From Bethel to Pentecost: The Tower of the Tarot deck as the Tower of Babel

Images of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9) in illustrated Christian manuscripts are suggestively similar to representations on the Tower card in many versions of the Tarot deck; both genres show the Tower being destroyed from above, with oversized persons falling head-first from it. In terms of connections between heaven and earth, the antithetical relationship between God’s holy stairway at Bethel – the “House of God” (Gen 28:10-19) – and mankind’s cursed simulacrum at Babel (Gen 11:4-5) could justify early identifications of the Tower card as the “House of the Devil” or “House of the Damned.” The Tower’s builders were punished for their hubris by having their single language split into the different tongues of the world. The New Testament parallel to this linguistic division – which befell Jesus’s apostles at Pentecost – was characterised by tongues of flame descending from heaven (Acts 2:3-4), so it would be natural to apply the same visual cipher to the event at Babel. Such celestial fire would readily have been integrated with the existing iconography of the Tower being destroyed from above, whereupon it could easily have become “normalised” as a conventional lightning bolt

Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: Ælfric and Bible Translation

The Old English homilist Ælfric is well known for his reluctance to translate the Bible and other patristic works into the vernacular; nonetheless, his corpus includes a large number of such translations. This paradox is partly resolved through an examination of Ælfric's perspective on the biblical narratives of the Tower of Babel, Christ's sending out of the disciples, and Pentecost. For Ælfric, the linguistic diversity of the Tower of Babel creates problems for translating the very sensitive texts of the Bible from one language into another, yet the narratives of Christ's sending out of the disciples and of Pentecost not only provide biblical sanction for translation but stress the necessity of translation in the evangelization process

Software Sustainability: The Modern Tower of Babel

The development of sustainable software has been identified as one of the key challenges in the field of computational science and engineering. However, there is currently no agreed definition of the concept. Current definitions range from a composite, non-functional requirement to simply an emergent property. This lack of clarity leads to confusion, and potentially to ineffective and inefficient efforts to develop sustainable software systems. The aim of this paper is to explore the emerging definitions of software sustainability from the field of software engineering in order to contribute to the question, what is software sustainability? The preliminary analysis suggests that the concept of software sustainability is complex and multifaceted with any consensus towards a shared definition within the field of software engineering yet to be achieved