Chapter 1 of Genesis represents both divine and human speech, and while God and Adam seem to understand one another—no one asks for translation or expresses befuddlement—what each does with language is clearly different. God creates with it, Adam names with it, and their languages differ as much as "Let there be light" differs from "You're a lemur." Even the appearance of mutual understanding may be deceptive; after all, God uses the word "die" in a deathless world without bothering about being understood. And while the biblical redactor is noncommittal about whether the humans understood their God, the poet John Milton in
This occlusion of understanding may be why there is only a modicum of conversation in Eden, very little of it quoted. For example, whether Eve actually speaks to Adam is anyone's guess, since she is never directly quoted in conversation with him. After Eve eats the fruit, the doings that follow—sharing the fruit, donning leaves, hiding out—occur speechlessly, in a quick dumbshow of shame that ends in the first rhetorical question: "Where are you?" God asks, and the ensuing duet of inquisition and blame isn't much of a conversation either. In the cascade of divine curses—on man, on woman, on serpent—speech travels in one direction, from power to powerlessness, and after Adam renames "the woman" Eve (Genesis 3:20), he will never name anything again, ceding the naming of his sons to their mother. At best, Edenic conversation is a lopsided affair; at worst, it's sabotaged, whether by divine commandment or serpentine deception.
By the time we reach the story of Babel in Genesis 11, whether God and humans speak the same language is almost beside the point; they barely speak to one another. After the flood, when the smoke from Noah's sacrifice rises, God, for the first time, can be heard muttering to himself: "for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21). What takes God by surprise, in the Babel story, is that humans have connived to do something in concert and on their own initiative. After the fiasco in the garden and the fratricide in the field, after all the quotidian murders, rapes, and betrayals, one wouldn't have thought so: "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth" (Genesis 11:4). Their project—manifold and complex, like so many human undertakings—was hotly debated by the rabbis of the Talmud. Some apologized for Babel's builders, whose aim, they reasoned, was to climb up and slit the tent of heaven where another unjust flood awaited innocent and guilty alike. Other rabbis staunchly defended God. For them, the builders were a concatenation of sinners with various motives: to colonize heaven, to worship idols, to lay siege to the kingdom of God. And accordingly, they argued, God meted out fierce punishments to the builders, some of whom were turned to apes and others to phantoms.
But perhaps the rabbis overlooked a different provocation:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. (Gen. 11:5- 7)
What exactly was their offense? This was not the first time human beings "imagined" evil plans repugnant to God. In Genesis 6, when the "sons of God came in unto the daughters of men," he'd conceded that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and ... every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5). What was new to Babel was the builders' plan to "make us a name," for to name oneself is to usurp a divine prerogative. And since the punishment at Babel was to avenge the human will to "make ... a name" for oneself, God doomed each of the builders to speak