Babble-On (Gen 11:9)
The Tower of Babylon
9 That is why it was named Babble-on — because that is where YHWH baffled the language of all the earth, and it is from there that YHWH blew them across the face of the earth.
עַל־כֵּ֞ן קָרָ֤א שְׁמָהּ֙ בָּבֶ֔ל כִּי־שָׁ֛ם בָּלַ֥ל יְ׳הוָ֖ה שְׂפַ֣ת כָּל־הָאָ֑רֶץ וּמִשָּׁם֙ הֱפִיצָ֣ם יְ׳הוָ֔ה עַל־פְּנֵ֖י כָּל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃ פ
I had never quite thought of it this way until just now, but the story we’re finishing today is a biblical expression of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The principle asserts that you can never know precisely both an object’s velocity and its location. For one thing, on a subatomic scale, measuring one knocks the other out of whack. Perhaps you’ve heard the joke about Heisenberg being stopped for speeding:
Officer: Dr. Heisenberg, do you know how fast you were going?
Heisenberg: No, but I know precisely where I was.
What I’m talking about in our case — apologies to those of you who have been drumming your fingers on the table — is that our heroes built the city and the tower to achieve two purposes:
They wanted to make a name for themselves.
They wanted not to be scattered all over the earth.
They made a name for themselves, and that is precisely why they were scattered. Had they not made themselves notorious by building their McMonument, they would not have been scattered — at least not by the logic of this story.
It would be slightly more accurate to say that those two were concomitant goals:
