The Leaning Tower of Babel (a)

The etiology of multiple languages...or a lesson in limiting imagination?

Genesis 11:1-9 (King James' Version)

11 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

² And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
³ And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
⁴ And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
⁵ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
⁶ And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
⁷ Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
⁸ So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
⁹ Therefore is the name of it called Babel*; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

* LeBalbel = Hebrew word for confusion, jumble

The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865)

First came the Flood, then the confounding of uppity humanity, who, meant to get down to the business of repopulating the world, set about building a stairway to the heavens. 'Let us make us a name', the survivors declared, and a tower to reach into heaven, faced with a deity who might at any moment sweep the earth clean of them again. Human ingenuity, that pesky free will clause in the contract, allowed them to imagine a tower to heaven, to collaborate and engineer it into existence. And a deity whose unsettled pets are teaming up and threatening to turn up on his doorstep recognises that now nothing will be restrained from them. Whatever they might imagine, they have the capacity to try, as fancy and reason are married together in an act that can be construed as rebellion or resistance, according to your will.