Noach 5786
The Name of the Game is Fame
The major part of Parashat Noach (Gen 6:9–11:32) is about Noah and the Flood that wiped out Creation 1.0, and there are also a couple of genealogical passages. I’m going to talk about a very small part of this parashah, just nine verses, but it’s a story that has loomed large in the biblical imagination — or rather in later people’s imagination about the Bible: the first nine verses of Chapter 11, the story of the tower of Babel:
Gen 11:1 The whole world had a single language with the same words. 2 When they traveled from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Let’s make bricks and fire them.”
With those bricks, they decided they should build both a city and a tower with its head in the sky. Why a tower? You might suppose that it was just because people like making things, but in fact they (that is, per v. 1, everyone on earth) announced that they were going to do this (1) to get famous and (2) to keep from being scattered all over the world. I guess nine verses in the Bible is more famous than most of us will ever get. However (spoiler alert!) #2 is exactly what is going to happen because of their building project.
The story goes on to say (1) that God made it difficult for them to communicate with each other and (2) that he scattered them all over the planet. It does not — quite — say that the language change was God’s method of scattering them, but that is the implication. That is certainly the situation we all find ourselves in now. The human race is scattered all over the planet and speaks some three, four, five, or six thousand different languages.
Even people that speak the same language sometimes have trouble communicating, of course. How then was the tower going to prevent them from being scattered? If we look a bit more carefully, we’ll find their answer to that question in v. 4:
Gen 11:4 They said, “Let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its head in the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed all over the surface of the earth.”
I said earlier that they wanted to be famous, and that is precisely what “to make a name for oneself” means, in English just as it did in Biblical Hebrew. That is, they were intent on building this city and tower so that they would be known for something. They wanted to have an achievement to their credit that so that their fame would resound. (Where your fame resounds when you are the only people on earth is a question I may have to resolve elsewhere.)
Surprisingly (to me anyway), the expression “to make a name” does not appear very often in the Bible. I found just a handful of occurrences. Here are some of them:
In Isa 63:12, the prophet says that God had Moses divide the sea so the fleeing Israelites could pass through “to make Himself an eternal name”; the phrase repeats in v. 14 as “to make Himself a glorious name.”
Jer 32:20 has God’s “signs and wonders in the land of Egypt” making a name for himself “to this very day.”
In Dan 9:15, Daniel confesses the people’s sins and asks for God’s mercy on devastated Jerusalem, addressing him as “You who brought Your people out of the land of Egypt and made Yourself a name,” once again adding “to this very day.”
In Neh 9:10 the Levites proclaim — you guessed it — “You performed signs and wonders before Pharaoh … and made Yourself a name to this very day.”
It would seem to me that building this city and the tower, too, was meant not merely to get “the whole world” some ink on the front page of the paper; it was to give them a name that would last to this very day, fame that would last throughout human history. The implication is that, just as happens earlier in Genesis, they were trying to become gods.
Beside the occurrences of God making a name for himself there is one human being in the Bible who does so. I’ll give you three guesses who that person is, and the first two don’t count. Yes, it’s David, the one who can break all the rules with impunity. God tells him (via his prophet Nathan):
2 Sam 7:9 = 1 Chron 17:8 I have been with you wherever you went and I cut down all your enemies before you. I will make you a great name, like the name of the greatest on earth.
No doubt that last phrase means “the greatest men who have ever lived on earth. Indeed, after God promises this to David, the very next chapter tells us:
1 Chron 18:12 David made a name when he returned from slaying Edom in the Valley of Salt: 18,000 of them.1
He “made a name” for himself, just as God had promised him.
What a contrast between the people who tried to build the city and the tower in order to make a name for themselves but were stopped by God from doing so, and David, who not only made a name for himself but did so after being promised by God that God would help him do it — just as God did for himself by means of the miracles he performed in Egypt.
There’s one more example worth mentioning here; perhaps you’ve already guessed it. If not, follow me on this quick trip to the book of Ruth. You know the story: Ruth’s husband, her brother-in-law, and her father-in-law have all died in the first five verses of the book. They had all left Judah and gone to Moab, and now Ruth returns with her bereaved mother-in-law to Bethlehem.
It turns out that a “redeemer” — a relative who has obligations to the larger family — has to marry Ruth and father a child who will perpetuate the name of either her husband or her father-in-law or perhaps both. This is all based (not legally, but for story purposes) on the concept of levirate marriage (see Deut 25:5–10). The Latin word levir means “brother-in-law,” and levirate marriage only happens when the dead husband leaves a brother — here, a slightly more distant relative — but no children.
If the living brother refuses, the widow appears before the elders at the city gate, the standard site for public proceedings, and explains the consequences of his refusal:
Deut 25:7 My husband’s brother refuses to establish a name for his brother in Israel.
It’s a beautifully written story, such a wonderful piece of literary writing that I intend to devote a series of bonus posts on my other Substack to writing about it. The point of that story today is that in chapter 4, when Boaz (the male lead of the story) is ready to marry Ruth, there’s another redeemer who’s ahead of him in the line of succession. This redeemer finds out that he’s expected to marry a Moabite woman — not merely a furriner but one who it seems, per Deut 23:4, should never be accepted into Israel — and he bails. Unlike all the other characters in the book, he is merely called “So-and-so.” He too has refused to “establish a name” for his brother, and the book of Ruth, in turns, leaves him nameless.
Now back to the story of the tower of Babel (really, of Bavel — that is, Babylon). Though they did build that tower, according to Gen 11:5, we don’t know the name of that people or any of the names of those individuals. The story won’t tell us those names. They made a city; they made a tower; but a name is the one thing they were unable to make.
After the one language split into many, of course, that people vanished entirely and became all the rest of us — the Armenians and the Irish and the Zulus and the whole ball of wax. A very different set of names finishes Genesis 11, ten generations of names that take us down to the star of Parashat Lech Lecha. So far from not having a name, he will have two: first Abram and then Abraham. But that’s for next week.
The matching verse in 2 Sam 8:13 says that David slew Arameans, ארם instead of אדם.