The Tower of Babel and the Tongues of Pentecost
Old Testament: Genesis 11:7-9
Come ye, therefore, let us go down, and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded: and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.
New Testament: Acts 2:3-6, 11
And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues... And when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded in mind, because that every man heard them speak in his own tongue... we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.
The connection
Genesis and Acts share a single word across two languages of translation, "confounded," and use it to describe exact opposites. At Babel, one language is shattered into many because a unified people, understanding each other perfectly, aimed that unity at self-glorifying pride: "let us make our name famous" (Genesis 11:4). At Pentecost, many languages are given to a small, frightened band so that people from a dozen different nations each hear their own tongue proclaiming, not human ambition, but "the wonderful works of God" (Acts 2:11). Babel disperses a people for reaching upward toward heaven on their own terms; Pentecost gathers a people because heaven has come down and given itself away. The confusion of tongues that was a judgment on pride becomes, at Pentecost, an instrument of the Gospel: division is not undone by erasing difference but overcome within it.
Moral sense
Babel's builders wanted one tongue in service of one name, their own. Pentecost's apostles are given many tongues in service of one name that is not their own at all, the miracle is not uniformity restored but division overcome without anyone losing what makes them distinct, each hearer addressed in exactly the language he already had.
Anagogical sense
What Pentecost begins in one city on one morning is the seed of an ultimate gathering, "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and tribes, and peoples, and tongues" (Apocalypse 7:9), standing where Babel's builders wanted to stand, before God, except finally welcomed there rather than scattered from it.
The Fathers
St Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 41, On Pentecost, 16: "But as the old Confusion of tongues was laudable, when men who were of one language in wickedness and impiety ... were building the Tower ... so much more worthy of praise is the present miraculous one. For being poured from One Spirit upon many men, it brings them again into harmony." St Augustine, Tractates on John 6.10: "If pride caused diversities of tongues, Christ's humility has united these diversities in one. The Church is now bringing together what that tower had sundered."
Warrant
Patristic: St Gregory Nazianzen (On Pentecost) and St Augustine (Tractates on John 6) set the confusion at Babel and the tongues of Pentecost against each other themselves, Gregory saying the tongues poured "from One Spirit upon many men" bring them "again into harmony", Augustine that "the Church is now bringing together what that tower had sundered." Checked in the Greek: glossa is the word confounded at Genesis 11:7 in the Septuagint and the word given at Acts 2:3, 2:4 and 2:11, so the reversal turns on one noun used at both ends.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1287.
The verses
Genesis 11:7 · Genesis 11:8 · Genesis 11:9 · Acts 2:3 · Acts 2:4 · Acts 2:5 · Acts 2:6 · Acts 2:11
