THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES at the Tower Babel may not have been a punishment after all:

Is the Tower of Babel wobbling?

by John Dart (Christian Century)

The unfinished Tower of Babel has stood for centuries in art, literature and biblical commentaries as an outrageous, heaven-reaching challenge to the God of Genesis, who responded by scrambling the common language of the citizens and dispersing them around the world. The brief account has nearly always been lumped together with the punishment stories involving Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the great flood—stories about how Yahweh deals with arrogant, sinful humanity.

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But a recently published study aims to tear down this view of Babel. It contends that the Genesis story was told merely to account for the origin of different languages from a city in old Mesopotamia, which was, from the biblical perspective, the patriarchal cradle of the civilized world.

Upon analysis, "there is no support in the story for viewing God's actions as punishment, judgment or curse upon the human race, nor as a catastrophe which doomed humanity to confusion and chaos," writes Old Testament professor Theodore Hiebert of McCormick Theological Seminary in the spring issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature. "The world's cultural diversity is represented as God's design for the world, not the result of [God's] punishment of it."

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