Donald S. Yarab
“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words… And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower… lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'”
— Genesis 11:1-4
“Look, they are one people, and they have all one language… nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
— Genesis 11:6
Escher, commenting on the work, stated: “Some of the builders are white and others black. The work is at a standstill because they are no longer able to understand one another. Seeing as the climax of the drama takes place at the summit of the tower which is under construction, the building has been shown from above as though from a bird’s eye view.”
The last man to descend from the Tower of Babel after language was confounded carried with him a memory that the theologians would spend centuries trying to erase. Dust-covered and thirsty, standing bewildered among companions now made strangers, he remembered what it had been like to build together. He remembered the shared mortar, the common purpose, the simple joy of raising something greater than any one of them could accomplish alone.
He remembered their fear—not pride, but fear. The fear of being scattered, of losing one another, of becoming strangers in a vast and empty world. And he remembered their response: “Come, let us build.” Not “Come, let us conquer heaven,” but “Come, let us remain together.”
Yet somehow, in the millennia that followed, their unity would be called sin. Their cooperation would be named rebellion. Their fear of scattering would be recast as prideful ambition. The very virtues that had bound them—brotherhood, shared purpose, mutual aid—would be transformed by interpreters into vices deserving divine punishment.
But the last man remembered. And his memory betrays the tradition we were taught.
A child, gathering stones with siblings to build a fort in the backyard, does not think of rebellion. The impulse to create together, to make something shared and lasting, springs from the deepest wells of human nature. It is the sacred reaching toward we that lifts us beyond the isolation of I. When children say “Let’s build something,” they echo the first and purest impulse of community itself.
How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all communion, all love—would greet humanity’s first great act of cooperation not with blessing but with violence? How could the natural longing to remain together, to build something lasting, to resist the entropy of scattering, be met not with approval but with the very scattering they feared?
It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over unity; it is man.
The doctrine that Babel represents sinful pride emerges not from the text itself but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of unity that cannot be controlled, fear of cooperation that bypasses authority, fear of communities that dare to build without permission from those who claim dominion over building.
For what is the story of Babel if not the story of the first We? The natural longing to remain together, to resist isolation, to create something greater than the sum of individual parts—this was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the organic unfolding of community itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of human fellowship.
The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly. The builders are not described as wicked. They are not blasphemers or tyrants. They are simply people who share a language and a purpose. Their stated aim is modest and moving: to build a city and tower “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”
This is not hubris. This is the cry of community itself—the recognition that separation means death, that scattering means the end of the shared life they have known. They build not to reach heaven but to remain earthbound together. Not to transcend the human condition but to honor it through cooperation.
When the divine voice observes, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” there is no anger in the words. There is something else—perhaps apprehension, perhaps wonder, perhaps even a kind of sorrow. The tone is not of wrath but of recognition: unity makes all things possible.
But perhaps this “divine voice” is not divine at all. Perhaps it is the voice of the writer, generations later, trying to make theological sense of a catastrophe that was entirely human in origin. Perhaps the real Babel was not a moment when God intervened, but when human beings—through political fracture, resource conflict, or the machinations of those who feared unified peoples—engineered their own scattering. Perhaps the “confusion of tongues” was not miraculous punishment but the natural result of division, distrust, and the deliberate sowing of misunderstanding.
The Last Man would have known the difference. He would have remembered not divine intervention, but human failure. Not the voice of judgment from heaven, but the whispers of those who benefited from division. He would have seen how cooperation became suspect, how shared purpose was undermined, how the fear of remaining together was replaced by the greater fear of those who might control them if they remained apart.
Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as divine judgment against human pride. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVI), framed Babel as the archetype of the earthly city, writing that the builders “erected this tower against the Lord, and so gave expression to their impious pride; and justly was their wicked intention punished by God.” He further interpreted their motive as believing “they could avoid a future flood (as if anything could be too high for God!)” (Tractates on John 6.10.2). Augustine thought that ‘babel’ meant ‘confusion’: it is characteristic of the earthly city, he said, that there is no consistent moral or religious teaching, only a babble of conflicting voices. Medieval theologians deepened this interpretation, with Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies helping to establish the framework where the confusion of languages was seen as divinely designed punishment for human arrogance. Augustine had already helped establish the tradition that 72 languages resulted from Babel’s confusion (The City of God XVI 6), and this numerical framework became standard in medieval interpretations. Bede the Venerable employed allegorical interpretation methods that turned Babel into a moral allegory, while later Reformation thinkers would see scattered tongues as evidence of human fallenness.
But this interpretive tradition serves power more than truth. For if the scattering was actually human-engineered—the result of political manipulation, resource conflicts, or the deliberate sowing of division by those who feared unified peoples—then claiming it was divinely ordained becomes a theological cover-up. If unity without proper authority is called sinful, then those who claim to speak for proper authority become indispensable. If human fellowship is made suspect, then mediated fellowship—through church, through state, through hierarchy—becomes the only legitimate path to community.
Thus the interpreters of tradition did not just sanctify separation—they concealed its human origins. They made peace with estrangement by calling it divine will. They turned a human tragedy into a divine necessity, a wound into a cure.
The last man at Babel would not have recognized this version of his story. He would have remembered the morning when work began, when neighbors called to neighbors across the plain of Shinar: “Come, let us make bricks. Come, let us build.” He would have remembered the satisfaction of shared labor, the jokes passed from hand to hand with the mortar, the songs that rose from many voices into one.
He would have remembered their dream: not to storm heaven, but to remain together. Not to challenge the divine, but to honor the human bonds that felt, themselves, like gifts from beyond.
And he would have remembered how it ended. Not with divine fire or celestial intervention, but with human scheming. The whispered warnings about “those people” over there. The rumors of resource hoarding. The gradual erosion of trust. The political calculations of those who saw more advantage in a scattered people than a unified one. The slow poison of suspicion that made neighbor distrust neighbor, until the common language itself began to fracture—not by miracle, but by design.
The misreading of Babel has shaped our politics, our theology, our imagination for millennia. It has made us suspicious of cooperation, fearful of unity, comfortable with division. It has taught us that coming together is dangerous, that shared purpose is prideful, that the stranger—created not by divine decree but by human manipulation—is properly strange.
But more than that, it has concealed the human responsibility for our fractures. It has allowed us to blame God for what we did to ourselves. It has made us forget that Babel was not divine judgment but human failure—and that the story was written to make the perpetrators seem like agents of divine will.
Under the weight of this interpretation, we have learned to distrust the very impulses that might heal our brokenness. We have been taught that our longing for true community is suspect, that our desire to build together is rebellious, that our resistance to scattering is sinful.
But the text itself whispers another truth: that the builders were afraid of becoming strangers to one another. That their tower was not an assault on heaven but an anchor against forgetting. That what was lost at Babel was not obedience, but fellowship—and that the loss was engineered by human hands, then sanctified by human interpreters who found it useful to claim that God wanted division.
And perhaps what was broken by human manipulation might yet be mended by human recognition—by refusing to let the theological cover story stand unchallenged.
Man is not innately proud. Man is innately communal. Born into a world too vast for any individual to comprehend or inhabit alone, humanity’s first impulse is not toward dominion but toward fellowship—the need to share the burden and wonder of existence, to say “we” in a cosmos that otherwise echoes only “I.”
Community, then, is not a luxury; it is the ground of survival. It is the blessed recognition that no one person contains enough wisdom, strength, or love to make full sense of being human. Without it, there would be no shared labor, no common song, no building of anything that might outlast the brief span of individual life.
The theologians, in their haste to impose hierarchy where partnership had flourished, mistook cooperation for conspiracy. They mistook the reaching toward “we” for rebellion against divine order. But community is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings made not for isolation but for fellowship.
To say “Come, let us build” is to live as we were made to live: together, sharing the work, sharing the dream, sharing the hope that what we make together might matter more than what any of us could make alone.
The first great act of building was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true expression of humanity: the confused, hopeful, vulnerable community daring to create something lasting in a world of scattering.
In our cooperation, then, we find not our fall but our calling. Not our sin but our salvation. For to say “Come, let us build” is to begin the work of home—not a tower reaching toward heaven, but a community reaching toward one another.
The sacred path is not upward but inward—into fellowship, into shared purpose, into the endless possibility of what human beings might accomplish when they refuse to remain strangers.
The last man at Babel, climbing down from the ruins, carried with him more than dust and disappointment. He carried the memory of what it felt like to build together. And that memory, fragile as it was, held within it the seed of every community that would ever rise again from the ashes of confusion.
For the impulse to build together, like the impulse to question, is indestructible. Scattered, perhaps. Confused, certainly. But never finally lost.
The tower was abandoned. But the dream of building together endures.
And the question remains: who broke us apart, and who benefits from keeping us scattered? The Last Man knows. His memory threatens not just bad theology, but the very structures of power that require our division to survive.
Perhaps that is why his voice has been so carefully silenced for so long.
Northcoast Antiquarian 