{"id":457,"date":"2011-01-10T05:50:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T05:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/01\/the-tower-of-babel-as-satire\/"},"modified":"2011-01-10T05:50:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-10T05:50:00","slug":"the-tower-of-babel-as-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2011\/01\/the-tower-of-babel-as-satire.html","title":{"rendered":"The Tower of Babel as Satire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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A couple of posts about the Tower of Babel story have appeared in the blogosphere recently. Terri discussed telling her children that it is not literally true<\/a>, while DoOrDoNot shared a humorous story about a child being offered a possible literal interpretation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the past I\u2019ve mentioned<\/a>\u00a0the story briefly, such as in a parody of\u00a0the use of the story by young-earth creationists to oppose mainstream linguistics<\/a>, and also\u00a0mentioned Judy Klitsner\u2019s treatment of the story<\/a> in her book\u00a0Subversive Sequels in the Bible<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. I was surprised to find that I\u2019ve never discussed it more directly or in more detail.<\/p>\n

The only thing I would add at present is that the story has a strong element of satire<\/i>. It is poking fun at the Babylonians, reinterpreting the name of their capital city Babylon<\/a>\u00a0(turning the \u201cGate of God\u201d into \u201cconfusion\u201d), and offering an etiological story about their great ziggurat<\/a>\u00a0Etemenanki \u2013 so grandiose was it that it is possible that they never managed to finish it, perhaps thus inspiring the story in Genesis.<\/p>\n

And related tangentially to the title of this post and the topic of this blog more generally, the blog Bible Babel has a post on the Bible in the sci-fi series Firefly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A couple of posts about the Tower of Babel story have appeared in the blogosphere recently. Terri discussed telling her children that it is not literally true, while DoOrDoNot shared a humorous story about a child being offered a possible literal interpretation. In the past I\u2019ve mentioned\u00a0the story briefly, such as in a parody of\u00a0the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Tower of Babel as Satire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A couple of posts about the Tower of Babel story have appeared in the blogosphere recently. 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