Ethnicity 383after reading the sacred writings, they misconstrued them” (C. Cels. 7.30; see also 6.7,
43; 7.28).
Homer’s account of the criminal feat of the sons of Aloeus in piling mountains atop
each other to storm the heavens was only a corruption of the narrative of the tower of
Babel in the writings of Moses, Celsus’ claims to the contrary notwithstanding (C. Cels.
4.21). Such assertions of Greek dependency on Hebrew Scriptures followed from the fact
that Moses “is shown to be much older than the Trojan War” (C.Cels. 4.36). The proof is
assumed but never actually made explicit by Origen. No doubt, he felt such chronological
proof had already been adequately developed by his apologetic predecessors, Clement,
Tatian, Theophilus, or even Josephus (Feldman 1990: 109–11).
Origen’s reading of the story of the Tower of Babel is especially significant. It does
more than merely signify Hebrew antiquity and, in fact, plays a large role in his refutation
of Celsus. The story could also be employed to offer a counter-explanation to Celsus’
vision of ethnic relativity. The anti-Christian polemicist had claimed that the diversity in
national ways of living was based upon the diversity of divine overseers and their peculiar
institutions. Not opposing the assumption of ethnic relativity or even the existence and
role of these overseers, Origen adopts the Babel story as a fitting explanatory narrative
for the origins of such diversity, though he expresses due caution at this point as he is
venturing on the “rather mysterious accounts about the division of [the nations] on the
earth” (C. Cels. 5.29). In his reading of the story, the earliest humans all shared a single
language of divine origin as long as they resided in the east where they could attend to
“the things of the light” (C. Cels. 5.30). However, when they moved from the east to
the plains of Shinar, pursuing the desire for material things and piling these goods up in
an assault against what was immaterial, so that they might bring “their exalted loftiness
against the knowledge of God,” each person:
in proportion to the distance from the East that had arisen in them to a greater or lesser
degree, was handed over to angels who were rather harsh to greater or lesser degrees....
And each one [was] led to the parts of the earth that they deserved by angels who implanted
in them the language akin to them; some to arid land, others to land chastening those who
dwell there by freezing; some to rather uncultivable land, others to land that is less difficult;
and some to land filled with wild animals, and others to land that is less so.(C. Cels. 5.30)This definitive event of ethnogenesis functioned as a myth of origins explaining the ethnic
diversity of the world perceived by both Celsus and Origen, but its narrative decisively
turned the tables of national legitimacy and superiority in favor of the ancient Hebrews.
Whereas Celsus had argued for their late and derivative status, Origen makes the Hebrews
the sole inheritors of the primal divine language. Origen’s Babel narrative elevates the
ancient Hebrews above all other nations, now seen as bearers of wayward traditions that
served as their punishment for earlier crimes. Far from being a rebellious break-off from
Egypt, the Hebrews “were called by God to be ‘an elect race’, ‘a royal priesthood’, ‘a holy
nation’, and ‘a people for His possession’,” for unlike the other nations who had been
assigned to angels, they alone “have been accepted by God as a special portion beside all
the nations on the earth” (C. Cels. 5.10; see Johnson 2006b).
Such a narrative carried additional weight: not only did it reverse the relationship
between the Jews and other ancient nations as it was portrayed by Celsus, it delegitimized