Between the flood and the call to Abraham, between the Universal Covenant to Noah and the particular call to one people, comes the strange, suggestive story of Babel.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plane in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, come let's make

bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said,

come let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name

for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

What I want to explore here is not just the story of Babel in itself, but the larger theme,

because what we have here is the second act in a four-part drama that is unmistakably one of the

connecting threads of Barachita's a whole.

It's a sustained polemic against the city and all that went

with it in the ancient world. The city, it seems to say, is not where we find God. The first act

begins with the first two human children. Cane and Abel both bring offerings to God. God accepts

Abels, not Cain's. Cain in anger, murders Abel. God then

confronts him with his guilt. Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Abel's punishment was to be a

restless wanderer on the earth. Cain then went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

And then we read, and Kane knew his wife and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch, and

Cain built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.

The first city was founded by the first murderer, the first fratricide.

The city was born in blood.

Now there's an obvious parallel in the story of the founding of Rome by Romulus who killed his brother Remus.

But there the parallel ends. The Rome story of children fathered by one of the gods,

left to die by their uncle, brought up by wolves,

...