It is common these days to read the Bible as an anti-imperial epic, the story of God and Israel, then (for Christians) God and Jesus, against empire. “Come out, come out from Babylon, my people!” is the theme. 
It’s a hard sell for all sorts of reasons. Jeremiah urges the people of Judah to enter not exit Babylon (Jeremiah 27, 29). Isaiah invests Cyrus the Persian conqueror with Davidic titles—he is the Lord’s “servant” and “shepherd” and “anointed one” (Isaiah 44-45). Heroes like Joseph, Daniel, and Mordecai end up as chief advisors to emperors. In Scripture, there is no such thing as “empire” but only empires, and they are not all the same. Some are Babels, some beasts; some are rods of discipline, some provide refuge for the people of God.
God does frustrate empires of the Babelic and bestial sort. In the Bible’s earliest account of empire (Genesis 11:1-9), human beings erect a city and tower in the plains of Shinar. The fourfold repetition of “one” (Genesis 11:1, 6) shows their goal is uniformity. Babel, the prototype of all later “Babels,” is intolerant of linguistic, cultural, and religious difference.
The men of Babel want to make a “name” for themselves. Like the later king of neo-Babylon, they want to set a throne among the stars, ascend above the clouds, make themselves “like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:13-14). Augustine recognized similar idolatrous motivations behind the Roman drive for imperial mastery. Lust for glory first inspired Romans to overthrow tyrants, but, having toppled the Tarquins, they remained full of the same lust. Only mastery of the world could satisfy. Desire for freedom morphed into a libido dominandi.
At the same time, Roman desire for glory was infused with anxiety and fear, which paradoxically increased in proportion to Roman success in conquest. Fear of enemies within and without inspired the manly virtus of the Roman warrior. Babel’s founders are also driven by anxiety about “scattering” (Genesis 11:4). Babelic empires are designed to fend off insecurity and fear of dissolution. Anxious glory-seeking takes political form in an empire that permits only one lip and one set of words. God created humans to spread throughout the earth, multiplying to fill the earth (Genesis 1:26-28), but Babelic empires attempt to arrest movement, to stop time and history. Babel aims to be the end of history, beyond which there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. It is the political embodiment of a hyper-realized eschatology, which is always also an eschatology of fear. Babel’s eternal walls are built to ward off the ravages of time. Long before Virgil, Babel announces the formation of an imperium sine fine.
Unlike Ozymandias, Babel learns its limits. As soon as he appears in the narrative, Yahweh begins to dismantle Babel brick by brick, as he ensures that all they fear happens to them. He confuses their unified lip and speech (v. 7) and scatters them (vv. 4, 9). They wanted to build a city reaching to heaven (v. 4), but Yahweh has to “come down to see” it (v. 8). They want a name, and they get one, the mocking name “Confusion” (v. 9). In a laconic nine verses, the narrative exposes the folly of an imperialism that tries to compete with the Creator.
After Babel’s fall, Yahweh calls Abram from Ur to initiate his counter-Babel program (Genesis 12:1-3). Given Yahweh’s vigorous opposition to Babel, it’s surprising that his promises to Abram share many features of Babelic imperialism. He promises Abram a “great name” (12:2). He assures Abram that he will produce “a great and mighty nation” (18:18), but not just one: “I have made you a father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:4-6, 16). Abram will become the father of kings (Genesis 17:6, 16), a patriarchal “king of kings.” The two great promises—land and seed—echo the dual aim of Babel to build a city and a tower. Abram’s children eventually conquer the land and build in it a city and a tower—Jerusalem and its temple, the true “gate of God,” which is the meaning of the name “Babylon.”
On the basis of these Abrahamic promises, the prophets envision a peaceful world order centered in the “imperial” capital of Zion (Psalm 72:8-11; Isaiah 2:2-4; 60:10-11), and these prophetic visions inform the climactic chapters of the Christian Bible. After the harlot city is burned and the Roman beast is tossed into the lake of fire (Revelation 17-19), John sees an imperial vision of kings entering the heavenly city with tribute for the Lamb who bears the imperial title “Lord of lords and King of kings” (Revelation 21:22-27; cf. 17:14). Postcolonial readers bemoan this unfortunate “reinscription” of imperial aspirations, titles, and structures into Scripture. “Reinscription” is the wrong word. Empire is inscribed from the moment Yahweh speaks to Abram.
Israel has an imperial vocation to realize in truth what Babel sought in rebellion—unity among peoples, a link to heaven, a great name, righteousness and peace and security. Abrahamic empire is not a Babel imposing its will but the center of “a unified world community under God’s rule” (Oliver O’Donovan). Israel’s hope, and the church’s, is not “peace in isolation” but “a peaceful international community” gathered around Zion (O’Donovan).
The Bible is not a story of Israel in opposition to empire. It is a tale of two empires, written to assure believers that all Babels will crumble and that Abram’s empire will shine forever.
Peter J. Leithart is pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at New St. Andrews College. His most recent book is Athanasius (Baker Academic). This article is taken from the author’s Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective, forthcoming from Wipf & Stock.
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Comments:
I'm also somewhat confused about just what to do with this article. I'll concede that the idea of a good empire - one that realizes "righteousness, peace, and security" - is not necessarily impossible. The Jesuit ethicist Thomas Massaro has suggested that there are seven normative guidelines that we can use to judge an empire:
1. An empire should be transparent about its motives, instead of generating myths of innocence, altruism and infallibility.
2. An empire should respect lesser powers.
3. An empire should only turn to military solutions as a last resort.
4. An empire should respect the imperative that civilians never be intentionally harmed in the course of warfare.
5. An empire should be recognizably prudent - it should "consult a preponderance of evidence," instead of basing decisions on fear and hypersensitivity.
6. An empire should promote international cooperation.
7. An empire should have an internal life that does not sacrifice the common good for a wartime footing.
Which "empire" does Leithart see as following these ethical constraints? While we can imagine some sort of "empire" doing so, has any historical empire clearly done so? And if these prove to be very difficult questions, wouldn't the practical effect of the Bible indeed be "against empire" insofar as the tale of "Abram's empire" mostly functions to reveal the failures of all historical empires?
Looks like the Politico-Military Elites running the American Empire are batting 0 for 7.
While all human empires fall short, some of them do a better job of living up to those seven criteria than others do. For example, for all its real and serious shortcomings, the 19th century British Empire did a much better job in many of those criteria than most of the other empires that had come before it.
In a real way, every human empire bears an image of the perfect empire of Christ in some ways, and every human empire also reflects the human perversion of that image. Rather like human individuals, really.
And interestingly? There is no temple or church in it (21.22): "I saw no temple in this city."
It might be very interesting to debate some of these points directly. This is your blog, so you are, of course, free to say whatever you like and keep the conversation to your own perspective, but your (and my) readers might find stimulating an interchange that considers this point by point. I'm willing if you are.
For now, I'd offer this: of course, "the Bible" is not anti-empire as a whole. I don't know anyone who would (or could) claim it was, so your initial target is a straw person. My own argument, like that of many, is that the Bible itself contains just that argument: is YHWH anti-empire or pro-empire? I tried to lay out the contours and history of each case in "Come Out, My People!", as you know.
Second, it is a common and widespread tactic to criticize something in the very terms of one's opponents. From another angle, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza criticizes writers like Horsley and Elliott for "reinscribing" empire in the name of YHWH (or her term, "G*d"), rather than shifting discourse categories altogether (to, again her term, "democracy"). Now, if we were writing sacred texts from scratch, perhaps that would be good, just as I doubt one would today present the two cities in Revelation in terms of female stereotypes of bride and whore. But my own task, and I assume yours, is to interpret the Bible on its own terms. As such, the anti-empire voices (like John of Patmos) regularly present God's empire (or, "kingdom") as a radically different alternative to human-made empires/kingdoms.
So, to use your example of YHWH's call to Abram in Gen 12: sure, he's promised to be the father of "nations," i.e., ethnic groups, which will be "great." But their greatness is precisely that they come from obedience to the word of YHWH and not to that of human kings who would claim such divine authority (as in the Babylonian kings in relation to Enuma Elish).
I appreciate you raising these issues from a different perspective, and, although I disagree with you (on Constantine, too), I think the conversation could be very important, rather than each speaking alone to our preferred audiences of supporters and sympathizers.
Thank you for the answer. Some empires are better than others. But even those empires are capable of great harm - there are things to admire about the British Empire, but there is also the suppression of the Mau Mau uprising, famines in India, atrocities and penal laws in Ireland, the history of opium ... (And even a very patriotic American shudders to think of his own country's actions against Native Americans.)
So, if, as you write, "the only completely righteous empire is that of Christ in the New Creation," is there any reason to prefer empire to dispersed authority? It would seem - see SteveM's comment above - that to speak of Christ's empire means to immediately sense such a great difference between that empire and all historical empires that to be for Christ's empire is to effectively be "against (all other) empires."
