Why did God condemn the building of the Tower of Babel? I’m sure that there are lots of reasons why, but in Genesis, it isn’t explicitly given. The story is reminiscent of the modern world.

The tower is built with bricks, the latest and flashiest technology of the day.

Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name... - KJV Genesis 11:4

The people were trying to build their way to heaven. Engineer their way to heaven. As though the difficulty and complexity of the human experience, the learning experience, could be shortcutted by man’s men’s invention.

We are still trying to build the tower.

The market rewards the replicable, the scalable, the exchangeable, the measurable, etc… For a product to make money and have ‘value’ it must have all of these characteristics. The bricks certainly did/do.

Do children?

Anything that doesn’t have these characteristics is of no use to the market and by extension is of no use to one looking for green paper, power, prowess. You can buy anything in this world with money. The imperfect economy of the world cannot assign value to anything that isn’t measurable, exchangeable.

Can any of these adjectives be applied to the work of a mother?

John Maynar Keynes, a brilliant economist, predicted in 1930 that as a result of the investment-innovation-technology cycle, within 100 years we would only have to work 15 hours a week. Most people think that he was wrong; however, to achieve the same level of luxury that Keyens comfortably lived with for most of his life we would have had to 15 hours per week starting in the 70s. His prediction was conservative, it didn’t even take 100 years.

But, of course, we aren’t working 15 hours a week. Why? We’re insatiable. We’re ambitious, meritocratic. The worth of a soul and its work is defined by the meritocracy. The meritocracy is defined by the money, the measurable.

Personally, I think the men were the ones building the tower, thinking they could use their physical and industrial prowess to manufacture a tower to heaven. Blinded, they couldn't see what really mattered. Maybe the women were wiser and knew that heaven isn’t made of bricks, it's made of people. Homes, not houses.

Not to say that technology in and of itself is bad, but perhaps God confounded the people’s languages when the men and women started devaluing the unreplicable, unscalable, unexchangeable, unmeasurable, yet invaluable role of mothers.

There are two elements, people (intelligence) and matter. Perhaps women have a proclivity to one and men to the other. The inferior economy of the world can't see it, but they are equally valuable.