Vol. 9 No. 1 (2023): Repensar Babel. Desafíos del mundo plural.
Historically, the myth of Babel has assumed responsibility for the geographic, cultural and linguistic
geographical, cultural and linguistic division and has been thought of as an explanatory account of the origin of the social.
origin of the social. It represents the longing for the conquest of a utopian heaven and the consequent seizure of power to
consequent seizure of power to exercise a new order and subjugation; an attitude sanctioned by division, confusion and diaspora. This historical problem, which in myth has its origin in the Judeo-Christian hermeneutic, explains in the same way many other historical phenomena such as translation, an example of a tool of homogenization, of restitution of unity and penultimate of the exegeses of myth. Starting from the ideas of conquest, punishment, difference and dispersion as primordial meanings, the meaning of Babel has been expanding through the different historical phases until reaching our contemporaneity. This multiplication of meanings begins to become visible in parallel to the disintegration of the medieval theological world that had sustained its representation and meaning until the sixteenth century to become a pictorial and literary object, transforming the tower of Genesis into a civil image, a permeable and undefined symbol of multiple identities.