From Babel to the New Jerusalem 115 6. From sugcevwmen dievspeiren (Gen 11,7.8) to peripathvsousin ta; e[qnh (Rev 21,24) We finally arrive at the last point of comparison between the story of Babel and the New Jerusalem. Gen 11,7-8 describes the eventual cessation of all work due to an insurmountable language confusion: “Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.” Gen 11,7, then, reverses the dynamic of 11,4: God descends to disperse the builders and the population, deu'te kai; katabavnte" sugcevwmen. There is a vestige here of the ancient Near Eastern literary motif of divine jealousy of humans, “there will be no preventing whatever they propose to do”. There is also a trace of the divine assembly in the plural wording “Come (deu'te, cf. 11,3.4!), let Us go down”, later on interpreted in the light of Christian revelation as referring the Trinity of Persons in one God. Regarding the name of the city, Babel (25), the puns seem to be the crux, and untranslatable: the Hebrew root balal, Gen 11,7, signifies “to mix”, “to confound”, “to disperse”. Another reading is nebelah, meaning “destruction”. The root nbl also gives us the word for “fool”. So when the people, who had been dignified with homogeneity of language, used the privilege given them for evil purposes, God put a stop to the impulse of their wickedness through creating differences in language (26). The word dabar appears for the first time in Genesis 11,1, which led midrashic commentators to suppose that the initial ten chapters of Genesis transpire in some pre-discursive context. Speech goes unrecorded as in the monologues of Adam and Eve. We are also not told what Cain said to Abel; Noah has no dialogue with God. dabar, in its full speech-sense, evolves around and is aborted at Babel (27). Henceforth mankind chatters in a host of closed, mutually incomprehensible tongues (28). Yahweh’s confusing of their speech is a punishment for their pride; it is also a guarding against any future massed assaults on divine sovereignty. The act resembles the expulsion of the protoparents from further contact with the tree of life, lest they eat of that tree, too, Gen 3,22-23. God’s will that the race go forth to possess their lands is now carried out with added vehemence because of human resistance; God scatters them because they will not freely spread abroad(29). Unlike Adam/Eve, Cain/Abel and Noah/Flood, there seems (25) The name Babel is understood to mean “confusion” but more probably means “Gate of God”: this is the Mesopotamian setting from which the people of Israel will spring, through Abraham. (26) Cf. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis. (27) “The fact that the Divine and the humans do not stand in dialogue with one another constitutes one of the most ominous elements in this text”, L. KECK et al. (eds.), The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville, TN 1994) I, 411. (28) Cf. G. STEINER, No Passion Spent. Essays 1978-1996 (New Haven 1996). (29) Rabbinical scholars have compared the Babylonian exile to the thwarting of the plan of Babel’s builders.