Humanity has already imagined the future. It has done so through mythical stories and science fiction. Religions have also imagined the future. That is why Pope Leo XIV has included the Tower of Babel story, as told in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, in his initial reflections in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. The Pope contrasts the story of Babel with the reconstruction of Jerusalem under the leadership of Nehemiah. The Tower is the emblem of human pride. The reconstruction of the Holy City represents a community that decides to work together in concord, not through domination.

Re-reading Babel gives us keys to see ourselves in the mirror of the builders of the Tower. Pope Leo XIV states in his encyclical that “Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.”

The Jewish tradition preserved in the Midrash and the Talmud has read the account of the Tower of Babel by decoding every word of the nine verses of this condensed chapter of Genesis. Humanity, after the Universal Flood, believes there is a way to avoid another catastrophe that would endanger its survival on Earth. It gathers in the Valley of Shinar to begin the construction of a great tower that will rise to the heavens.

The biblical account presents a failed epic with resonances to our current situation marked by language technologies: it introduces the notion of a global (universal) community made up of those who speak a single language; the construction of the Tower is based on a technical knowledge that proclaims itself “supernatural” (all-powerful) and even “supranatural” (beyond nature); the community expresses a desire for total dominion over Nature or God, which could be interpreted as “totalitarian” or absolute control of the totality; finally, the story reaches a deadlock because absolute control, as a manifestation of technological domination, fails. Global communication and community become impossible. Let us examine the account verse by verse with the respective interpretations from the rabbinic tradition.

The first verse says: “And the whole earth was of one lip of united words” (Genesis 11:1) (I follow here André Chouraqui’s translation, which seeks to preserve the literalness of biblical Hebrew).

A Midrash from the rabbinic tradition reads the text in this way based on another interpretation of “united words (ahadim)”. They pronounced sharp words (hadim) or also “severe” as it is likewise translated: “Every one thousand six hundred and fifty-six years the firmament trembles, so let us build pillars: one to the north, another to the south and another to the west; the east will use this one as support in the east.” The global or universal community is possible through unified communication. This communication is motivated by a desire for domination in order to prevent the firmament from overflowing and eliminating humans.

The second verse relates: “And when they departed from the East [the Orient, kedem], they found a rupture in the land of Shinar and settled there” (Genesis 11:2). The rabbinic reading of the Midrash asks: to go toward the East, did they move away from the East? In reality, says Rabbi Eleazar bar Shimon, this means they moved away from the Ancient One (Kadmuto, which comes from the root kedem, east) of the world, saying: We want neither Him nor His divinity! The birth of the city (Babel) implies a break with an order of things (the ancient order). In the rabbinic interpretation of the biblical text, the break with the ancient order is not only geographical (moving away from the ancient east), but also the rejection of its very implicit morality: the morality of the Ancient One of the World, the Primordial. The birth of the city implies new modes of human-human and human-nature interactions that cannot be normalized by the pre-urban ethical framework or by tribal morality. The new order of the “technology of a single language” creates an ethical void.

The third verse recounts: “And they said to one another: ‘Come, let us make........

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