Noah’s Arc and The Tower of Babel are both Biblical stories in which God is none too pleased with the behavior of mankind. Jordan Peterson explains what eternal lessons we can draw from this.

Noah’s Arc

Jordan Peterson does a creditable job interpreting Noah’s Arc in his new book We Who Wrestle with God, in which he dissects some key stories of the Old Testament. 

In the story of Noah’s Arc, God is angry about the wickedness of mankind and therefore decides to wipe everything out with the flood.  After the waters recede, though, God says: 

“I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.”  (Genesis 8:1) 

Ok, so what was the point of the flood in the first place?  If God says that we’re all bad regardless, why try to purify the Earth with the flood to get rid of all our wickedness? 

Anyway, why were things so bad that God was provoked to eradicate every living and creeping thing with the flood?  According to Jordan Peterson, “the wickedness of Cain’s descendants has come to dominate the entirety of human endeavor.”  This Peterson compares to the “gigantism that comes to characterize the exploits of those in the past.”  

So the sin of Cain, who killed his brother Abel, lives on in his descendents, and that’s why things were so bad before the flood.  Ok, I guess that makes sense. 

But what is Peterson talking about specifically with that word “gigantism”?  He’s referring to the great deeds and heroism of distant ancestors, which we then mythologize until they’re “giants.”  But he’s also referring to a specific line in the story of Noah’s Arc in the Old Testament.  

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:4) 

Really beautiful prose there.  Peterson interprets this as a mythologizing of ancestors, remembered in the collective consciousness as giant-like figures.  

But an alternative explanation is that maybe there were literally a race of giant humans, vaguely remembered in the Old Testament, and Greek mythology, the Cyclops, which may have existed as recently as ten thousands of years ago.  

“There were giants in those days.”  It’s pretty straightforward actually.  If this race of giants existed, and there is at least some documentary evidence that they did, it’s plausible that the physical evidence has since disappeared.  It’s rather fascinating, that the collective memory of humanity, of this monstrous race of giants, is remembered in a kind of echo, in this one line in the story of Genesis, but again, also in other stories and myths, such as the Odyssey.   

Well, that’s the fun of it.  There are a lot of ways to interpret the Bible, and Jordan Peterson does a creditable job in his new book We Who Wrestle with God, in which he takes the stories of the Old Testament and makes you see them in a new light.  I give him a lot of credit.  If nothing else, it makes you go back to the original text, and that’s always a good thing.  

The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel explains why there’s so many different languages in the world, different cultures and the lack of unity. That’s all thanks to our hubris.  But to bring the story to 2025, it’s also a warning against a mishmash of cultures, different languages and people not understanding each other.  Sound familiar?

As Jordan Peterson sees it We Who wrestle with God, it’s also a lot more than that. The Old Testament story is a warning against a lack of reverence for God,  overreliance on technology, and moral relativism. Yeah, there’s a lot in there, I mean it’s Jordan Peterson..

I find the Tower of Babel story fairly mysterious. Why exactly God is so angry about the tower, we can only conjecture. At any rate, his displeasure is clear in Genesis

“Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language, and this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”

It’s as though God is upset that the people became too uppity, and life was apparently getting too easy for his tastes.

In response, God throws a wrench in this situation of everyone speaking the same language and instead makes life a lot more difficult

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” (Genesis 11.7)

Hubris. Of course if you build a tower which you purport will reach to Heaven, God is going to smack you down.  As it says in Proverbs “Pride goeth Before Destruction and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

As Peterson puts it:

“The pursuit of technology engaged in by these builders constitutes both a substitute for proper ethical driving and a form of worship of the intellect.”  

I suppose they should have been focused on praying or something like that, instead of building this enormous tower.

By the way, Tower of Babel–what exactly is “Babel”? According to We Who wrestle with God, it’s etymologically related to the ancient city of Babylon which the Israelites would not have felt so keen about. So Babylon comes to represent everything bad.  “The terms Babble and Babylon are clearly related in terms of etymology and geography…”

To put it in context, this hubris to build the Tower of Babel, think about similar incidents: Eve ate the apple, Cain killed his brother. Are you starting to see the pattern?  Peterson writes, “The descendants of Cain are those who erect the doomed Tower.”  Likewise, the descendants of Cain are deemed responsible for the wickedness which causes the flood in the story of Noah’s Ark.

Let’s get political now: The Tower of Babel could be a warning against multilingualism and even multiculturalism. Peterson says of a shared culture:

“...it is easier for us to understand other people, who share the same position, tradition, who dreams similar dreams, and who speak the same language.” 

 I dare say that speaks to some of the social realities in the United States and Canada too.  Now you might disagree with that, you might disagree that’s a problem. But what you can’t disagree with is that, at least according to Genesis, this creating of many tongues is not a desirable situation. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a punishment from God.

The antidote? Peterson explains, “We need a shared rock of certainty under our feet so that we can all stand upon it while we talk.”

I don’t know why building a tower was such a big deal that it provoked the punishment of creating different languages, and I don’t even know if having different languages is a problem. But anyway, that’s the story and it certainly does raise some provocative questions.

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