Humans are supposed to spread out over the whole earth; God makes that clear early in the book of Genesis/Bereishit. After creating humans, God tells them:

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subjugate it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over all the living things that crawl on the earth.” (Genesis/Bereishit 1:28)

Perhaps God expects humans to be good stewards of God’s creation; after all, God makes humandkind “in God’s image.”¹ But they fail. Nine generations later, in the time of Noah, God observes “that the evil of humankind is abundant on the earth” (Genesis 6:5) and “the earth is filled with violence because of them …” (Genesis 6:13)

So God floods the whole world in this week’s Torah portion, Noach², and life begins over again with the passenger’s on Noah’s ark, including his three sons and their wives.

Then God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” (Genesis 9:1)

All bird and land animals will fear humankind, God adds. And the rules have changed: now humans are allowed to kill and eat other animals, but anyone who kills a human being must be killed in turn.

“Whoever sheds the blood of humankind,

by humankind his blood must be shed,

Because in the image of God

[God] made humankind.

And you must be fruitful and multiply. Swarm over the earth and multiply on it!” (Genesis 9:6-7)

In other words, it is a sin or crime to kill a fellow human being, because we all have some divine characteristics. And God still wants humans to fill up the earth.

Noah’s descendants do multiply, and eventually they scatter. His grandchildren and great-grandchildren become the ancestors of people who establish separate countries all over the Ancient Near East, including Canaan, Egypt, Kush, Akkad, Aram, and Bavel—the Hebrew name for “Babylon” in English. But then they modify God’s prohibition against killing fellow human beings. The separate ethnic groups become alienated from each other and make war in order to seize their neighbors’ lands. Later in the Torah, killing in battle is not considered murder.

However, this week’s Torah portion describes a brief period when all human beings cooperate and live together in harmony. This occurs when Noah’s descendants move away from the ark and settle together in Shinar, a biblical name for the Mesopotamian valley of the lower Tigris and Euphrates.

Everyone on earth had one language and one set of words. And it was as they journeyed from the east that they found a broad valley in the land of Shinar, and they settled sham. (Genesis 11:1-2)

sham (שָׁם) = there.

If only some of the humans had stayed in Shinar and the rest had journeyed on, God might have been satisfied. But all the humans on earth settle there, and began making bricks.

And they said: Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a sheim, lest we be scattered  over the face of the whole earth. (Genesis 11:4)

sheim (שֵׁם) = name, fame, reputation. (Also the name of Noah’s oldest son, from whom Abraham is descended.)

These people do not want to scatter over the earth. Since no dissent is reported, we can assume that they are a functional social group and they prefer to stay together. They probably have leaders, but not a king. (In Genesis 10:8-10 one of Noah’s descendants, Nimrod, is called a mighty hunter and the king of Shinar when its chief cities were Bavel, Erekh, Akkad, and Kalneih. But this seems to refer to a later period of history than the time when people build the first city after the Flood.)³

Noah’s early descendants succeed in building a city and a tall tower, activities that, in the absence of a king with a police force, require a high level of willing cooperation.⁴ A city makes it easy for people to engage in more activities together, take advantage of a greater division of labor, and get help in emergencies, but the reason for building a tower is not as obvious. Three reasons commentators have proposed are:

1. Noah’s early descendants are afraid that God will decide to wipe out the human race again. Instead of preventing divine destruction by obeying all of God’s wishes, these people build a watchtower so they can see their enemy, God, approaching and take steps.⁵
2. They build the tower all the way up to the heavens in order to wage war against God there, with the help of an idol they plan to place at the top.⁶
3. The tower is merely a landmark that shepherds can see from far away, so they can easily guide their flocks home.⁷

All three reasons confirm the unity of the people. So why are they worried about being “scattered  over the face of the whole earth” when they are so good at living together? The only reason must be that they know scattering is God’s agenda.

And why do they believe that making themselves a sheim will keep them together?

In Biblical Hebrew, sheim means “name”, “fame”, or “reputation”. Since they are the only human beings in the world, they do not need a name for themselves beyond “human”.⁸ And while certain individuals might become famous, the people as a whole cannot do so because there is no other group of beings to compare themselves with—except perhaps gods or angels. (See my post Bereishit: How Many Gods).

Then does sheim mean reputation? The people as a whole might want to establish a good reputation with God so that God would forgive them for not scattering over the earth. Did they hope that building the city with the tower would impress God?

Maybe what they really want is a sham rather than a sheim. Although the two words do not share a root verb, their spelling is identical in a Torah scroll: שם. For more than two thousand years, Torah scrolls have had no vowel pointing. The vowel points that distinguish sheim (שֵׁם) from sham (שָׁם) in books were only added when the Masoretes codified the Hebrew Bible during the 7^th to 12^th centuries C.E.

Maybe in the original oral version, a few thousand years ago, the humans said:

Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves sham (“there”), lest we be scattered  over the face of the whole earth.

All the humans in the world cooperate to make themselves a place in the world, their home.

They cooperate with each other, but not with God.

And God went down to look at the city and the tower that the children of the human had built. And God said: “Hey!  One people and one language for all of them, and this is how they have begun to act? So now nothing that they plan to do will be impossible! Come, let us go down there and let us scramble their language, so that a man cannot understand the language of his neighbor.”⁹ (Genesis 11:6-7)

The best way to make the collaborative, cooperative people scatter is to turn them into strangers, aliens who cannot even understand each other. Then they will no longer want to work together.

Then God scattered them from there over the surface of all the earth, and they stopped building the city.  Therefore He called its name Bavel, because there God scrambled the language of all the earth, and from there God scattered them over all the surface of the earth.¹⁰ (Genesis 11:8-9)

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What if it were true that if all humans on earth could understand each other, nothing we planned to do would be impossible?

Would we stop killing each other? Would we finally become good stewards of the earth?

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1. Genesis 1:27.
2. “Noah” in English is Noach (נֺחַ or נוֹחַ) in Hebrew. The word means “rest” or “resting place”.
3. The Talmud, written in the 5^th century C.E., long after the book of Genesis, claimed that Nimrod was king over the people who built the Tower of Babel (Talmud Bavli, Chullin 89a).
4. The popular myth that the builders of the Tower of Babel valued a brick above a human life appears in Sefer HaYashar, Genesis, Noach 14 (first published in 1625).
5. E.g. 14^th-century Rabbeinu Bachya, 17^th-century Siftei Chakhamim.
6. E.g. Midrash Tanchuma, written no later than 800 C.E., Siftei Chakhamim.
7. E.g. Radak (12-13^th-century rabbi David Kimchi), Rabbeinu Bachya.
8. adam (אָדָם) = human, humankind.  
9. For commentary on why God suddenly switches to the first person plural, “us”, see last week’s post: Bereishit: How Many Gods?
10. This folk etymology connects the name of the city and region of Bavel (בָּבֶל) with the verb for “scramble”, balal (בָּלַל). However, the name Bavel probably comes from the Sumerian place-name Babilim, which meant “Gate of God”.

Since we toured Terezin three weeks ago, I have been haunted by the idea of genocide.  How could Hitler and his government decide that a whole “race” of people, including even the children, was irredeemable and should be exterminated like vermin?

I can understand wanting a particular individual to die.  Twice in my own life I hated a person who seemed fixated on doing things that ruined my life or the life of someone I loved, and I could not think of any way to escape.  I wished that individual were dead.  I could not feel empathy.  At least I was lucky enough to have the moral sense and common sense not to act out of my fear and hatred.

But I cannot imagine what it would be like to hate a whole category of people, millions of strangers I had never even met, human beings with virtues and failings and desires and moments of kindness and insight.  What would it be like to hate them all, to believe they do not deserve respect, and to cooperate in a program to persecute and murder them?

What would it be like to feel the blanket fear and hatred that many Christians felt for Jews from the Middle Ages through the 19^th century?  That Nazis and their supporters felt for Jews during the 1930’s and 1940’s?  That some Americans and Europeans feel for immigrants today?

Then I came to this week’s Torah portion, Noach.  How could the God-character in this mythic story decide that only Noah and his immediate family were worth saving, while the rest of the human species was irredeemable and should be exterminated?

So I wrote a new post this week, about final solutions and how they failed.

The Flood: Not a Final Solution

And God saw how the wickedness of humankind on the earth was abundant, and how all the forms of [human] designs were only wicked all the time.  And God regretted that [God] had made humankind on the earth, and [God’s] heart became saddened.”  (Genesis 6:5)

This expression of regret at the end of the first Torah portion, Bereishit, launches the story of Noah and the ark in the next portion, Noach.  The God-character notices that although Noah is good enough, humans in general have become violent and destructive.

And God saw the earth, and hey!  Nishchatah, because all flesh hishchit on the earth.  And God said to Noah: “The end of all flesh is coming before me, because the earth is filled with violence on account of them, so hey!  Here I am, mashchitam along with the earth.  Make for yourself an ark …  (Genesis/Bereishit 6:12-14)

nishchatah (נִשְׁחָתָה) = it had been ruined, destroyed.  (A form of the verb shachat, שָׁחַת = lay waste, ruin, inflict calamity and death.)

hischit (הִשִׁית) = has inflicted ruin.  (Another form of the verb shachat.)

mashchitam (מַשְׁחִיתָם) = destroying them.  (Another form of the verb shachat.)

The divine answer to the violent destruction perpetrated by the human species is to drown the perpetrators—and all the other land animals—and start again.  After the flood is over, Noah sacrifices the extra animals that God told him to bring on board.  The God-character smells the smoke of the offering and has a second change of heart.

And God smelled the soothing odor, and God thought: “Never again will I curse the land because of humankind, since the forms of its mind are wicked from its youth.  And never again will I strike down all life, as I have done.”  (Genesis 8:21)

Then God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants, promising never to flood the whole world again.  Next the God-character blesses Noah and his sons, confirms that they will rule over all other animals, and changes the rules about killing.  In the Garden of Eden, God declared that all creatures that move on the land or fly in the sky, including humans, could eat only seed-bearing plants and trees (Genesis 1:29-30, 2:16).  Now God permits the consumption of meat.

Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat, like green vegetation; I have given you everything.  However, flesh with the living soul in it, its blood, you must not eat.  (Genesis 9:3-4)

This new rule indicates that part of the destruction and violence that prompted the flood consisted of carnivorous behavior, by humans and by other animals.  God decides to compromise and let humans kill and eat animals, as long as they respect the animals’ souls by not eating their blood.¹

The other reason for the flood appears to be that humans were killing other humans.  God warned Cain to resist this impulse in vain.  (Genesis 4:6-12)  After the flood God puts the warning a different way.

Whoever sheds human blood, by a human shall his blood be shed; because [God] made humankind in the image of God.  (Genesis  9:6)

Perhaps the God-character hopes that humans would improve if they were allowed a limited measure of violence concerning other animals, and allowed to execute anyone convicted of murder.  God also reminds Noah and his family that murder is prohibited because humankind was made in the image of God.

With the right guidance, the God-character now believes, humans can learn to avoid the worst behavior.  Although humans have evil impulses, they are not all bad.  Since God gives humankind another chance, God probably sees that good impulses are also part of human nature.

It is a start.  As the book of Genesis continues, God gives humans more rules to follow, and notices more humans who are virtuous.

Unfortunately, when people in power “play God” they often act more like the God-character who drowns the world than the God-character who tries to help humans improve.

The Holocaust: An Attempt at a Final Solution

In Prague, nobody forgets what happened 60 years ago.  In the train station I saw a memorial to Jewish parents forced to leave their children and board trains for concentration camps when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939.  On the way to Wenceslaus Square my husband and I passed a former Jewish bank that the gestapo used to interrogate and torture Czech Jews from 1939 to 1945.

One of the six synagogues in the old Jewish quarter of the city, the Pinkas Synagogue, is now a Holocaust memorial, its walls covered with the names of about 78,000 Czech Jews who perished.

At the Museum of Decorative Arts we saw personal treasures, from paintings to teacups, that Jews had packed in their suitcases when the Nazis forced them to abandon their homes.  When the Jews arrived at Terezin or another holding camp, the gestapo went through their suitcases and confiscated everything of value.  The Nazis kept records, so the exhibit identified the original owners of the items.

On a clear day in October we toured Terezin (renamed Theresienstadt by the Nazis), about 60 km (37 miles) from Prague.  On the way the bus passed potato, cabbage, and mustard fields.  The mustard was blooming yellow.

The bus drove through an entrance gap in the outer walls: a brick berm covered with grass, a narrow moat, and a second brick and grass berm.  The Hapsburg emperor Joseph II built these fortifications in 1784 to turn a country village into a military base.  Inside the outer walls he added barracks and stables for a cavalry unit.  The Hapsburgs also built a prison next door, encircled by a similar fortification.  When Germany captured Czechoslovakia in 1939, the new rulers continued to use the large fort as an army base and confine political prisoners in the small fort.  Then Adolph Eichmann, who was in charge of the logistics for mass deportations of Jews to concentration and extermination camps, picked Terezin for another purpose.

The “Final Solution” that the top Nazi administrators agreed on in January of 1942 was genocide: extinction of the entire “race” of Jews.  There were so many Jews, in all the territory Germany had conquered, that Eichmann had to do it in stages.  The first stage was to remove Jews from their homes and transport them to collection centers like Terezin.

At Terezin, Jews had enough uncertainty about their future to put up with SS orders and restrictions, hoping that the Allies would soon win the war, hoping that when groups of residents were loaded on trains bound for Auschwitz and other camps their lives would be bearable.  They did not know their families and friends were going to extermination camps.

On our tour of Terezin, we saw the former barracks where old Jews were assigned to unheated stables and attics, so that they would die quickly by freezing in the winter or by heat stroke in the summer.  We saw drawings by Jewish children and drawings by Jewish professional artists, including depictions of gaunt residents waiting in line for thin soup ladled out from a barrel.  We saw the cemetery, where every morning hearses brought bodies to be dissected, cremated, and buried.  We saw the railroad tracks where newcomers arrived at Terezin and where Terezin residents were herded into cattle cars bound for extermination camps.

Hitler’s government had two cold-blooded reasons to persecute Jews.  One was to confiscate Jewish wealth (everything from money and property to the gold fillings in their teeth) in order to fund the German war of conquest.  The other was to feed the myth of Aryan superiority and inspire enough hatred so the German population would be willing to go to war, put up with wartime deprivations, and keep the Fuhrer in power.  Escalating the hatred meant escalating the persecution, and eventually murder, of the people chosen as scapegoats.

Hitler revived hatred of Jews in the first place not just by reviling them, but by blaming them for unemployment, poverty, and crime.  Today some of the political parties in the United States and Europe blame immigrants for unemployment, poverty, and crime.

The God-character in the Torah portion Noach is right about humankind: the forms of its mind are wicked from its youth.  (Genesis 8:21)  And the most wicked designs come not from the scapegoats, but from the oppressors.

May all humans realize that there is never a “final solution”, that mass murder only increases the evil in the world.  And may we all accept that human nature is a mixture of good and bad, so the best course of action is to encourage good deeds, by education and by example.  Then we will become the image of God after the Flood, the wiser, more mature God-character with a better understanding of human nature.

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1. For more on the prohibition against eating blood, see my post Re-eih & Acharei Mot: The Soul in the Blood.

 

a Torah monologue by Maggidah Melissa Carpenter

It all started with sheep.  When I was a girl, people kept sheep to shear for wool and to milk for making cheese.  My mother used to say, “On the sixth day, God gave the humans and animals plants for food.  Nothing but plants!”¹

I used to argue, “Then why did God make mothers that give milk?”  And I ate cheese on my lentils.  I still do.

Those were the good days.  Then some man named Lemech went crazy, and there was a fight, and two men died.  Lemech was the second murderer in the world.  He boasted about what he’d done, so I could understand why God didn’t give him a mark of protection, like Cain.  What I could not understand was why God didn’t speak.

After that fight, it seemed like young men had shorter tempers and bigger appetites.  One year they came back from the sheep-shearing missing two sheep.  There was blood on the fleeces.  Blood in their beards.  Soon they were bringing back whole sheepskins, and legs to cook.  The first time I saw a man bite into a roasted leg, I had nightmares for a week.

Nobody stopped them.  My mother tried, but she was a small woman, and they knocked her down.  After that she walked with a limp.  My father kept going out with the other shepherds.  And when they brought back lambs, some of the women ate the tender meat.  In a few years almost everybody was eating lamb.  Even the lions.

The young men came home sometimes with cuts and gouges from the shearing knives.  They were fighting.

“Chamas,²” my mother whispered.  Violence.  Cruelty.

*

            Lots of men came after me once my figure filled out.  I carried my own knife to keep them away, since we had no laws.

Some years later I made friends with Lemech’s youngest son, Noach.  His mother had died by then, and his father had gone for good.  Noach traded barley and grapes in the marketplace, along with the little wooden boxes he made.  He stayed away from the other end of the market.  Said he didn’t like the taste of meat, and sheep gave him a rash.

One day he invited me up the hill to see the house he’d built.  It was a big empty wooden house with four bedrooms.  Noach said we could put a bed in the room I liked best.

“What about the other rooms?”

He looked down.  “Maybe we’ll have children.”

“Yes,” I said.

*

            We had three sons, and I raised them to be vegetarians.  Once Cham, our youngest, came home with a nasty knife wound, but at least none of my sons ever brought home meat.  All three married good women.  Our house was full.

One day when Noach came home from the fields he was shivering.  He said: “God spoke to me.”

“What!”

“I was just hoeing, out in the field, and God spoke to me. Inside my body.”

“Are you sure it was God?”

“Yes.  God said I have to build a box.  A giant box.  Waterproof.  Divided up into compartments.  And then I have to collect animals.  Two of every kind of animal in the world. And put them in the box.  And four pairs of humans: you and me, and our sons and their wives.”

“Why?”

“Because God is disappointed in the human race.  Because of all our violence, our chamas.  God wants to start all over again.  So he’s going to send a flood that will wipe out the whole earth.  Except for the survivors in the floating box.  The ark.”

“But Noach, what about children?  And the more peaceful animals?  Isn’t God more—selective?”

“I guess not.  And I can’t argue with God.  I’ve got to start building a box.”

He did.  It dwarfed our house.  Sometimes folks wandered by and jeered at him, but my husband only told them one thing, over and over again.  “God said to build an ark, because the earth is filled with chamas, so he’s going to send a flood to wipe out all flesh.  That’s what God said.”³

Nobody listened to Noach.

He finished the ark, and packed several compartments with seeds and farming tools, and grain to feed everybody.  Even the lions.  He sent off our sons and their wives to collect pairs of animals from around the world.  Then he asked me to get the sheep.  He told me that now God wanted seven rams and seven ewes, so he could make slaughter-sacrifices for God after the flood.⁴

“What?  I thought God didn’t like chamas!  Why would God want us to save animals only to kill them?”

“I dunno.  I can’t argue with God.”

“Then go get the sheep yourself, Noach.”

“I can’t.  Sheep give me a rash.”

“I thought—I thought that was just an excuse.  I thought you were a good man, different from all the others.”

Noach looked miserable.  He backed up and stood in the shadow of the ark.  “God wants seven cattle, too, and seven goats, and some extra birds.  I’ll take care of those.”

And I knew I had to get the sheep.  My only other choice was to drown.

God gave us seven days to load all the animals.  When the rain started our son Cham balked and argued, but in the end he followed his wife inside the ark, and we sealed the door.  I remember when the ark shifted and began to float.  We all cheered.  Then we heard people hammering on the outside of the door, and I felt bad.

We spent all our waking time feeding the animals.  The rain stopped after 40 days, but the flood went on for months.  Then the ark grated against something.  We climbed the ladder and peered out the window in the roof.  The sky was blue.  So was the water, rippling in the wind.  Tiny islands of bare rock stuck out of the water.  I realized they were mountaintops.

When the water finally dried up, we saw lots of mud where we could plant seeds.  We wait for Noach to lead us out of the ark, but he just kept shoveling grain into the animals’ stalls.  Until one morning he finally called us together and said:  “God said to go out, and let out the animals, to be fruitful and multiply.”

We started to cheer, but Noach looked so glum that the cheer failed.  I wondered if my husband had delayed leaving the ark because he was not looking forward to the animal sacrifice.

Noach held back the sheep and cattle and goats and birds that he said God wanted sacrificed.  I stood with my hands on my hips and watched him build a platform out of stones.  I think it was an altar, though I’d never seen one before.

He got our sons to hold the animals while he slit their throats.  Then he burned them.  A new, clean world, and my husband goes and sends up a column of greasy black smoke.  Behind it a rainbow appeared.  Noach’s face and hands broke out in a rash.

We ploughed a big field of mud farther down the mountain, and we discovered that some debris from the flood had settled into the mud.  Pottery, blankets, dead animals.  Human bodies.  When I ploughed up a dead child, I lay down on the dirt and cried the rest of the day.

I don’t get it.  If all our chamas made God regret creating the world, why did God do so much chamas to destroy it?

I liked God’s first creation better.

—

1. And God said: “Hey, I give to you all seed-bearing green plants that are on the face of all the earth, and all the trees that have seed-bearing fruit; they shall be food for you. And to all animals of the land and to all birds of the heavens and to all crawlers on the earth that have the soul of life:  all greens, green plants, for food.”  And it was so.  And God saw all that “he” had made, and hey!  Very good.  And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.  (Genesis 1:29-31)
2. chamas (חָמָס) = violence, lawlessness, cruelty. The first occurrence of this word is in the Torah portion Noach: The earth was corrupt in front of the Elohim, and it was chamas. (Genesis 6:11)
3. Genesis 6:13, 6:17.
4. Genesis 7:2.