The Confusion of Tongues
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Genesis 11:6
The passage
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Genesis 11:6
About this plate
The tower fills two thirds of the plate and disappears into cloud without finishing. It is drawn as a ziggurat, terrace on terrace, with the courses of brick ruled in so evenly that the whole face reads as a wall of lines.
Down on the working platform, everything has stopped. A man in white stands on a cut stone block with both arms thrown up. Around him men in a dozen different costumes turn away, cover their ears, gesture at each other, argue. A hoisting derrick leans at the right with its load still hanging. Tools and dressed blocks lie where they were dropped.
Doré is illustrating the verse before the punishment. God is still speaking — nothing will be restrained from them — and the picture is what that sentence is about: an enormous competence, mid-sentence.
The tower is not falling. That is the point most retellings get wrong and Doré gets right. Genesis never knocks it down. The work simply stops, and the unfinished thing stands there, and that is worse.
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