ABSTRACT
Literary critic George Steiner has written: Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. In the realm of myth recorded in Genesis, each thing and every act is organized around, if not coordinated by, a physically absent God. While it is difficult from the perspective of recent time to conceive of a God or group of deities needing to make a name for himself/herself/themselves, the Judaic tradition is structured around giving name and thereby praise to God. There are only two circumstantial pieces of evidence that effectively remove God from consideration as the locus of glorification at Babel: first, God is presented as taking a positive role in the making of architecture and cities only much later in biblical tradition; second, there is the significant referent given in the quoted passage for ourselves.
