David Wolf on Tower of Babel

David Wolf on Tower of Babel · David Wolf on Nationalism

This video contains two topics:

The Tower Of Babel Story Does Not Justify Nationalism
David Wolf | 23.V.2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSdGEEllIY4

Here is on his take on Babel:

I

5:44 "in the valley of Shinar"

Do you refer to Mesopotamia as "a valley"? A pretty big one.

Text does not mention "valley" but mentions a "plain" and also finding it.

"they build a tower"

They project to build a tower or something which Moses gave the same name as towers have.

Doesn't say they did build it, also doesn't say the stopped building it, but they did stop building the city.

II

6:01, Genesis 11:4 And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.

It's the tower the top whereof may reach to heaven, not the city.

III

6:49 While I agree there was geographic spread, before Babel, ch 11 could theoretically refer in more detail to same event as end of ch 10.

CMI thinks it does so.

I think stone age was before Babel.

As usually understood, i e paleolithic.

IV

6:52 By these were divided the islands of the Gentiles in their lands, every one according to his tongue and their families in their nations.

Challoner has : [5] "The islands": So the Hebrews called all the remote countries, to which they went by ships from Judea, to Greece, Italy, Spain, etc.

However, while this may be a fair assessment for a reader from King Solomon's time and on, the text is arguably from those early post-Flood times (Moses collecting the diverse scraps of text into one, unless it was mostly Joseph and Moses only added the final touch), and "islands" could back then have referred to even Americas, Australia and so on ....

V

7:28 "a certain group of people in Shinar"

Well, what kind of people today would be living part time in Paris, part time in New York, part time in Sydney etc?

The élite, of course.

I would agree with Postilla in libros geneseos, usually attributed to St Thomas prior to modern critics, the élite were going to Babel - or where it was going to be built.

This is one explanation of the geographic spread of mankind prior to Göbekli Tepe. CMI are forced to deny Göbekli Tepe being Babel. If you were close family to Mungo man in Australia, not all of you, but part, would at any given time be going .... to "the mountains of Armenia", probably Mt Judi near Cizre, and a bit later to Babel, that is probably Göbekli Tepe near Sanliurfa.

Sanliurfa is pretty due west from Cizre. So, it fits with And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar, and dwelt in it.

VI

7:44 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babylon, and Arach, and Achad, and Chalanne in the land of Sennaar.

Note well, Babylon / Babel is mentioned first, and it is the same name as in next chapter, And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.

So, one cannot totally deduce Babel came after three cities already being there, it was the first city. After the Flood and the cities of Nod, especially Henoch.

VII

8:10 "worship the constellations"

No, Idolatry began later. Nimrod is not Ninus.

I would consider Babel was more about technolatry - and attempted technology.

What kind of technology would you use to get to space?

Don't presume a failed attempt or a stopped before even take-off project would have been so well documented it could be readily distinguished from a lookalike called "tower".

8:40 The world being united by one language need not have been a religious one.

If Peleg is the name of that person from birth, not a later nickname, Babel arguably ended when Peleg was born.

101 after Flood in Masoretic timeline, 401 in Roman Martyrology, 529 in more standard versions of LXX timeline.

On the Ark everyone spoke the same language, so, up to 529 years later, everyone would still be doing so. Popular versions in outskirts could have began a process of diverging dialects, but not very much considering how long people lived back then, and the élite who went to Babel obviously each from whether it was Lascaux or Mungo or whereever (older stone age ending a few decades before) would be speaking the same dialect as each other, when meeting up.

9:05 "temple tower to reach the heavens"

Well, temples don't get you to the heavens. Some things you do in those of God may, indirectly, but not back then, when everyone still went to Sheol.

Rockets perhaps can get you as far as the Moon, Nimrod was arguing one couldn't trust God's rain bow promise so one needed to get higher up.

And he had been better at Mammoth hunting (and at organising them) than at pre-Flood lore, so had very dim ideas about the universe.

VIII

9:24 Sumerian and Babylonian temple "towers" (I'd call them temple pyramids, if you don't want to say Ziggurats) were clearly post-Babel, so, how Sumerians and Babylonians believed things were doesn't say anything about what Nimrod believed - anymore than what Voltaire believed said anything about what Bossuet believed, to take a shift in the opposite direction.

Sumerian and Babylonian Ziggurats are uniformly from after Ninus, who would have lived at the time of Sarug which would have been things now carbon dated to 6000 BC, when Nineve starts getting built.

9:53 The gods would be the luminaries, the planets and stars.

Partly.

Let's take the Moon God first:

"Sīn /ˈsiːn/ or Suen (Akkadian: 𒂗𒍪 EN.ZU, pronounced Su'en, Sîn)[1] or Nanna (Sumerian: 𒀭𒋀𒆠 DŠEŠ.KI, DNANNA) was the god of the moon in the Mesopotamian religions of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. Nanna is a Sumerian deity, the son of Enlil and Ninlil, and became identified with the Semitic Sīn. The two chief seats of Nanna's/Sīn's worship were Ur in the south of Mesopotamia and Harran in the north. A moon god by the same name was also worshipped in South Arabia."

"Sīn was also a protector of shepherds. During the period in which Ur exercised supremacy over the Euphrates valley (between 2600 and 2400 BC), Sīn was considered the supreme god. It was then that he was designated as "father of the gods", "head of the gods" or "creator of all things"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(mythology)

And Harran is not too far from Göbekli Tepe, it's on the plain where GT is at a corner of it.

But Ur is a clearly Sumerian, non-Hebrew speaking, post-Babel city. Let's check the other luminary:

"Utu was worshipped in Sumer from the very earliest times.[11] The oldest documents mentioning him date to around 3500 BC, during the first stages of Sumerian writing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utu

Carbon dated 3500 BC - that is the carbon date of the reed mats in which the temple goods were taken out of Asason Thamar / En Gedi at occasion of Genesis 14, meaning we are dealing with a real time c. 1940 to 1930 BC.

MUCH too late for Babel.

Enki on the other hand was god of water.

He was worshipped in Eridu ...

Founded Approximately 54th century BC
Abandoned Approximately 6th century BC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eridu

Carbon dated 5400 BC is after Ninus founded Nineveh in the time of Sarug, well after Babel.

IX

11:42 let us go down,

All three persons.

12:05 Again, the Bible text doesn't mention paganism as the issue, it could just as well have been technocracy.

I consider this likelier, since I consider paganism as a product of the post-Babel mess-up.

12:16 In the context, it is against globalism directly, whatever globalism was doing wrong.

In the text, there is not a whit about God's hatred against paganism, since paganism isn't even mentioned.