Episode 154 - Not in God’s White Heaven

With fellow desert people Abby and Sam joining the table, Abish blinds everyone with the Science of the Lambs, a radioactive-green experiment combining Midori, blue curaçao, vodka, and some suspiciously persistent flat Sprite. A skewer of rainbow gummy frogs provides the educational garnish because dissecting amphibians is science, and because gummy fetal pig hearts remain tragically unavailable. The drink is considerably more successful than the infamous hot-dog-water cocktail, whose surviving cocktail wienies were recently discovered fossilized in the refrigerator.

The intro proceeds with all the discipline of an unsupervised particle accelerator, bouncing through chicken-heart meat gum, the new Little House on the Prairie, Netflix’s live-action Avatar, From, The X-Files, The Odyssey, World Cup corruption, and an urgent philosophical debate over whether Dani Rojas is too precious to fuck. He is not. Science has spoken.

History: [00:30:51]

Abigail begins with the Tower of Babel and discovers that the entire biblical story is only nine verses long, despite centuries of Christians attaching an expanded cinematic universe to it. Genesis never says the builders wanted to storm heaven, overthrow God, survive another flood, or construct the tower under the supervision of Nimrod. It simply describes humanity building a city and a tower, followed by God scrambling their language and scattering them. The familiar Sunday School version is less biblical history than theological fan fiction with a surprisingly generous special-effects budget.

The likely inspiration was Babylon itself, particularly the enormous ziggurat Etemenanki, whose construction required fired bricks, naturally occurring bitumen, cedar beams, centralized government, and a staggering amount of human labor. Babylon’s monumental architecture advertised the power of its kings and patron god Marduk, while the Hebrew writers had excellent reasons to hate the empire that conquered Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and deported much of the population. The story therefore functions less as a warning against tall buildings and more as a Hebrew roast of imperial power, centralized authority, and Babylon’s enormous bricked-up civic penis.

Abigail then launches into a speedrun through historical linguistics, explaining that languages do not suddenly appear, remain perfectly preserved, or decay from one original divine tongue. They drift through pronunciation, grammar, syntax, borrowed vocabulary, migration, conquest, trade, technology, jokes, and children imperfectly recreating the noises made by adults around them. Linguists can trace related words backward toward reconstructed language families such as Proto-Indo-European, but spoken sounds leave no fossils and there was never a single morning when everyone woke up speaking something new.

That creates a particular problem for Mormonism, because the Book of Ether turns the confounding of languages into a literal historical event witnessed by Jared, the brother of Jared, their families, and the future passengers of several bitumen-sealed ocean barges. While other Christians can treat Babel as an etiological myth explaining linguistic diversity, Mormon scripture parks a wooden submarine directly in the middle of that escape route. The result is a doctrine chained to an ancient legend, a brief detour through Mahonri Moriancumr and the children of Aronek, and the devastating revelation that even humanity’s supposedly perfect original civilization still named one of its children Jared.

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