The Way to Life: Sermons in a Time of World Crisis is a collection of sermons by Helmut Gollwitzer (an assistant of Karl Barth), and one of which is an excellent exposition of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) that exemplifies how to preach etiological saga in the Old Testament today. Most biblical scholars (such as Stanley Hauerwas) exegete the Tower of Babel in a similar way. 

The Tower of Babel decries the idolatry of nationalism and opposes all people who wish to make their nation great again by supporting its own interest, especially at the exclusion or detriment of other nations. It also decries imperialism regardless of whether it is ancient empires of Babylon, Egypt, Rome, or modern nations like America today. Babel is a symbol for any nation that utilizes technology and resources to exert itself over all the other nations of the world. The Tower of Babel has special significance to Gollwitzer because he experience the horrors of nationalism run amuck in World War II. The entire collection of sermons are in the context of "world crisis."

Gollwitzer describes the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 as "[a]etiological saga" which means it is a story that explains the origins of something in an understandable way to the author's audience (and is not a verifiable historical account). In other words, the Tower of Babel is an ancient Near East (ANE) myth that the writer of Genesis redacted to explain their nation's place among the nations and explain their suffering from the empire that lords over them.

The etiological genre of Tower of Babel indicates that it should be demythologized in order to be understood correctly, and should not be interpreted as telling us about historical event in the ancient Near East. It is possible that there was some sort of event that happened, that was the genesis of the older ANE version of this Tower of Babel story, but this historicity of the event is not communicated in this story, and insisting that this story is literal history would undermine its purpose and misunderstand the narrator's intended meaning. Gollwitzer notes that Genesis 11 refers to a plurality of gods that dwell in the sky (i.e. ANE cosmology), that "come down" to cause confusion. Gollwitzer comments that the narrator does not have a concern for the Babylonian gods, and did not take the trouble to scrub the narration from every trace of ANE paganism. For instance, there are many ANE variations of the Tower of Babel such as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta which is an ANE Sumerian myth that also features the building of a great ziggurat and the "confusion of tongues" and there are other examples such as the Assyrian version of the Tower of Babel. The common features indicate that the original form of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 originated from this time period, yet it has been modified to fit a contemporary purpose. These ANE pagan references indicates that this story is indeed very ancient and originated in the ANE, but it has been reshaped by post-exilic Jewish redactor to understand their oppression by the ruling empire (possibly the Seleucid, Macedonian or Persian empire).

Finally, Gollwitzer does not explain in this quotation, but it is important to know that the story of Pentecost in Acts 2 is the Christian reinterpretation of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. The author of Acts 2 de-babelizes all the nations of the world, and by the power of the holy spirit the confusion of tongues is undone and the different nations are reunified. For instance, Pentecost features a similar table of nations that represents the world, and the confusion of tongues, and many other commonalities. 

Helmut Gollwitzer on the Tower of Babel:

The building of the Tower of Babel is the history of the great Empires, from century to century the great Empires and their great Caesars. They unite many lands and people under their rule, one ruling language, one administration, one culture. All this happens in the name of union and peace, all, it is claimed, for the blessing of mankind—Pax Romana, Pax Germanica, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. But when the unification reaches its culminating point, the decay has always already set in. There must be some kind of canker in these attempts at unification. And yet today we really need unification. Do you remember how, after 1945, after the end of the attempt to unite Europe under German domination, everybody spoke of world government, whose time had now come—and today mankind is as fragmented as ever it was, particularly today when really a common effort of will among all nations is necessary to end the madness of armaments, for a new world economic order, and for the saving of our biosphere if we do not wish to perish. Instead of that we hear today the despairing talk of the "ungovernable character of the world". In great matters as in small, in large-scale politics as in small groups, in town-councils and in Presbyteries, our work remains fruitless because we cannot understand languages, because what continually happens is like what is said here, that "no one any longer understood another man's language".

Thus the ancient narrator three thousand years ago described what he saw round about him when he looked at the great Empires of that time, Egypt and Babylon, and at the same time he predicted the history of mankind up to the present day. For this purpose he used a story which he did not himself invent, but which people were telling each other everywhere in the oriental world at that time, and by which they used to explain the origin of two quite different phenomena, the origin of tower-like mounds, or rather high towers and ruins of towers, which people gazed at with wonder in the Mesopotamia of that day—and the phenomenon of the many kinds of language, which are so troublesome because they make it hard for one man to understand another. The gods must have interfered here—hence these enigmatic mounds and ruined towers, and hence the confusion of the nations and languages.

The biblical narrator, who adopted this aetiological saga (that is what scholars call such stories about origins), has no concern for the gods, he does not believe that there live above us gods who feel jealous and anxious because of the great powers of man, and for that reason intervene in defense of themselves. He knows, as an Israelite, the one living God, the Creator, who loves his creatures, who has equipped his human beings with many gifts and great powers, who wills to bless their work and make it prosper, who rejoices in the powers of his creatures. And yet he sees a truth in this saga, and for that reason he places it at the end of his account of the beginnings of the history of mankind, which is now contained in the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis. Thus a good beginning—the man and the woman in the garden of this earth, they have food and work, they live in peace and fellowship, the work is profitable, it is a healthy world. Then this one special, specially endowed creature of God—man, destroys more and more the Creation and himself, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the men of the story of the Flood, and lastly this tower-building—these are the stages of an accelerating disorder, destruction growing like an avalanche which starts with men and turns bad on themselves. The narrator merely tells the story; he does not comment on it. But his narrative forces this question upon us, what has gone wrong here, that man is so destructive, and that God does not bless men, but confronts them with his judgment?

Sources:

1. Gollwitzer, Helmut The Way To Life: Sermons in a Time of Crisis. England: T&T Clark, 1981. Trans. David Cairns. 2-3. Print.

2. Tower of Babel (source: wikipedia)