Sense of Scale

In the story of Babel that I was taught as a kid, the Babelites were not sure they were going to earn their way to heaven and were uncertain of God’s grace, so they figured they’d just climb. They built a tower that punctured the clouds, hoping to find where God lived.

I love this image. It’s so literal and graphic. It’s also wrong. Robert Alter, my favorite Biblical commentator, says no one was trying to build a tower to get to heaven. The text says that the tower’s top was “in the heavens,” but that “is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers” (Alter 39). The Babel built tower is the linguistic and literal equivalent of our “skyscrapers.”

Anthill Madness: the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

As the ancients built their skyscraper, God came down to walk around the town and said, “If this is what they have begun to do, now nothing they plot to do will elude them” (Genesis 11:6). I think we can be relatively sure, in this instance, that these words were put in God’s mouth, because it is here, in God’s speech that we find the sin of the story. The tellers were so overawed with the invention of baked bricks, with their power and ingenuity, that they imagined that God would grow afraid of them and what they could accomplish.

From the distance of the twenty-first century, with its space travel and split atoms, the idea is laughable. C’mon, I can think as I’m reading, you made bricks. Calm down. Let me show you the internet. And so it is also one of those moments where it’s a little too easy to make fun of people who existed in the past, to imagine I’m smarter than them.

As is often the case when we’re dismissive of our ancestors, we fail to see the way that their foibles reflect our own. Because our philosophy, history, medicine, science—all things that are as good and useful and necessary as baked bricks—they’re a spot of snow in a storm compared to what it is to be God. In a constantly expanding universe crafted by an immortal hand, we are so, so small. When viewed from the heavens there is no variation in size between their bricks and the best humanity has brought forth in five thousand years since then. The best of us and the worse of us—none of it is really that different in front of God. “Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing,” Moses says after God has shown him everything, “which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10).

The Burning Bush, Darius Gilmont. Tell me this is not one of the coolest scriptural representations you’ve ever seen.

The knowledge that we are all little and not very powerful can be frightening. There is sometimes an impulse to fight back against it—to build a tower, a statue, an idea, something to say I was here, and I mattered. These efforts are, of course, ultimately futile. “My name is Ozymandias,” a crumbled statue in a Shelley poem reads, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Even less happily, we could belittle others hoping to look important in comparison, or bully ourselves in the hopes that we’ll get bigger and stronger, that we’ll make ourselves matter.

Or—or we could lay back and look at the stars. We could wonder about how the fingers that light them, the force that hangs them, knows our names. And not just our names but our every joy and pain. We could marvel that we are (as our hymns say) the “little ones” of the Lord. We could treat everyone like they’re exactly as important as us, know that, from the heights of heaven, we are no different. Our smallness can be awe inspiring and curiosity-invoking, and when it is we call it humility. Humility, ultimately, is really just a sense of scale.