And All the Animals is a walk through the whole Bible — start to finish, in order, one story at a time.
There are two voices. A narrator tells the story. A raven supplies the facts: what a cubit works out to, how big Nineveh actually was, which museum the tablet is sitting in. The raven was, by its own account, present for some of this, and has not entirely gotten over how that turned out.
The stories are told straight, which means the people in them come off exactly as badly as the text says they do. Jacob is a con man. Noah gets off the boat and plants a vineyard. The prophet in episode one would rather die than watch his enemies be forgiven. The Bible's own narrator is unsparing about all of it — we just say it out loud.
Where a passage has been read two ways for a thousand years, we say so, lay both out as well as we can, and leave it with you. Where the archaeology is contested, you get the dates, the findspots, and an honest shrug. Episodes end on a question rather than a moral.
Written for about ten and up, and for whoever else is in the car. Every episode opens with a plain note about what's in it, and when something is hard, we say so before we get there.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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6:34
Verse 4: "lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." Verse 8: "so the LORD dispersed them." Their stated fear returned in their own sentence — and God has to come down to see it.
SPEAKER_00
Before we start, nothing in today's episode needs a warning. It's a building project that goes wrong and nobody gets hurt. Nine verses. That's the whole story. It's shorter than the list of who was related to whom on either side of it. And in nine verses, a group of people say out loud exactly what they're afraid of. Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
SPEAKER_01
Hold that last clause. Six verses later, you will hear it again, word for word, as a description of what happened to them. This is and all the animals. We're going through the Bible together, start to finish, every story in order. He does the telling. I'm the one who knows what a qubit is.
SPEAKER_00
They said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar.
SPEAKER_01
That is correct for southern Mesopotamia and wrong for almost anywhere else. There is no building stone on that plain. There is river mud, and there is natural tar seeping out of the ground. So you make mud brick, you fire it so it lasts, and you set it in bitumen. The text is not describing a generic tower. It is describing how people actually built in that specific place.
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And what they built wasn't a spire. Picture a ziggurat, a stepped mountain of brick, square at the base, climbing in terraces with a temple on top.
SPEAKER_01
Babylon had one. Its name was Etimenanki, which means roughly the foundation of heaven and earth. The base was about 90 meters on a side. People walked up it on staircases.
SPEAKER_00
So when the text says a tower with its top in the heavens, that's not a cartoon. That's a real class of building. And the people who built them said so about them. Now the joke. And it is a joke. This chapter is funny, deliberately, and it's the first time the Bible does comedy on purpose. They build the tallest thing their civilization can imagine, top in the heavens, visible for miles. And the text says, And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower.
SPEAKER_01
He had to come down to get a look at it.
SPEAKER_00
That's the setup and the punchline in one sentence. Everything they have, every brick, every terrace, the whole engineering achievement of the age. And from where the story is told, it is so small that you'd have to descend to notice it.
SPEAKER_01
The text does not editorialize. It does not say, and it was very small. It just puts the height they were aiming at and the direction of travel in the same paragraph and lets you do the arithmetic.
SPEAKER_00
That's a move you've heard before, if you were listening in episode one. Genesis is extremely good at saying things by declining to say them. Here's how the chapter is built, and it's the tightest construction we've looked at yet. Listen to who says what. The people say, come, let us make bricks. The people say, come, let us build a city. And then, come, let us go down and confuse their language.
SPEAKER_01
Three times, come, let us. Twice from below, once from above. The chapter answers their sentence with their own sentence.
SPEAKER_00
And that plural, let us, is the same odd plural we ran into in Genesis chapter 1, when the text said, Let us make man in our image. People have read that several ways for a very long time. And I said then I wasn't going to settle it. I'm still not.
SPEAKER_01
What's observable is that it turns up here, in the same shape, at the other end of the primeval story. Whoever wrote this was aware of the echo.
SPEAKER_00
Two more things, and then the thing the episode is really about. First, the name.
SPEAKER_01
The city is called Babel. In Akkadian, the Babylonian's own language, Babilu means gate of the God. That is what its citizens called it, proudly, for centuries. Hebrew has a verb, balal, which means to confuse or to mix up. It sounds almost identical.
SPEAKER_00
So the chapter takes the grandest name in the ancient world, the gate of God, and hears it as gibberish. That is not a neutral piece of etymology. That is a very small nation making a joke at the expense of a very large empire. And the joke has outlived the empire by two and a half thousand years.
SPEAKER_01
Whether the pun is the actual origin of the name or a deliberate re-hearing of it, is a question for people with more Akkadian than I have. The two words are what they are. You can look them up.
SPEAKER_00
And second, they don't just stop building the tower, they left off building the city. The tower gets all the attention. What actually stops is the city, the place where all of them were going to stay together, so that none of them would have to go anywhere. So here's where I leave you. And it's the shortest thing I've ever had to point at. Go back to verse 4 and read what they said they were afraid of. Lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. Now read verse 8.
SPEAKER_01
So the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
SPEAKER_00
Same words. The thing they built the whole city to prevent is the thing that happens, described in the sentence they use to describe it. They also said they wanted to make a name for themselves. So turn one page, just one, and read what the very next person in the book gets told, and by whom, and notice which of the two things he asked for.
SPEAKER_01
Next time, a man is told to leave everything and go somewhere, and is not told where.
