the tower of babel

One of the pictures in my office is an illustration of the Tower of Babel, copied from a 15th century French manuscript. In the picture, the tower looks a little like a square wedding cake, with a stairway winding upward and parapets on every level. The windows of the tower and the stars in the sky above it are picked out in gold. The foreground of the picture is crowded with men working together. One is turning a winch to lift a wooden plank. Another is unloading blocks of stone from a pack slung over the back of a camel. There are men planing boards, mixing mortar, and one using a compass to draw what might be a blueprint of the completed building. The harmony of the scene is marred only at very top of the picture, where two angels, hovering over the tower, are using small clubs to beat off the builders and break the stone.

I always thought that the end of the story, when the project had to be abandoned because the builders could no longer speak to each other, was remarkably unfair. I know that the people who tried to build the tower were guilty of the sins of pride and arrogance, seeking to war with heaven and challenge G-d. But what the picture shows is what I imagined: the whole world working towards a common goal, trying to create something extraordinary, astonishing, not realizing that their efforts were doomed from the start and that all their work would come to nothing.