Saints and Sinners: Bible is not a history book
Q: The Bible is a great source of inspiration, but it is not a history book as some ministers seem to think. It bothers me when I hear pastors take literally the stories of creation, for example, and Jonah and the Whale. — R.B.C., Albuquerque, N.M.
A: Some ancient stories, it is true, are no more than folk tales — made up, like Aesop’s fables. Others are myths based on an actual event — what we might call a historical novel today. Or, like some fiction, myths often present a truth in story-form with a pseudo-historical setting, such as in the story of Jonah and the Whale.
Another story the origins of which Bible scholars have long puzzled over concerns the Tower of Babel. Some have doubted that there ever was a Tower of Babel.
But new light has been shed on the mystery.
Archeologists who dug out the ancient city of Babylon in what was once southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) in the 1920s found numerous tower-like structures called ziggurats. Some experts now believe that the largest of them — with a 300-square-foot foundation — was the biblical Tower of Babel.
The evidence suggests that the tower was built by the Sumerians — a people who came to the flat country of Babylon from a mountainous region to the south. It was the Sumerians’ hope that God would someday come down to Earth using the mountains as a stepladder on which to descend.
Later, when the Jews were marched into captivity in Babylon, they were astonished by the diversity of languages and religions they found in this teeming cosmopolitan city. Seeing the towers pointing up toward the sky, they put two and two together. Or thought they did.
Their explanation, which was ingenious (if not a bit inaccurate), went like this:
The Babylonians had been trying to build a tower on which they could climb to heaven. This displeased God, who conceived a way to foil their plan.
The workmen on the tallest tower, who, up to this point, all spoke one language, went to the job one day and discovered to their bewilderment that they were speaking different languages. When a laborer spoke to the man next to him, the man couldn’t understand him. And vice versa. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to go on with the construction. Work on the tower ground to a halt.
In this way, Jews accounted for the presence of the mysterious tower and for the great variety of languages they heard being spoken. The story also may have been inspired by the fact that the name of the Babylonian tower was called Bab-ilu (“Gate of God.”) In Hebrew, the name translates as Babel, or Bavel. The similarity in pronunciation of babel and balal (“to confuse”) may have led to a play on words.
Q. Our minister spoke about the Second Coming. Do we modern Christians believe in the Second Coming? — A.W. Plainview, Texas
A: Millions of modern Christians — particularly evangelicals — recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, which asserts that Jesus “shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
Actually, there has been an upsurge of interest in the Second Coming in recent years. Evangelist Billy Graham once attributed this revival to “a widespread feeling that the problems of modern civilization have become insoluble by human effort and the only hope is for Jesus to return to earth and put things right.”
Many Christian scholars regard the Second Coming as a metaphor for Armageddon — the belief that history will some day reach a point where evil will be overcome and the Kingdom of God will be ushered in by Jesus in some way utterly beyond our comprehension symbolized by the Second Coming.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)