After the great flood, the people of the world grew in number again and they all shared a single language.
After travelling, they came to the land of Shinar. And there, the leader of the people who was called Nimrod, decided to build a great tower that would reach high up into the sky – so high that its top would be in the heavens..
And God looked at the people and at the great tower that they were building and he said, “You are one people and you have one language, and you will be able to achieve whatever you put your mind to.”
So God decided to confound their speech – to confuse the tongues and the minds of the people. And the people became so confused by the multiple languages that they could no longer communicate easily with each other, and as a result they abandoned their efforts to build a great tower, and they abandoned many other things, too. They even began to forget that at one time, all people could communicate easily and that people can achieve whatever you put your mind to.
And much of communication turned out to babbling, little more than the sounds that a baby makes to pass time through the day. And so the tower that was never finished was called the Tower of Babel.
There are many stories of the Tower of Babel in different cultures, Indian, European, Hebrew. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the Kaballah story which tells us that …
… one third of the Tower builders were punished by being transformed into semi-demonic creatures and banished into three parallel dimensions, inhabited now by their descendants.
And when we see, hear, or feel the problems in our communication today, perhaps we are also living in three parallel dimensions.