The story of the Tower of Babel occupies a complicated place in my intellectual and emotional life. I first encountered it within a literalist religious framework, where Genesis 11 was presented as straightforward history: an actual tower, a unified human language, and a divine act that shattered human coherence. When I eventually came to understand that this account could not be sustained as literal history, the realization was deeply destabilizing. What fell apart was not only a particular story, but the epistemological structure that had supported it. For a time, Babel became synonymous with loss. A loss of certainty. A loss of trust. A loss of the sense that meaning was guaranteed rather than negotiated.
With distance and maturity, I now return to Babel as allegory rather than reportage, and in doing so, I find that the story has gained rather than lost depth. Contemporary biblical scholarship overwhelmingly situates the Tower of Babel within the genre of mythic or etiological narrative. That is, stories that explain fundamental features of human existence rather than recount empirical events. The text itself signals this intention. Genesis 11:1 begins, “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words." This is not a claim meant to withstand linguistic scrutiny; it is a narrative setup, a deliberate exaggeration that frames the theological problem the story seeks to explore.
Modern scholars emphasize that Babel is less concerned with divine jealousy or punishment than with human ambition and the politics of unity. Walter Brueggemann argues that the tower represents “the human yearning to create a self-sufficient world, secure against all threats, including the threat of God." In this reading, Babel is not about curiosity or creativity gone awry, but about the consolidation of power. The builders seek to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4), a phrase that signals not mere pride but the desire for permanence, control, and centralized identity.
Robert Alter similarly notes that the language of the passage echoes imperial projects familiar to the ancient Near East. Bricks, kilns, and monumental architecture are not neutral details; they evoke Mesopotamian ziggurats and the political theology of empire. Alter observes that Babel dramatizes “the hubris of civilization itself, its impulse to monumentalize power and erase difference.” From this perspective, the confusion of languages is not arbitrary cruelty but resistance. It is a divine refusal to allow totalizing uniformity to harden into domination.
This scholarly framing fundamentally reshapes how I engage the story. As someone who now understands himself as religious but not spiritual, I no longer seek transcendence or metaphysical certainty in the text. Instead, I approach it as moral literature, attentive to its critique of systems and structures. Babel becomes a story about how easily coordination slides into coercion, how unity becomes suspect when it leaves no room for plurality.
Escher’s The Tower of Babel offers a striking visual analogue to this scholarly consensus. His tower is not grotesque or chaotic; it is orderly, elegant, and impressively engineered. The workers are disciplined and purposeful. Nothing about the scene suggests moral failure at the level of individual intent. This aligns with Brueggemann’s insistence that the danger of Babel lies not in wickedness but in “the absolute confidence that human systems can finally secure human destiny.”
What unsettles me most in Escher’s image is the absence of dissent. Every figure is absorbed into the task. Each occupies a clearly defined role within a larger, unquestioned project. This resonates powerfully with my own experience in education, where institutional systems are often sustained by people of goodwill who rarely have the vantage point, or the permission, to question the whole. Like Babel’s builders, educators frequently labor within structures that promise coherence, efficiency, and progress, even as those same structures risk flattening human complexity.
The biblical text itself hints at this problem of scale and distance. “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower” (Gen. 11:5). The irony is unmistakable: the tower meant to reach heaven is so small, from the divine perspective, that God must descend to inspect it. Scholars have long noted the subtle satire embedded here. The builders’ ambition is undercut not by thunder or fire, but by narrative irony. The tower’s grandeur exists only from within the system that produced it.
This irony speaks directly to my own journey away from literalism. What once felt like betrayal now feels like discernment. To read Babel allegorically is not to diminish its authority, but to take it seriously as wisdom literature. The story does not explain why people speak different languages; it interrogates why humans so often mistake sameness for unity and scale for significance.
Escher’s decision to depict the tower mid-construction rather than in ruins is crucial. The story, as the image renders it, is unfinished. The catastrophe has not yet occurred. The builders still believe in what they are making. This suspended moment mirrors my present stance toward inherited religious and institutional narratives. I am no longer inside them uncritically, but neither have I abandoned them entirely. I engage them cautiously, historically, and ethically.
In this light, Babel no longer represents the fragility of belief for me. It represents the necessity of humility. The modern scholarly view affirms what my own experience has taught me: that stories endure not because they are literally true, but because they remain diagnostically accurate. Babel continues to matter because it names a recurring human problem: the temptation to build systems so comprehensive that they silence the very diversity they claim to unite. Escher’s tower stands as a visual reminder that the most dangerous structures are often the most convincing ones, and that discernment, not certainty, is the truest form of faith I now know how to practice.