Reclaiming Babel: Diversity and God’s Original Design

As we kick off our Discovery series on the Book of Genesis, scholar Theodore Hiebert makes a liberating claim: It’s time to have new conversations with Scripture.

This summer, the Trinity community is exploring some of the most spectacular — and consequential — stories of the Christian faith: from Creation to Noah’s Ark to the Tower of Babel. But what if we’ve been reading them all wrong?

Theodore Hiebert, PhD, professor of the Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, says that when we bring new questions to these ancient narratives, we uncover lasting truths that can shape our communities for good, even today.

Sign up to join Discovery Summer Sundays: The Book of Genesis, beginning June 7 with special guest speaker Theodore Hiebert.

The first chapters of Genesis, known as the primeval history, contain some of the most well-known stories in the Bible, including Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and Noah and the Great Flood. And they’re often relegated to Sunday School lessons for children. Why do these ancient stories matter right now, not only for kids but for everyone?

It’s amazing how often these ancient stories come up in modern conversation, in contemporary media, and even in public policy debates. They’re alive and well in our culture. They continue to be discussed in all kinds of healthy and not-so-healthy ways, which have serious consequences for our society. For example, the creation stories are used to promote policy positions about the definition of marriage, perspectives on gender, and viewpoints on reproduction. Their alleged scientific nature has been used to decide educational curriculum in public schools. 

These are our founding faith stories, and we keep coming back to them for wisdom and for reorientation. We need to own these stories and put them to good use. To do that, we need to rethink some of them in very basic ways to recover their intended meaning and open them up to be relevant in new and healthy ways. We need to challenge dysfunctional interpretations, and we need to start new conversations that matter in today’s world.

The primeval history culminates with the Tower of Babel story. For two thousand years, it’s been interpreted as a cautionary tale of humanity’s pride and God’s punishment that positions diversity as a consequence of sin. Yet you invite us to reexamine Babel and frame it as a story of grace: Difference has been God’s intention from the beginning. How might this reclaimed understanding influence our communities today?

Yes, the Babel story has a long history of being read as a pride and punishment story, by which people living in different places speaking different languages were thought to bear God’s punishment because of their pride. But this interpretation can only be supported by inferring meaning (imperfectly) from the story’s details. The story actually shows the people wanting to preserve their distinctive culture after the flood, while God wants to create a new world with many different cultures. 

This reclaimed understanding of Babel can give us a new starting point for embracing difference. On the one hand, this story affirms the reality and importance of ethnic identity — how crucial it is for our lives as social beings to be part of a unique and distinctive culture. That was precisely the aim of the first humans following the flood: They wanted to create a new and lasting social identity. 

But the story also, without qualification, embraces difference. It teaches us that God’s new world had many distinct identities and cultures, and that each would have divine worth. Its lesson is just what award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks to in her book Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions: “Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Because difference is the reality of our world.” 

If we read Babel in this new (old) way, then we must also read the story of Pentecost in Acts 2 in a new (old) way. Usually, Pentecost is read as fixing Babel by bringing a diverse and confused world into one people. But if Babel didn’t break anything, if it was the world God wanted, then Pentecost can be read as it was originally intended, as the story of how the church at its birth would be just as diverse as the world God created.

In the conclusion of The Beginning of Difference, you write, “Entirely new conversations with Genesis are now possible.” What does it mean to be in dialogue with Scripture? What role does imagination play in our reading of these texts? 

Once we have dismantled the old, questionable interpretations of these classic stories, they become new stories — stories that demand new conversations with Scripture. For example, if the story of Babel is not about pride or divine punishment but instead about cultural solidarity and difference, our dialogue with the story is completely changed. It becomes a conversation about the place of cultural identity in God’s world and about living with difference in a world God designed that way. This conversation, to me, is much more interesting and productive than the old one. It speaks to our real lives in a multicultural world. 

Imagination, in the best sense — not as a flight into a fantastical world, but as the ability to ask new questions and challenge old ideas — is absolutely crucial to our reading of biblical texts. Without it, we get stuck in old ways of reading and interpreting. With it, we can engage texts more fully. It took me years of reading Babel and questioning the old interpretation to encourage my imagination to flip the paradigm and ask: What if we just started over? One of the most effective ways of reading a biblical text is simply to ask new questions of it. And it takes imagination to frame a new question.

What do you love about the Bible?

The Bible is the ordinary, unexceptional record of our faith’s ancestors’ real experiences — their encounters with God, their relationships with one another and with others, and their understanding of their place in the world around them. These stories contain the most ancient wisdom we have about what it is to be human. When crises hit and the world is unsettled in new ways, we return to Scripture to find our bearings.

A lot of ancient patriarchy, cultural hostility, and violence runs through these stories, but they also hold a lot of compassion for the most vulnerable, the poor, and the marginalized. The Bible provides the earliest sources for some of our most important ethical and moral stances. “God enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing” (Deut 10:18 CEB). God cares for Hagar, the matriarch of the neighboring Ishmaelites, as deeply as he cares for Sarah, the matriarch of the Israelites themselves (Gen 16, 21). In Genesis, Job, the Psalms, and the Prophets, the Bible wrestles in deep and uncompromising ways with the problem of evil and innocent suffering. In Genesis 1–11, the Bible explores the issues of ethnic identity and cultural difference in ways that are almost contemporary. 

I love the Bible because it probes so deeply the human condition.

Theodore Hiebert writes about biblical views of identity and difference in his book The Beginning of Difference: Discovering Identity in God’s Diverse World, which challenges exclusivist cultural interpretations of the Book of Genesis and reveals a text that embraces, and celebrates, ethnic identities and differences; it contains a reinterpretation of the story of Babel as positive account of the origin of the world’s cultures. God’s Big Plan, which he co-authored with Elizabeth Caldwell, is a children’s story of Babel based on this new interpretation. Ted was the lead translator of the Book of Genesis and one of the editors for the Common English Bible (CEB). He wrote the notes to Genesis for the CEB Study Bible and for the New Interpreter’s Study Bible. He is the Old Testament editor for Abingdon Press’s Covenant Bible Study. Ted holds an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, a PhD from Harvard University, and has been a research fellow at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.  He has taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo and lectured at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut. He is Francis A. McGaw Professor of Old Testament and Dean of the Faculty Emeritus at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He currently lives in Hamden, CT.