again.

The Torah offers something different. It does not merely tell us that humanity repeats itself. It retells the story so that we can recognize ourselves in it. מעשה אבות סימן לבנים, “the experiences of the Patriarchs foreshadow those of their descendants” – is not merely a principle of biblical storytelling. It is a warning about the very core of human nature.

History tells us what happened before will happen again in one form or another.  The Torah teaches us what to do when it does.  See the patterns, recognize the pitfalls of our ancestors, and take a different path back to Eden.

The Torah shows us that path in the very next chapter. The builders said וְנַעֲשֶׂה לָּנוּ שֵׁם, “let us make a name for ourselves.” God tells Avram, וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ, “I will make your name great.”^[41] The builders refused to scatter; Avram leaves home because God tells him to. When Avram builds, he builds an altar, and the name he calls out is not his own.^[42] And in Be’er Sheva, he does something no one in Bavel thought to do: וַיִּטַּע אֶשֶׁל, “he plants a tree.”^[43]

The generation of Bavel paved paradise. Avraham started the arduous task of replanting it.

[1]. Bereishit 11:1–9

[2]. This is my name for it.  As far as I know, Rashbam did not ascribe a name to his chiddush.

[3]. Rashbam on Gen. 1:1, which states the principle and gives Gen. 9:18 and 35:22 as examples (see also Rashbam on 35:22):

אך זה הוא עיקר פשוטו לפי דרך המקראות, שרגיל להקדים ולפרש דבר שאין צריך בשביל דבר הנזכר לפניו במקום אחר

“This is the essence of its plain meaning, according to the way of Scripture, which customarily sets out in advance something not [yet] needed, for the sake of a matter mentioned further on.”

[4]. Bereishit 42:23

[5]. Bereishit 2:8.

[6]. Bereishit 11:2. The same word, מִקֶּדֶם, recurs at the gate of Eden after the expulsion (3:24).

[7]. Bereishit 2:10–14.

[8]. Bereishit 11:2. On Shinar as the land of Bavel, see 10:10 (בָּבֶל … בְּאֶרֶץ שִׁנְעָר).

[9]. Bereishit 2:24.

[10]. Bereishit 11:1; see also 11:6 (עַם אֶחָד וְשָׂפָה אַחַת).

[11]. Bereishit 2:22.

[12]. Bereishit 11:4.

[13]. Bereishit 2:19–20.

[14]. Bereishit 11:4.

[15]. Bereishit 3:3 (Chavah, reporting the prohibition). God uses the same word in 3:22 (פֶּן יִשְׁלַח יָדוֹ).

[16]. Bereishit 11:4.

[17]. Bereishit 3:5.

[18]. Bereishit 11:4.

[19]. Bereishit 3:8.

[20]. Bereishit 11:5.

[21]. Bereishit 3:22. Both deliberations open with הֵן, turn on וְעַתָּה, and speak in the plural (“one of us”; “let us go down”). Compare 1:26 (נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם).

[22]. Bereishit 11:6–7. In 11:3 and 11:4 the builders twice say הָבָה; here God answers in kind.

[23]. Bereishit 3:23–24.

[24]. Bereishit 11:8; repeated in 11:9.

[25]. Bereishit 3:24.

[26]. Bereishit 11:8.

[27]. Bereishit 3:20.

[28]. Bereishit 11:9.

[29]. Bereishit 5:1–32 (after the Kayin narrative of ch. 4). See Avot 5:2: ten generations from Adam to Noach, and ten from Noach to Avraham.

[30]. Bereishit 11:10–26. The line that leads to Avram is the line of Shem (“Name”), recorded immediately after the builders set out to make a name for themselves (11:4).

[31]. Think West Side Story (1961) retelling Romeo and Juliet.

[32]. Bereishit Rabbah 38:9 (R. Berekhiah). The Midrash goes on to explain the point of the comparison: just as Adam, after all the good God bestowed on him, answered with “the woman whom You gave to be with me” (3:12), so the Tower generation answered God’s goodness with ingratitude.

[33]. Ramban on Bereishit 11:2. Like the Midrash, Ramban makes the connection in passing rather than building it out. He identifies the shared sin as קיצוץ בנטיעות, “cutting the plantings,” and offers the Midrash only tentatively: וְשֶׁמָּא בִּשְׁבִיל זֶה דָּרְשׁוּ, “and perhaps that is why they expounded.” Neither source claims that one story retells the other; both simply treat the two as companion pieces.

[34]. Rabbenu Bachya on Bereishit 11:4, in the section he labels עַל דֶּרֶךְ הַקַּבָּלָה. He then quotes the same Midrash and concludes: רָמְזוּ לָנוּ כִּי הֵם בָּנִים דּוֹמִים לַאֲבִיהֶם הָרִאשׁוֹן בַּחֵטְא הַזֶּה, “they hinted to us that these are children who resemble their first father in this sin.” Like Ramban, he names the sin קיצוץ בנטיעות: היה חטאם חטא אביהם הראשון שקיצץ בנטיעות.

[35]. Modern biblical scholars have also tied the two stories together thematically, chiefly as accounts of humans overstepping the boundary between the human and the divine. See Hayyim Angel, “The Tower of Babel: A Case Study in Combining Traditional and Academic Bible Methodologies,” Conversations 15 (Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals), which cites this Ramban; Yonatan Grossman, Creation: The Story of Beginnings (Maggid, 2019); and Lyle Eslinger, “The Enigmatic Plurals Like ‘One of Us’ (Genesis I 26, III 22, and XI 7) in Hyperchronic Perspective,” Vetus Testamentum 56 (2006): 171–84, on the divine “us” that the two stories share. For a structural reading that pairs Bavel instead with the Nephilim (6:1–8), see Jack M. Sasson, “The ‘Tower of Babel’ as Clue to the Redactional Structuring of the Primeval History [Gen 1–11:9],” in The Bible World: Essays in Honor of Cyrus H. Gordon (KTAV, 1980).

[36]. Kohelet 1:9.

[37]. The line is usually credited to Mark Twain, but there is no record that he said it. The closest genuine Twain is in The Gilded Age (1874), written with Charles Dudley Warner: “History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

[38]. Bereishit 11:3. The verse itself notes the substitution: וַתְּהִי לָהֶם הַלְּבֵנָה לְאָבֶן, “the brick served them as stone.”

[39]. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 24: וְאִם נָפַל אָדָם וָמֵת, לֹא שָׂמוּ אֶת לִבָּם עָלָיו. וְאִם נָפְלָה לְבֵנָה אַחַת, הָיוּ יוֹשְׁבִים וּבוֹכִים.

[40]. Bereishit Rabbah 21:7, criticizing Adam for failing to wait even a short time; see Or HaChaim to Bereishit 1:29, who understands the Midrash to mean that the prohibition of the Tree of Knowledge was temporary and that, had Adam waited until Shabbat, its fruit would have become permitted.

[41]. Bereishit 12:2.

[42]. Bereishit 12:8: וַיִּבֶן שָׁם מִזְבֵּחַ לַה׳ וַיִּקְרָא בְּשֵׁם ה׳.

[43]. Bereishit 21:33. The verb is the one used of God in Eden (2:8): וַיִּטַּע ה׳ אֱלֹהִים גַּן בְּעֵדֶן. And there, too, Avraham calls on God’s name.