THE FALL AS THE BEGINNING OF EMPIRE

Liz McAlister, Kirkridge Retreat Center, September 2005

"Come Out!" "Come out of your country, your people and your parent's house and go!" Gen. 12:1

Genesis 1 - 11 traces the human journey from Garden to the power of the urban Tower, and pronounces it Fallen. With Genesis 12, a new narrative begins, opening the main plot of the Bible, the journey of redemption. Abram is called to leave the ancient city of Ur, site of one of the oldest ziggurats. This sets the pattern for the rest of the book. The Moses story establishes the archetype of going feral from civilization. He leads the people to abandon the fleshpots of a command economy in order to relearn the economics of grace in the wilderness.

There are two forces at work in the Genesis account of which we ought to be aware

The Centripetal Force is the power of the Center (the city/empire) to pull everything into itself from the margins and rule over it, concentrating power and wealth.

The Centrifugal Force is the power of moving away from the center which, in this case, is deconstructing concentrations of power by dispersal, resistance and diversity.

The Bible is antipathetic to the city. Early Israel was a heterogeneous mix of foragers, fringe-dwellers, pastoral people and small-scale farmers. They existed at the margins of the late Bronze Age Egyptian empire. Their myths of origin had to do with wandering Armenians, and a prophet who summoned them to abandon the cities of Egypt for life in the wilderness. There divine revelations came under trees and on mountaintops and beside magically flowing rivers and burning bushes. Their social organization was, for generations, a kinship-based and loosely federated tribal system. Their economy was based on gift ritual and reciprocity, or "Sabbath economics." This is Israel at its best; its governmental structure was that of a theocracy. And they largely eschewed the urban life of Canaan until they abandoned their primal ways and fashioned their own centralized kingdom under David et al so they could be like other nations. This "civilizing" project, understood in I Samuel 8 to be a betrayal of their identity. It was centered in a Canaanite city called Jerusalem.

In the foreground of the ancient Hebrew's perspective on the city was the experience of slavery in Egypt: The Egyptians set taskmasters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharoah... The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks upon the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor . (Ex 1:11,14)

The human cost of such construction colored the view of those at the bottom of the social pyramid. The cities were the symbol and substance of Egypt's empire. They constructed fortresses along trade routes, which projected their military power into the subservient province, and collected tribute from vassal cities and villages. The Hebrews had solid political and economic reason to resent the cities their slave labor helped build.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the regimes of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Anatolia are Israel's prime adversaries. And laced through these stories like a bad refrain are denunciations of the fortified city-states, symbolized preeminently by the architecture of domination: the tower. In your thoughts you will ponder the former terror. Where is the one who took the tribute, the officer in charge of the towers? You will see those arrogant people no more! (Is 33: 18). For Zephaniah the day of God is a day of trumpet and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the corner towers (1:16). And Gideon's vow represents the defiance of the city's might by an Israelite guerilla from the mountains: When I return victorious, I will tear down this tower (Judges 8:9) - a threat he made good on more than once.

Genesis. Gen 1 thru 11 narrates the "Fall of civilization." We begin in a garden where humans enjoyed communion with God and creation; by Gen.11 we're in a metropolitan nightmare of hubris and oppression. "Babel" is a thinly-veiled reference to Babylon (v 9a). The centripetal power of the city draws human and natural resources into its vortex of production and consumption; it is characterized by centralization (v 2), cultural conformity (v 1) and above all, the architecture of domination (vv 3f). The "tower" here alludes to Babylon's ziggurats "reaching to the heavens."

The root of the problem in Genesis 11 is the centripetal force of the City. ("They are one people and they have one language," v 6), confounds God's intention that human communities be "scattered abroad over the face of the earth" (vv 8f), a mandate reiterated throughout the primeval cycle (see Genesis 1:28; 9:1). Human variety is as essential to social ecology as species diversity is to a healthy biosystem - an insight we are only just rediscovering.

It is the divine action that shatters the human re-engineering, and re-disperses peoples (v 7). The Tower of Babel tale understands this "scattering" not as the result of God's judgment but as a liberation from the imperial project . Cultural diversity is affirmed as the best restraint on the human impulse to construct societies of domination. Millennia have confirmed the political insight of this story. It is an uncanny depiction of the correlation between massive State construction projects and imperial ambition. It remains all too relevant today: the transcontinental railroad, the Manhattan Project, yes, even the lamented Trade Towers in NYC and the projects for a new New Orleans.

But if Israel's suspicion of the surrounding empires is in the foreground of these traditions, there is a deeper issue in the background. We can see it if we look at how the Babel story is situated in Genesis. The first creation story of Genesis 1 emphasizes an abundant, vibrant creation crowned by a cosmic Sabbath. "It was good!" God saw that it was good. (This is the "WOW" of God - and sometimes God said it backwards!) There is no hint of scarcity, conflict or exploitation. The second creation story of Genesis 2 introduces the human being as indigenous to a garden. Man is fashioned from the "dust;" he and his partner ëava, meaning life personified, live in deep relationship with the spirit world (walking and talking with God), with the creation (naming of the critters), and with each other (Eve being fashioned from Adam's own body).

One can intuit in these narratives a memory of a time when human beings experienced this abundance. Modern anthropology, under the influence of Social Darwinism, used to paint a portrait of the life of all pre-historic humans as "miserable, violent and brutish." This view began to change because of a1972 study, Stone Age Economics, in which the researcher posited the "original affluence" of primal societies. Sahlins found evidence that hunter-gatherers were healthier, freer, more egalitarian, less violent, worked less and enjoyed life more than urban cultures, not least our own. Yet the bias is well-entrenched in our consciousness.

Perhaps the Genesis narrators were drawing on the deep memory of the abundant life-ways of Neolithic peoples in the rich Tigris-Euphrates delta. In any case, the crucial contribution of the Israelite scribes lay in their attempt to explain how and why these life-ways disappeared. And they do it in a way that focused on human culpability rather than divine whim. The biblical account represents the world's first systematic ideology of resistance to the project of civilization , and it is produced by a people who had front row seats in the drama. (Cf. the section title to Genesis 4:17 ff)

So Genesis' explanation of what went wrong was a story about a Fall. Our understanding of the Fall has been trivialized by a theology that moralizes about individual disobedience or hubris. But the story reflect on nothing less than civilization itself, and so it narrates the history of the human condition.

What does the story look like if we interpret humans grasping the Tree of the Knowledge as a powerful metaphor of the human impulse to imagine that we can actually improve upon Creation ? (We can do God one better! And better yet, we can be god!) This impulse has resulted in a long and sordid history of attempts to domesticate and re-engineer the world. domestication of plants and animals led to sedentary village life and the beginnings of stored surplus. This led to population increases, the complexification of society, the rise of hierarchy and militias, and the invention of writing (the first examples of which have to do with bookkeeping). The result was that around 7 or 6,000 BCE we see the first archeological evidence for cities. This is the dawn of civilization, and it brings war, ever more sophisticated technologies and ecocidal tendencies, as human societies grasp more firmly to the Tree of Knowledge. In our own time we have transformed rivers into dams and forests into boardfeet, and re-engineered the atom and the seed and the gene.

The consequences of the Fall in Genesis 3 are: the expulsion from the Garden, alienation from the earth, and condemnation to a life of toil as a farmer. The first act outside the Garden is fratricide. Abel, a remnant of the not-yet-fully-domesticated life of the nomad, is murdered by the farmer Cain. This vignette represents the opening battle of history's longest war between aggressive, expansionist agriculturally based societies and their insatiable appetite for land, and retreating traditional foragers on the other. Throughout the history of civilization, indigenous peoples have been given an ultimatum: move further into the wilderness while we settle on the best land; or be sucked into the vortex of our culture, serving us as peasants or slaves; or perish altogether, because as many Europeans put it, natives are unfit for civilization. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce summed it up: "When you come we die."

Most telling for our theme, however, is Cain's first act after his banishment. He constructs a city that he identifies with his son Enoch, whose name means "re-creation" (Genesis 4:17). The city becomes the re-engineered alternative to the garden - an accurate reflection of what actually happened in the last millennia of pre-history. In this way Genesis portrays the rise of civilization as a history of the Fall.

By Genesis 6 the world is filled with violence, led by the mysterious "Nephilim" - giants on the earth. The Bible understands the Nephilim as warriors - people who had grown too big and powerful.

God reconsiders the human project altogether, and proposes to pull the plug. This ushers in the Noah story, whose hero is "just a man." We might say this tale represents the redemptive counterpoint to city-construction: re-genesis vs. re-engineering. If homo sapiens is now become homo faber, the only divinely-ordained work of our hands is to preserve Creation, in contrast to those who would usurp or destroy it. The Ark is the symbol of our vocation as stewards. Noah's fidelity to this vision of preservation (ridiculed then as now), offers a new start for humans, whose interdependence with all the creatures on the planet is emphasized repeatedly in the new Covenant of Gen. 9.

We know this well - we live it: urban civilization is warring civilization. Conqueror and builder are no longer distinct. This is the bigger narrative, then, that culminates in the tale of the Tower of Babel. It is the unqualified lament of the Hebrew people - displaced or colonized by urban civilization. The Bible identifies the tower not only with imperial might, but also with idolatry. The ziggurat represented an artificial mountain upon which the gods could be met - in contrast, say, to Moses' rendezvous with the wilderness God Yahweh on Sinai.

Ancient peoples acknowledged the mountaintops as home of the gods - Israel shared that view. On the other hand, imperial urban societies, in keeping with their project of domesticating the world, brought the gods "in-house," engineering their own axis of the world in pyramids and ziggurats. The penthouse suite was, of course, reserved for the king's communion with the deities, who were patrons of the empire (vs. Yahweh, who is ever critical). The distant sacred mountain, looked at by traditional peoples as the source of life and power, is now replaced by a tower where the king and his gods look down ON their subjects in surveillance and control.

They controlled the waters, tapped the great rivers like kegs of beer. They had agriculture down to a science. Storehouses spat out grain, markets were littered with dates and slippery with oil. The city was the source of all life.

In this light, God's decision to deconstruct Babel can be seen as a counterattack on empire. Today the height and breadth of urban civilization dominates the planet. The ancient sages understood the threat of concentrated human ingenuity in the service of the imperial state: "Now there is nothing they propose to do that will be impossible for them" (11:6). The terrible truth of that warning is just dawning on us, living as we do under the swords of ABC and GNR (atomic, biological and chemical weaponry, and genetic, robotic and nanotechnologies).

Genesis traces the human journey from Garden to the power of the urban Tower, and pronounces it Fallen. As it closes, a new narrative begins, opening the main plot of the Bible, the journey of redemption. It commences with the first great act of centrifugality: Abram is called to leave the city of Ur, site of one of the region's oldest ziggurats. This sets the pattern for the rest of the book. The first war narrated in the Bible takes place on the plain of Shinar, and it catches Lot in its crossfire because he, unlike Abram, chose to settle among the "cities on the plain" (Genesis 13:12). Jacob tends to avoid cities, and the first Hebrew building project is not a tower, but a pile of stones, placed as an altar by the Galeed (Genesis 31:47). Joseph , in contrast, is drawn into the centripetal pull of Egypt, particularly his forcing people to come in to the city by managing scarcity during a time of famine.

Above all it is Moses who establishes the archetype of going feral from civilization. He leads the people to abandon the fleshpots of a command economy in order to relearn the economics of grace in the wilderness. When Israel does venture back into Canaan, they occupy existing cities but do not build their own, something that doesn't transpire until the time of the monarchy (and then with a vengeance!). But the first "conquest" episode is a telling object lesson, perhaps even something of a political cartoon. Joshua's inaugural target is the ancient, fortified Canaanite city state of Jericho, which is vanquished, we are told in one of the great polemical legends of scripture, by a sort of Jubilee liberation song and dance.

The social architecture of domination is entrenched today. Modern imperialism has systematically eroded local cultures and spread the our language and culture. The revolution in global communications, opening trade barriers, the growth in multinational business, and the mobility of world populations all accelerate this erosion. Ethnic costumes give way to western fashion, traditional chants to Madonna, and regional dishes to McDonalds. Human variety is as essential to social ecology as species diversity is to a healthy biosystem, yet both are victims of global capitalism. The new Tower of Babel is the sameness of commercial culture and transnational technocracy.

Some aspects of this global mix may be good and rich, but most are troubling, and some are downright genocidal. HUMAN variety is falling victim to global capitalism.

In our communities, we must reassert the Genesis wisdom of a "scattered" human family by nurturing diversity. Just as it is our vocation to critique culture in light of the gospel, it is also our duty to defend culture's rights, because each is a gift of creation as well as a result of the Fall. Annie Dillard writes: You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere... you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it's often a bearing wall that has to go... Knock it out. Duck. 

Her metaphor about tearing down the walls of one's house describes a task we face. We live in a world constructed upon an architecture of division. Do we have the courage to take down walls that divide - even if they are bearing walls? A dangerous task... Why? Because the Empire holds such power. When Jesus tried to resist it, he was mocked, tortured, and crucified. Such will be the fate of any who dare to stand against the brutal logic of empire. John does not deny that Jesus' followers will likely be subject to the same "honor."

My friends - the apocalyptic virtue is endurance; active, public resistance that does not shrink in the face of imperial threats and punishments. To endure is to remain faithful, to stick to one's commitment to worship only God and to the slaughtered Lamb, the only one found "worthy" to open and read the scroll - which is the scroll of history (Revelation 5:2-12). Jesus "read" the history of Israel and understood what no one else did: The Empire is not to be compromised with, accommodated to, or fought against with weapons of destruction.

Our instruction is "Flee!" Flee the consensus. Physically, that is impossible, given the givens. Spiritually, the instruction calls us to dispersal, resistance, diversity - building communities where they can be realized and embodied. Let's

Appoint a king over us so we can make war like other nations.... They are rejecting me and not you...

We are instructed to try to keep something real and true and good alive!