Great laughter was in heaven

A city and tow’r, whose top may reach Heaven;
And get themselves a name, lest far dispersed
In foreign lands their memory be lost
Upon their tongues a various spirit to raze
Quite out of their native language, and instead
To sow a jangling noise of words unknown:
Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud
Among the builders; each to other calls
Not understood, till hoarse, and all in rage.
– Paradise Lost, John Milton XII 44-46, 53-58

This is the poet John Milton’s account of Genesis 11:1-9, when God confuses the tongues of builders in the Plain of Shinar so that they cannot build a tower reaching to heaven. Therefore, it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth (v. 9, NRSV). Milton’s telling is somewhat more allusive, allowing us to picture vividly in our mind’s eye God descending from heaven “to visit men/ Unseen, and through their habitations walks / To mark their doings” (P.L. XII 49-51). Milton also imagines what might have been the reaction to God’s intervention, suggesting that angels and other heavenly spectators to God’s might are amused. “[G]reat laughter was in Heav’n/And looking down, to see the hubbub strange/ And hear the din; thus was the building left Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named.”

Laughter in heaven

But did heaven really laugh? The biblical text does not mention.

In biblical interpretation of this passage, a question has emerged: did God condemn language, or is language just incidental to the main condemnation of the builders’ insolence? After all, the problem of their cooperation against God was halted by the instantaneous confusion of tongues. As theologian James Elington points out, even Protestant opinion has been divided on this topic. “For [Martin] Luther, this ‘seedbed of all evils and discords’ was a cause of linguistic division and confusion across the human race. Although [John] Calvin saw the emergence of languages in a more positive light, he nonetheless held that humanity’s rapid departure from its monolingual origins was evidence of a terrible divine judgment for sin.” Where Calvin departed from Luther’s perspective, however, was in his estimation that God simply sped up the timeline for linguistic diversity on that fateful day. “Calvin also left the door open to another possibility: Without Babel, without a fall into sin, a harmonious and holy diversity of languages still would have arisen.” What Elington’s view suggests, contrary to Milton’s narrative, is that heaven does not laugh at our attempts to build community across linguistic boundaries, or see it as an inherently foolish activity. A church that can embrace linguistic diversity as part of God’s original design would be one step closer to a vision of the Kingdom that is not limited by worldly understandings. Elington notes that even before the time of Christ, Roman thinkers like Cicero were convinced a nation’s longevity depended on its people sharing one language and one ethnicity. One does not have to squint at history or our own present context very hard to find similar examples of civilizational success being defined in specific national, ethnic, and linguistic terms. How fortunate for us that salvation comes not just for one country or in one language, but rather, as Jesus assured, this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come (Matt. 24:14).

Pentecost and Babel

Other commentators highlight the importance of reading Babel in tangent with the story of Pentecost. Against the view that the Babel narrative is fundamentally about language, some scholars argue that it is fundamentally about dispersal, about God hastening the scattering of humanity so that they could steward all parts of earth, a dispersal Milton notes the builders feared. In The Gift of the Stranger: Faith, Hospitality, and Foreign Language Learning, David I. Smith and Barbara Carvill draw parallels between Babel and those times when Israel’s inclination toward insularity meant they failed in God’s exhortation to be hospitable to strangers. Regarding the Babel story, they note, “it is oppressive uniformity rather than diversity that seems to be associated with sin.” Later they comment, “If the more pessimistic readings of the Babel story were correct, we would expect to see a return to linguistic uniformity when healing comes, an undoing of the curse of difference. . . .Yet we can learn from Pentecost that our solutions to the fragmentation we face will not be genuinely redemptive if they underestimate or trample on human diversity, including diversity of language.”

In our globalized culture, in which the scattering of people about the world has already taken place by forces which seem all too human and not of God’s blessèd urging, such as war or famine, perhaps it does us good to remember that offering hospitality through language learning ultimately poses no real risk to our own identity. Israel’s covenant with God is the source of their ultimate cohesion, not, as Cicero claimed, their language or culture. According to Smith and Carvill, “welcoming the stranger does not involve an abandonment of identity for Israel, any more than it does for the individual language learner or the school community. Rather, it involves the formation of an identity expressed in love.” Smith and Carvill argue that language learning and teaching actually have a fundamental role to play in training people how to be hospitable in the first place.

Language as hospitality

Consider what learning a “foreign” language usually involves; students are confronted with the indissoluble differences between their own language guage and another, differences in grammar, sound, and idioms that we cannot easily skirt around with good translation. Translation, however, preaches its own mini gospel, or “good news”: difference is not an insurmountable hurdle toward our ability to relate to one another, because there is an enduring possibility of our experience and faith being translatable to each other, always communicable even if not identical.

In a talk given to a group of Christian foreign language teachers, philosopher Calvin Seerveld described linguistic diversity as a certain sign of God’s promise to protect our world: “God prevented such warlike violence and vanity by dispersing men and women across the face of God’s earth so they would not be able to centralize and capitalize their own utter destruction. The diversity of speech in the mouths of humans then is like another rainbow from God, not in the sky but within the human voice: a rainbow promise made good with a down payment at Pentecost.” Seerveld’s emphasis is that our language education must reflect the joy of this promise, and that we cannot demonstrate we believe that linguistic diversity is a blessing if we do not teach it in a joyful way. Not “you are what you eat,” but rather, “you are how you eat.”

Language as joy

James K. A. Smith makes a similar claim in the opening of his book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. He points out that Christian education is often articulated as an exercise in imparting a worldview, or about “info-dumping“ Christian perspectives on various topics, rather than cultivating the heart and its desires by setting up education as a kind of liturgy that embodies its own end goals. Language education cannot be only about final aims, such as becoming a good translator or being hospitable. Those are fine goals, yet part of the blessing of language is its inherent joy, a joy needed to bolster students in their eventual use of those skills of translation and communication. Learners of new languages often speak with delight about the process itself, not just its final usefulness to them.

That we could find such ‘architectural’ joy in the grammatical structure or in the lilt and whimsy of new vocabulary, as much as in the possibilities that language opens up, points to the legitimacy of an optimistic reading of both Babel and Pentecost. We should imagine any laughter from heaven was directed toward the folly of human rebellion. Psalm 2:3-4 relates a similar rebellion of earthly kings wanting independence from heavenly oversight. The kings say: Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us, in response to which the Psalmist says, He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord has them in derision. Any laughter at Babel cannot have been about the rabble of sounds, as Milton suggested, but rather because we see the Holy Spirit at Pentecost bringing joy through language. God meant for us to delight in linguistic difference; it was always supposed to be this way.

The character of God

Ultimately, what we learn from Pentecost and the existence of thousands of unique languages gives us insight into God’s character. If no language is foreign to God, we can begin to understand the scope of God’s power and omniscience, and at the same time, the individualized and accessible nature of his relationship with us. In Acts 2, many believers were spontaneously given the gift of fluency in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. This spontaneous multilingualism draws frenetic excitement from the crowd. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” No extra-biblical poetry, apologies to Milton and his competent verse, is needed to locate the humour of the situation, for the comic relief is provided a few lines later.

But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” The text lists people from Mesopotamia, Asia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, and the Arabic Peninsula being present at this gathering, meaning God saw their languages fit for the preaching of the Gospel, not just Aramaic or Greek. Acquiring another language for the purpose of translating scripture or conveying hospitality is not a reluctant, modern solution to a stubborn problem, but an ancient source of joy.