The Babels

This page is for the richness of Babel.

There are at least four Babels worth keeping in one place: a real tower, a story about the tower, a library built out of the story, and a piece of software I use every day. They are all the same idea wearing different clothes — the totality of language, and what it costs.

the tower that actually stood#

Babel was a real place before it was a metaphor. The name is Bab-ilim — “gate of the god” — Babylon, on the Euphrates, and its tower was the Etemenanki: “the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth,” a seven-tiered ziggurat of baked brick and bitumen sacred to Marduk, rising perhaps 90 metres over the city. It was old when history found it — damaged and rebuilt across centuries, most famously restored by Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 605–562 BCE), who recorded the work in glazed-brick boast: its top was to “rival the heavens.”

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, describes an eight-tiered tower you climbed by a spiral ramp, with a temple at the summit containing nothing but a great couch and a golden table — furniture for a god. When Alexander took Babylon he found the ziggurat decayed and ordered it demolished for rebuilding; he died before the rebuilding began, and so the tower’s last act was to become a hole. Today it is a marshy depression in Iraq called Sahn, its footprint still visible from the air.

The chronology matters: the Judean elite were deported to Babylon in 597 and 587 BCE, and lived out their exile in the shadow of Nebuchadnezzar’s freshly gilded skyscraper. Genesis 11 was compiled by people who had seen the thing.

the story#

The Genesis account is nine verses long and does not mention pride — read it again sometime. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered.” The builders’ sin, if there is one, is the refusal to disperse — a single city, a single language, a single name. The divine response is not demolition (the text never says the tower fell) but confusion: the unbraiding of one speech into many, and the scattering the builders feared. The pun is the point: Babel because there God balal — “confused” — the language of all the earth.

So the historical Babels stack neatly: a Mesopotamian temple-tower meant to join earth to heaven, seen by exiles who retold it as the origin story of why no two peoples understand each other. Empire builds the tower; scripture explains the scattering.

the library#

Borges took the story’s premise and inverted it. In The Library of Babel (1941), the scattering is complete and infinite: a universe of hexagonal galleries containing every possible 410-page book — every truth, every falsehood, every permutation of the alphabet, almost all of it gibberish. Where the tower was one language reaching for heaven, the library is all languages reaching for nothing: total information, zero meaning. The librarians search for the catalogue of catalogues; sects form; some destroy books, which doesn’t matter, since the library contains near-identical copies of everything. Infinity absorbs both vandalism and virtue. 𐃏

The mathematics is the joke Borges plays with a straight face: the library is unimaginably vast but finite (25 symbols, 410 pages fixes the count), and he closes by suggesting it may be periodic — unbounded repetition standing in for the infinite. Every writer since who has reached for “all possible X” is quoting him.

the babel i actually use#

And then Emacs, as usual, got there first. org-babel lets a single document speak many languages at once — Python, R, shell, LaTeX, SQL, elisp — each source block executed in place, results woven back into the text. The name is exact: it is deliberately the anti-Babel. Where Genesis 11 unbraids one tongue into many so the work stops, babel braids many tongues into one document so the work continues. Literate programming is the tower project resumed with better tooling — let us make a name, in nine languages, in one buffer.

Most of the mathematics and code on this site passed through an org-babel block on its way here. The scattering, it turns out, was survivable; you just need a sufficiently good editor.

the moral, if any#

Every Babel is a bet about the same trade: unity of language against reach. The ziggurat bet bricks on it, Genesis bet against it, Borges showed that winning it completely is indistinguishable from losing, and org-babel quietly pays out small dividends on it every day. I remain, on balance, a builder.