Parshah Commentary

The opening chapters of the Torah return again and again to the subject of differentiation: God separates light from dark, sky from land and land from water, humanity from the dust of the earth. Our weekly reading, Parshat Noach, takes up this theme on the level of human collectives, asking how distinct nations come to be. For the Bible, this question is both anthropological and theological: What brings people to associate with groups larger and more enduring than themselves? What sets these groups apart from one another? And what purpose does each particular group have in the divine order of the world?

Our parshah addresses the question of the origin of nations in two different ways. First, in Chapter 10 of Breishit, it takes a genealogical approach. The text relates that the children of Noah begat descendants who spread across the earth, each of Noah’s three sons expanding “according to their land, each with their language, their families and their peoples.” The process is presented as a neutral, even benevolent, story of dispersal, described in a litany that echoes the ordered division of creation in the first chapter of Breishit—everything in its proper place, according to its type.

But Chapter 11 approaches this same question in a more mythological register. Following the story in last week’s parshah about humanity’s banishment from the Garden of Eden due to their sin and the account earlier in this week’s parshah of God’s decision to blot out the evil of humanity with a great flood, this tale is presented as yet another episode in the conflict between unruly humans and their frustrated creator. The story of the Tower of Babel—in which God disperses the people of the earth via a sudden confusion of tongues after they come together to build a soaring tower—is sketched out in nine tersely ambiguous verses that leave many questions unanswered: Why did humanity seek to build such a tower? What about it was displeasing to God? Despite its many points of opacity, the text definitively conveys one core message: the primacy of linguistic difference in generating other forms of human distinction. “And the whole land was of one language,” we are told at the story’s outset, followed soon after by its concluding verse, which explains that, in punishment, “God confused the language of the whole land.” Unlike in Chapter 10, where language is presented alongside family, tribe, and territory, here it is speech that pushes people into certain groups and away from others, disrupting an innate human drive toward togetherness.

If language could be the origin of human fragmentation, could it also facilitate the resolution of the tensions that arise from human difference? We find just such a framework much later in the Bible—in the words of the prophet Zephaniah, who lived in the tumultuous generation that preceded the fall of the Kingdom of Judah and destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the conclusion of his dark prediction of forthcoming doom, he shifts to a vision of God describing a future age of harmony and security: “Then I will turn all nations toward clarified language, for all of them to call in God’s name and to serve God with shared exertion.” Zephaniah’s vision evokes the Tower of Babel in mirror image: He sees the divine transformation of human speech as driving a new joint human purpose and possibility.

But crucially, Zephaniah does not promise a return to the “one language” that preceded the Tower of Babel. Instead, he foretells a tongue that is not unified but “clarified”; in Hebrew, the word’s root denotes refinement along with separation. This “clarified language” could be read as a dialectical synthesis of the contradiction between the pre-Babel single language and the post-Babel “confused language”: The language dreamed of by Zephaniah entails unity of purpose along with difference in mode of expression. In this moment when the questions of the relationship between universalism and particularism are so vexed—and when the idea of Jewish chosenness has wrought such harm—our parshah, read through the lens of Zephaniah, thus offers a way of understanding difference neither as a source of interminable strife nor as something that should be overcome, but rather as a force that may be productive in our collective struggle for a better world, a world in which cooperation and diversity live side by side.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.