From the Cosmopolis section of my Comparative Religious Ethics textbook: The usual exegesis of the story of Babel suggests that God punished the citizens of Babel for their hubris in trying to reach the realm of the divine through the strength they derive from their uniformity which enables them, so they think, to accomplish whatever they desire. So, it is said, God punished them by confusing their tongues...therefore they could not cooperate [to finish] their technological project. However, we suggest that this is a misreading of the significance of the story. Given the overwhelming emphasis on hospitality to the Stranger in the Torah (a command repeated more often than any other)...God reoriented human efforts by creating a world of strangers where the holy is to be encountered in the midst of diversity...Stories of hospitality de-center our ethnocentrisms and foster an awareness of our interdependence--our unity in diversity...[giving] the story of Babel its postmodern character...on a pilgrimage toward Cosmopolis that John Dunne calls the way of all the earth.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 23:41:57 +0000
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