What makes God laugh? There's an old saying that what makes God laugh is seeing our plans for the future.

But if Tanakh is our guide, what makes God laugh is human delusions of grandeur.

From the vantage point of heaven, the ultimate absurdity is when human beings start thinking of themselves as godlike.

There are several pointed examples in the terror. One whose full import has only recently

become clear occurs in the story of the Tower of Babel. Men gather together in the plain of

Shina and decide to build a city and a tower that will reach to heaven. As it happens, we have

archaeological confirmation of this fact. Several Mesopotamian zygirates, including the

Temple of Marduk in Babylon, have been found with inscriptions saying that they reach heaven.

The idea was that tall buildings, man-made mountains,

allowed humans to climb to the dwelling place of the gods and thus communicate with them.

The Mesopotamian city estates were among the first places of civilization, itself,

one of the turning points in the history of human life on earth.

Before the birth of agriculture, the ancients lived in fear of nature, of predators,

other tribes and bands, and of the vicissitudes of heat and cold, drought and flood.

Their fate depended on matters beyond their control.

Only with the spread of domesticated animals and agriculture did people gather in towns,

then cities, then empires, and a tipping point occurred in the balance of power between nature

and culture.

For the first time, humans weren't confined to adapting to their environment. They could adapt their environment

to suit them. At this point, they, especially the rulers, began to see themselves as gods,

demigods or people with the power to influence the gods. The most conspicuous symbol of this

was the buildings on a monumental scale,

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