[Download] "The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World's Cultures." by Journal of Biblical Literature ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World's Cultures.
- Author : Journal of Biblical Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 257 KB
Description
The tower of Babel, standing unfinished, has become a cultural icon, symbolizing the preposterous pride of its builders and the divine punishment for all such acts of arrogance. It has cast its long shadow over the entire history of interpretation of the biblical narrative in Gen 11:1-9 in which it is found. In this interpretive history, the "tower with its top in the heavens" (11:4 NRSV) has been adopted as the key to the story's theme: the human attempt to assert autonomy, attack heaven, and challenge God. The division of languages and dispersion of peoples--that is, the origin of the world's cultures--that concludes the story of Babel is inseparably linked to this iconic symbol. Differentiating the world's peoples is the sign of God's displeasure with the tower; it is both the penalty for human pride and the means to restrain further assertions of it. The pride-and-punishment reading of the story of Babel is already firmly fixed in the earliest extant interpretation of Gen 11:1-9 in the book of Jubilees (ca. 200 B.c.E.), where it is found in the author's explanatory additions to his retelling of the biblical narrative. It has been embraced with little basic variation by both Jewish and Christian exegetes throughout the history of interpretation, and it is still dominant in recent scholarly commentaries on Genesis. Outside of biblical scholarship, this reading of the Babel story has been given broad cultural legitimacy in classics such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, in many works of art such as Pieter Brueghel's masterpiece, and in all children's story Bibles. (1)