The Tower of Babel

While reading Genesis 10-12 and Matthew 4, we find the statement, "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." Immediately, I began to think about how man seems to thrive on being disobedient to God. Like people today, they had plans to make a name for themselves, and apparently these folks didn't want to follow God's directive to spread out and fill the earth.

These are the people who began what is labeled as the sexagesimal, positional numeration system or a base-60 numeration.  They only had two mathematical symbols, one a narrow wedge (resembling Y) and a wider wedge (resembling <) and could represent any numbers they needed and calculate very accurately.  They were able to calculate the square root of two correct to seven decimal places. These are the people who gave the world sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour.  Why base-60 instead of base-10 (fingers) or base-20 (fingers and toes)?

The people of this city needed a tower to study the stars.  They gained much worldly wisdom, studying the earth, the moon, and the stars (and, of course, developing gods associated with many aspects of creation to worship instead of the Creator).  They were accustomed to a 360 day year. (You can do some research here, but I personally believe that there was originally a 360 day, twelve month, thirty days a month year that was disrupted when the flood occurred.)  These city-dwellers assigned 360 degrees to a full circle (one revolution of the earth - yes, they knew it was round), and so angular measurement developed into what we still use today. 360 conveniently divides by ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty and sixty. Sixty conveniently divides by one, two, three, four, five and six.

As I conclude today's thoughts, I realize I've been meditating on Biblegateway's verse of the day from Micah 6:8 which is in direct conflict (disobedience) to the beginning verse from Genesis 11:4.  "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"