The Tower of Babel

Noted Bible scholar Gordon Wenham writes:

It is obvious that the character of the material in chaps. 1-11 is markedly different from that in chaps. 12 onward. The opening chapters have a universal perspective dealing with all mankind… it is also essentially preparatory in function and puts the patriarchs into their cosmic context.

And the final bit of that preparatory section – the last piece of the puzzle of why the world is the way that it is – is the story of the Tower of Babel.

Babel deliberately echoes lots of things earlier in the story, especially Cain after he murdered Abel in Genesis 4. Both he and the builders of the Tower of Babel migrate eastward, build a city to establish security and existence without God, are proud of their manufacture, and are judged by being forced to migrate.

At Babel, as we have already seen, people tried to use bricks to build a way to the heavens. They didn’t expect God to come down (11:5), and when he did, he judged their hubris by confusing their languages, so that they could no longer understand one another.

What does this have to do with autism? It gives us another Biblical-theological model for understanding it.

If Genesis 3 suggests that autism can be understood as one among many types of brokenness as a consequence of the Fall; Genesis 11 suggests that it can be understood as a different language. After all, if autism can function in much the same way as being of a different nationality, then we can understand the communication differences and difficulties associated with autism as a consequence of Babel.

And that in turn gives us interesting insights into how the division between autistic and neurotypical interacts with faith.

As Waltke notes, the key New Testament use of the Tower of Babel is at Pentecost in Acts 2:5-18. Ash writes:

Ever since the Tower of Babel, the confusion of human languages and the difficulties human beings have communicating properly, have been a terrible sign of living in the world outside Eden, the world under God’s righteous curse on human pride.

Now, wonderfully and very surprisingly, the confusion of languages is briefly and miraculously overcome. Babel is reversed. At Babel, the people sang their own praises, and so became incomprehensible to one another: at Pentecost, they sang the praises of the one God, and so began to understand one another.

Pentecost then gives us a signpost that the communication difficulties between autistic and neurotypical can begin to be overcome by the Spirit in the present, as we grow in love for one another in the Church, and as people come to praise God in wonderful diversity from every tribe and language, and every people and nation. Yes, and from every neurotype too.