Between Babel and Beast

America and Empires in Biblical Perspective

Peter J. Leithart

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781608998173, 9781498213042
• eBook ISBN: 9781725245808
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The United States is one of history's great Christian nations, but our unique history, success, and global impact have seduced us into believing we are something more--God's New Israel, the new order of the ages, the last best hope of mankind, a redeemer nation. Using the subtle categories that arise from biblical narrative, Between Babel and Beast analyzes how the heresy of Americanism inspired America's rise to hegemony while blinding American Christians to our failures and abuses of power. The book demonstrates that the church best serves the genuine good of the United States by training witnesses--martyr-citizens of God's Abrahamic empire.

PART I

Empires in Scripture

chapter 1

A Tale of Two Imperialisms

Old Testament history is bracketed by empires.1 Just after Babel collapsed, Yahweh called Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans, but two millennia later Israel was under the hegemony of neo-Chaldea’s successor, Persia. One can simplify this history by cherry-picking favored texts, characters, or events and presenting them as the sum total of the biblical portrait of “empire.”2 On the face of things, though, Israel’s history with empires is too long and complex to be summarized in a single stance or an easy slogan.3 The Bible refuses to smooth the historical phenomenon of “empires” into a singular “empire.” For Scripture, it is not case that empire is empire is empire, which is the oddly ahistorical assumption implicitly adopted by some of the most historically sophisticated biblical scholars of our day. Empire differs from empire; Babel and Persia cannot be collapsed into one another.4 As living political orders, no empire is static over time. Rome is sometimes the church’s protector, sometimes a bestial devourer of holy flesh, sometimes the monstrous steed of a harlot-city drunk with saintly blood.5

The line between Israel and empire is not, furthermore, a clean one. Assyrians conquered and exiled Israel, but long before then, Israel conquered and subjected Canaan. Romans killed Jesus and His followers, yet centuries before Constantine, imperial categories, titles, and terminologies were being “reinscribed” in Christian thought and practice.6 These “reinscriptions” are more fundamental than usually acknowledged. They are not accidental but essential, not a late aberration but inherent in the original biblical outlook and integral to the gospel.

Babel (Genesis 10–11)

The Bible hints that imperial political structures existed before the flood. Cain built the first city as a bridal city for his son Enoch, for whom the city was named,7 and one of the descendants of Cain, Lamech, boasted of his bigamy and his vengefulness (Gen 4:22–24). Cain’s murder of Abel was followed by a great flourishing of culture, civic and rural. Cain’s descendants developed techniques of husbandry, invented musical instruments, and experimented with metallurgy. Though not explicitly designated as an imperial system, the history of Cain’s descendants points to the sacrificial origins of cultural and political order.8 The first overtly imperial program in the Bible was the post-flood establishment of two great cities, Nineveh and Babel.9 Nimrod first established Babel, Erech, Akkad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar (Gen 10:10), and later founded Nineveh. Nineveh consisted of four cities—Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen—which together constituted a four-cornered civic “world” that built on but expanded Cain’s urban program (Gen 10:11–12).10 We learn little more about Nimrod’s Nineveh, but the text tantalizingly suggests that imperial power—rule of a people or city by another—is inherent in political order. Any political structure larger than a household involves imperial supremacy in this general sense.11 In ruling Israel, David governed preexisting tribal and clan political units. David the king was a ruler of “princes” (1 Chron 21:2; 27:22; 28:1), an imperial “king of kings.”

Genesis is divided into sections by ten toledoth statements, typically translated as “these are the generations of.” Chapter 10 begins with a toledoth statement, and the next occurs in 11:10, so the Babel episode in Gen 11:1–9 is enfolded in the account of the “generations of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” Babel is among the things that the sons of Noah “birthed.” Genesis 11 begins with an unspecified group of migrants (“they” in 11:2), and the antecedent must be the “sons of Noah” (10:32) or some subgroup of the sons of Noah. Genesis 10:30 specifies the antecedent: the descendants of Joktan, brother to Peleg and son of Eber, a descendant of Shem (10:25), and these Joktanites settled “from Mesha as you go toward Sephar, the hill country of the east” (v. 30). The eastward-migrating bands in 11:2 are Joktanites, descendants of Shem, cousins to the “Eberites” that made up the family of Abram.12 Abram and the Babelites had the same ancestry. Genesis specifies two groups among the builders of Babel. “Nimrod the mighty hunter” is the obvious one (10:9–10), but was assisted by the Joktanite clan of the Shemites. Prior to the flood, the faithful Sethite “sons of God” had married Cainite “daughters of evil,” an erotic and cultural mingling that eventually compromised and corrupted nearly every member of the faithful line of Seth and filled the earth with violence (Gen 6:1–4). After the flood, it happened all over again as the Joktanite descendants of Seth offered their support for the Hamite/Nimrod Babel project. With sons of God “intermarrying” with the daughters of men at Babel, it was only a matter of time before there was another catastrophic “flood.”

Prior to Babel, the earth “was one lip and one set of words.”13 The two terms are not identical in Scripture. Typically, “lip” (hpf#f) is used for religious confession and worship (Pss 12:2–4; 16:4; 40:9; 45:2; 51:15; Isa 6:5, 7; 29:13),14 while “words” (Myribfd) has a more strictly linguistic significance. What unified the men at Babel was not merely language but a single liturgical confession. The distinction between “lip” and “words” illuminates what might seem to be another poetic repetition: “Let us build for ourselves a city and a tower” (v. 4). Babel was a double project, including both a city, which corresponds to the “words” of common speech, and a “tower” (ziggurat) for the liturgy of international community. That the head of the tower would, they hoped, “reach heaven” is another indication of the religious character of the project. Like every temple in the ancient world, the Babel tower was conceived as a connection point between heaven and earth, gods and men. Babel aimed to create a “gate of God” in Shinar—“gate of God” being the original meaning of the name “Babylon.” The fourfold repetition of “one” (dxf)e; vv. 1, 6) emphasizes that their aim was uniformity. Babel, a prototype of all the antitypical “Babels” that appear later in the Bible, was intolerant of linguistic, cultural, and especially religious difference. Not all imperial orders demand homogeneity, but those that do so perpetuate the Babel project.15 The distinction between tower-lip and city-words also corresponds to the racial distinction among the sons of Noah. Hamites built Babel, but they were assisted in the project by Shemites from the line of Joktan. At least part of the proto-priestly line of Shem, in other words, consecrated the Babel project.16 For the moment, Shemites shared a single “lip” with the rest of humanity. Since Yahweh Himself admitted that, unified, Babel would be able to achieve almost everything (v. 6), we need to be careful not to underestimate the nearly omnipotent power of Babelic empire.

They also, of course, aimed for Name. This too was a religious goal, a bid for immortality. Like Homeric heroes, they hoped to overcome the threat of death by achievements that would earn them everlasting reputation. If not eternal life, at least they could achieve eternal name. Exalting the name, like building a tower to heaven, was an implicit assault on Yahweh’s Lordship. They succumbed to the serpent’s temptation to become like gods. Like the later king of neo-Babylon, the men of the first Babel wanted to set a throne among the stars, ascend above the clouds, make themselves “like the Most High” (Isa 14:13–14). Augustine recognized similar motivations behind the Roman drive for imperial mastery. Lust for glory first inspired Romans to throw off the rule of kings, but, having toppled the Tarquins, their lust was unsatisfied, and they pursued mastery over others, their desire for glory transformed into a libido dominandi.

At the same time, Roman desire for glory was crossed by anxiety and fear, which paradoxically increased in proportion to Roman conquest and power. Fear of death drove the Roman imperial project—fear of enemies in the first instance. Fear was the source of virtus, the manly virtues of the Roman warrior. As Augustine pointed out, Scipio worried that Roman virtue would grow flaccid if the threat of Carthage were removed.17 In a later period, Romans masked their anxiety about individual and political death with a drive for luxury, consumption, and the Pascalian distractions of entertainment.18 B...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Empires in Scripture
• Part II: Americanism
• Part III: Between Babel and Beast
• Conclusion
• Endnotes