A Building Drive - A City / A Tower

Genesis 11: 3-9 – Building the City and the Tower
key words: bricks, tar (mortar), city, tower, one language, confuse speech, scattered, babel (confused)
“to make a name for ourselves”

Key topics from Torah Study with Rabbi Marder 8/22

• The first ‘building drive’
• sound patterns in the verse
• contrast between location where you build bricks vs use stone
• bricks were an important aspect of Mesopotamian culture
• What is the motivation for building the city? Was it a rebellion against the command to populate the world?
• Ziggurat – the spiral tower in the ancient near east – to emulate a mountain.
• Why is there a problem with this?
• Arrogance of humans to try to ‘reach the heavens’
• interpretations from: Arthur Green, Talmud Sanhedrin, Rashi, Eli Munk, Samson Raphael Hirsh
• And more contemporary interpretations – political points
• Why is God above?

Art:
Pieter Bruegel.









Gustave Doré,











Poetry:

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Language:
BabEl = confusion – joke on the Glory of Babylon