In
which the exiles lay siege to themselves
Genesis
11:1-9
And
all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it happened as they
journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and
settled there. And they said to each other, “Come, let us bake bricks and burn
them hard.” And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as
mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in
the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the
earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the human
creatures had built. And the LORD said, “As one people with one language for
all, if this is what they have begun to do, now nothing they plot to do will
elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they
will not understand each other’s language.” And the LORD scattered them from
there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is
called Babel, for there the LORD made the language of all the earth babble. And
from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth.
Ezekiel
4:1-3
And
you, man, take you a brick and put it before you and incise on it the city of
Jerusalem. And you shall lay a siege against it and build against it a siege-work
and throw up a ramp against it and set up an armed camp against it and put
against it battering rams all round. And you shall set your face toward it, and
it shall be besieged, and you shall lay siege against it. It is a sign for the
house of Israel.
Babel
represents the fall of the city, Jerusalem as much as Babylon, the lifting-up
and bringing down of empires. As we draw very close to the close, the returning
exiles are reminded that their God is at work in the changing fortunes of the
nations, that, should they reject their vocation the Master who has humbled
them before may do so again. In this world, there are no everlasting kingdoms.
The stories that will sustain a people are not simply stories of specialness,
of being chosen, but also lessons from past failures. Bricks and mortar matter,
but they count for little if they become our grand enterprise, and even less if
it is to our own glory. How then, might the things we build—our homes, our
churches, our workplaces, our cities with their communal meeting spaces—bring
people of different tongues—different languages and cultures, different
worldviews and perspectives, different faiths and doubts concerning faith—together,
to discover God at work in the contradiction and mess of our lives?
Biblical
texts: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary
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