Today is the Christian festival of Pentecost, and I’ve been working on what looks like it’ll be the final chapter in my Bible Babel book. The several different names for God that show up in the Bible — that’s what the chapter’s about. Although one could argue whether or not it belongs, I include the Spirit — Holy Spirit, Spirit of God — there, and no discussion would be complete without some description of the dramatically in-Spir-ing moment of the first Christian Pentecost, narrated in the New Testament’s book of Acts (chapter 2).
That story in Acts is a kind of Babel revisited, to opposite effect.
In the tower of Babel story in Genesis, God “confuses” (Hebrew balal) the common human language so that people could no longer understand each other and persist in building a unifying tower to the heavens — hence the multiplicity of languages and peoples. In the Acts account, God’s Holy Spirit, dramatically conveyed in tongues of fire, bridges the language gap by enabling the apostles multilingual capabilities. They then preach repentance and forgiveness through Jesus, and the narrator triumphantly declares that the Holy Spirit was conveyed to many newly baptized believers that day.
In other words, reading these two stories together, it would seem that God created many languages to preclude the unity of human beings (tower of Babel), and then miraculously enabled communication across languages to proclaim a single message (first Pentecost). That message, if accepted, would allow human beings a direct line to God, even (according to later Christian doctrine) to become “like God” by receiving eternal life through Jesus.
Pentecost, of course, was not an originally Christian idea but something inherited from its parent Judaism, where it had evolved from an agricultural festival to one celebrating God’s gift of divine instructions (Torah) to the Israelites. Today, as in Jesus’ time, it is observed fifty days after the beginning of Passover — seven weeks after the second day, to be exact, which explains why it’s called the “Festival of Weeks.” Christians celebrate Pentecost fifty days after Easter to commemorate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit.
While I find the relationship between these two stories intriguing, the hints of supercessionism that follow are troubling. That Christianity surpassed Judaism and rendered it obsolete (and Judaism’s persistence is an obstinate refusal to accept the grace of God through Jesus) is a common conceit and follows from many New Testament texts. But that’s another post for another time.
