The name is inspired by one of the origin myths present in the Bible: The Tower of Babel.
It is often interpreted as a hubristic act of defiance against God, however many believe it doesn't have such a negative characteristic.
🔗The Myth
The text is pretty small and we can analyze it in detail. You can find it in Genesis, chapter 11, from verses 1 to 9. Some context: the events in this chapter happen just after the Great Flood, a cataclysm where God flood the whole Earth and only Noah and his ark remained.
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
We are in an ideal situation where everybody can understand each other, there are no nations, no tribes and no divisions. Some experts of the Bible often say that all words matter, but here we can see a redundancy between "one language" and "a common speech". Some say that another translation of "וּדְבָרִים" can be "and things", hence this could be interpreted as "they shared things".
As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Nothing crazy here, they have just found a nice place and settle there.
Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
They fear a new flood and therefore want to build a tower to resist it. This is where the hubris of humans comes into place for many people.
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
This is the interesting part. God itself recognizes that when people unite and collaborate with each other they can achieve marvelous things. It seems God was concerned by it and so decided to confuse their language, to divide them once more.
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
In Genesis 9 it is said that God asked them to make a name and to repopulate the whole Earth. Some interpret it by saying that people demonstrated their value and so were ready to go repopulate the Earth. We see a problem with this interpretation, because if that was the only motive there would be no reason to confuse and divide them.
You may understand now that this myth is an etiology, i.e. a myth meant to explain a phenomenon, in this case why there are so many languages in the world. As we see it, it has little to do with hubris, but rather tells us that thousands of years ago people already understood that only through collaboration we can achieve a much better society. But then they also had to stigmatize it.
It is interesting to notice that God didn't have to forcefully destroy the tower, confusing the languages and preventing people from fully understanding each other was enough to stop it and scatter them through.
🔗Conclusions
The main goal of this project is to let people understand that through collaboration we can build a better society. Divide et impera is yet another example that rulers of the past already understood that to concentrate power in the hands of few, the many must be divided and scattered, as God did with the people of Babel.
We want to challenge the status quo and focus on the positive side of this old myth, that's why we chose Babel.
We believe there is more in the city of Babel than just hubris, and we find concerning that for thousands years certain groups had to stigmatize collaboration to such an extent.
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