The Tower of Babel
Pieter Bruegel
PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER, c.1563. OIL ON WOOD.
‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ A unified, monolingual human race, working together as they traverse eastward come to the land of Shinar and begin to build a tower, high up into the sky. Yahweh, seeing them rise higher to the heavens and feeling threatened by the power of a species that can all communicate, confounds their speech, creating hundreds of different of languages so they can no longer understand each other, and the tower begins to break, scattering them all over the world. This is the story that Bruegel is telling, one of hubris and futility, of humans who aspire to divinity and have their pride punished. He paints the tower before it’s destruction, being built in a spiral upwards, but there are cracks showing and we see bricks beginning to fall. We are, he is trying to tell us, so arrogant to think we can reach God when our earthly craftsmanship is not even able to build a strong tower.