“And they said, ‘Come, let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens’...So the
Lord scattered them over the face of the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad” (Genesis 11:4,8).
Raising towers comes instinctively to men, but not necessarily to women. Boy infants squat on the floor, squeeze blocks in fat fingers and place one atop another, piling them up until they fall. Later they will fulfill that urge by erecting pillars, monuments, spires and towers as evidence of their presence on the earth. And they take pride in affirming theirs as tallest. Those who cannot compete in erection consider ways to bring down the symbols of male dominance. Both the tower on the plain of Shinar in Genesis 11 and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that came cascading to the ground on September 11, 2001 affirm those basic male tendencies.
The purpose for building the towers was quite different. In the Bible account it’s said that the people in those days spoke a common language, but their intent was to raise an edifice high enough to peer into the heavens and eavesdrop on the deities who dwelled there. Certainly it’s a naive thought. Most scholars now believe that the Babel tower was indeed the ziggurat of Babylonia which the Hebrews may have witnessed and considered an arrogance. It was in fact a wedding cake arrangement, spiraling upwards to a platform. There the king would take a consort and in effect demonstrate to the lord of the skies a literal example of how he should fertilize the earth with rain so that the fields would yield their precious crops. It therefore combined several violations of the Hebrew faith. For one, the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth did not require a prompt to instruct Him in what He ought to be doing on the earth, and for another, to utilize sexuality as a ritual of worship was indeed beyond the pale.
In our secular society the Twin Towers were erected purely for expediency. Unlike Cleveland, New York City is blessed with a solid foundation upon which one might build as high as desired with little fear of the foundation crumbling beneath. The architects hardly considered that the height of their edifice would be an offense to anybody. Yet it was. The first attempt to bring it down was a miserable failure—but not the second try.
The occupants of the Twin Towers spoke a diversity of languages; after all, they came from a variety of nations—but they all spoke the language of the computer. It was God who frustrated the arrogance of the Babel builders. It was savages who in the Name of Allah brought down the Twin Towers.
Babel began as a community, or at least a common enterprise, precipitating the scattering of the nations. The Twin Towers drew a plethora of nations into a commonality of interests.
Babel’s purpose was to invade the heavens. The goal of the Twin Towers was economically motivated.
God’s intention was to distribute and expand humanity through all His world, albeit it may have been misunderstood or even resented by the human beings who might have preferred the comfortable to the challenging, and the know to the unknown—but that’s the way the Lord seems to work. God did on a human and social scale what He had been doing with the simplest molecules and life forms; i.e., to divide and multiply.
El Qaida would retract and thwart the progress of civilization in the Name of Allah. If they had a vision, it was to reduce the expansiveness of modern society into a tribalism they define as religion. God even in a secular culture pushes onward with His plan for progress and humanity’s unity.