WRITING AUTHORITY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ... - Cornell University

confused, and from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the regions [My
emphasis]. 440
The Tower of Babel was built when “dixitque alter ad proximum suum” ‘another spoke to his
neighbor’ or before one man was “straunge to oþer”—at a time when my proximity to my
neighbor’s speech prevented me from seeing him as an “other” to myself.
It is this state that God, almost fearing the strength of mankind’s unity, wishes to prevent
by making men strangers to each other. In the biblical narration, he prevents the building of the
Tower not—as is generally believed and as Josephus interprets in transposing a Greek myth to a
biblical episode—by making each builder speak in a different tongue. 441 Rather, God confounds
the ability of language to speak with one meaning, effectively silencing human speech:
“confundamus ibi linguam eorum ut non audiat unusquisque vocem proximi sui” ‘let us confuse
their tongue there so that no one hears the voice of his neighbor.’ God’s solution for the hubris
displayed by the unification of humanity is not to make many tongues, but rather, it is to make
their one “vocem” ‘voice’ a voice of confusion foreign to the ear of the other.
Because the confusion that separated each human from his neighbor results in their
dispersal across the globe, the creation of alterity essentially results in colonialism. Being unable
to build one polity alongside a neighbor fundamentally alienates each human from another and
allows the objectification of others. This is what Josephus’s Antiquitates concludes as it uses the
myth of Babel to describe the colonization of the world by man and of one man by another:
440 Genesis 11:1-9.
441 Flavius Josephus 10.
After this they were dispersed abroad, on account of their languages, and went out by colonies
everywhere, and each colony took possession of that land which they light upon, and unto which
God led them; so that the whole continent was filled with them, both the inland and the maritime
countries. There were some also who passed over the sea in ships, and inhabited the islands; and
some of those nations do still retain the denominations which were given them by their first
founders; but some have lost them also, and some have only admitted certain changes in them, that
they might be the more intelligible to the inhabitants. And they were the Greeks who became the
authors of such mutations. For when in after-ages they grew potent, they claimed to themselves
the glory of antiquity; giving names to the nations that sounded well (in Greek) that they might be
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