Some Bible stories unsettled me when I was little, confused me as a middle-schooler, and brought yet another perspective to me as an adult reader.
When baby Moses was placed in a basket, I was sad. I was also five years old. All I could think was that his mother was giving him away.
As a skeptical sixth grader who had just studied Egypt, I thought, “There are crocodiles in the Nile. Wasn’t there a safer place for Baby Mo?”
Once I became a mother, the sacrifice Jochebed made for her child made perfect sense.
The Walking Man from Galilee challenged the scholars to look at the Law with different eyes. Two thousand years later, Jesus would still be shaking his head at us because we misapply the point of many Bible stories.
Recently, I re-read one that gets only nine verses devoted to it in Genesis. Before and after those lengthy family tree spreadsheets (so-and-so begat so-and-so and so on and so forth), the incident at Shinar appears. Wednesday night or Sunday morning Bible school classes, I was there. Even took four semesters of Bible history at the Christian university from which I graduated. In each of those settings, the Tower of Babel construction project (Genesis 11) fascinated me.
Who could blame people for wanting to build a tall tower after the Flood? A child’s point of view would see this as perfectly logical, safe and smart. Perhaps Noah’s descendants were still a bit leery of low-lying places. My middle-school brain thought that people working together on a big project was a good thing—unity and teamwork were noble concepts.
It would be in college when I saw with clearer vision the tragedy of Babel. The professor highlighted God’s tone in verse 6, and everything clicked.
…You are one people, with one language, and this is what you choose to do with your unity? Really?
At this place in Babylonia, the people were motivated not by unity but by vain ambition. The main lesson taught to me as a child was that they were wrong to try and build something to heaven. What I finally understood from that Old Testament story was that a selfish pursuit, in any form, is a house of cards waiting to fall.
“Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name….” Let us make us a name. For ourselves. For our glory.
In response, Jehovah made sure tongues were confused and garbled. No longer able to communicate, people scattered, and the project ended. In this origin story of how the world came to have various languages, God thwarted misplaced pride.
The same story heard with three different mindsets, seen through three separate lenses.
Whether you are nine or ninety, do not fear the questioning voice when it speaks to you. It’s okay to be skeptical or doubt—those are signs of faith growth spurts. If nothing else, re-reading and analyzing something at a different age empowers you to strengthen your foundation.
Bible Bowl Trivia: The word nimrod refers to a person making dumb choices. Nimrod was Noah’s great-grandson who was the king in Shinar during the commissioning of the Tower of Babel.
And that, as Brother Paul (Harvey) would say, is the rest of the story.
Snyder, Texas, native Sue Jane Sullivan is a retired schoolteacher whose thought-provoking commentary appears occasionally in several West texas newspapers, including The Texas Spur and The Caprock Courier.
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