ABSTRACT
Noah’s Ark, an artefact that redeems the world, and the Tower of Babel, one that leads the world to chaos and catastrophe, give us two images that frame every serious conversation about technology even in the 21st century. The Torah’s warnings against Babel-style hubris are real and urgent today, especially with the advent of AI, but they are warnings about how and why we use our inventions, not about the tools themselves. Further, though there’s plenty of reason to worry about the threats of new technology, the arc of our inventions, I will argue, is not merely capable, like Noah’s ark, of navigating toward redemption, it does in fact. The creative intelligence God implanted in humanity has done what it was commissioned to do, on balance, even through the threats of nuclear annihilation and other catastrophes.
The Ark, the Tower and Double Rainbows
Every great technological revolution unleashes wild claims, fears and aspirations. The arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the atomic bomb, and the internet provoked warring choruses of utopians and Luddites, prophets of salvation and prophets of doom. Even writing, that earliest communications tech, worried Socrates that writing would shrivel memory, fill us with information rather than wisdom, and unleash a promiscuous chaos of messages broadcast without responsibility.
The rise of AI is reprising this old drama. As always, it seems the noise has never been louder, the stakes higher, the transformational promise brighter nor the looming disaster more apocalyptic. Whole industries, whole professions, geopolitical balances of power, even the existence of humanity itself seem to hang in the balance.
The Hebrew Bible juxtaposes two archetypal images that frame this argument and the Jewish tradition tells us how to think about it. The first is Noah’s Ark. God tells Noah why he has to build it. People have corrupted the world and He is “bringing the flood, water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which there is the spirit of life.” The ark will be a life preserver for a chosen few, including Noah’s family. Then He gives Noah the first technical document, the specs for the enormous floating box that will ferry the remnant of the biome, including a few humans, across the impending Flood to start the world all over again.
The creative intelligence God implanted in humanity has done what it was commissioned to do, on balance, even through the threats of nuclear annihilation and other catastrophes.
The same weekly reading from the Torah then describes the Tower of Babel, humanity’s most audacious engineering project undertaken generations after Noah. United by a common tongue, under the mighty and willful Nimrod, men gather to build their tower in an unparalleled moment of unanimity. They say, “let us make bricks” and “let us burn them well,” exulting in their superior technology As R. Bachya ben Asher said, “They were very advanced in matters of philosophy and even technology.” They are carried away by their own science and technique, for kiln-fired bricks, whose durability, hardness and regularity will replace natural stone, a divine creation. They challenged and sought to replace Him, thinking them His equal: “Come, let us make a name for ourselves.” Ramban suggests that that the builders were after the Tetragrammaton — the four-letter name of God associated with Creation itself — hoping to dominate the cosmos with their own grandiose engineering. The tower is not merely tall enough to storm Heaven, it is a declaration that human creativity will supplant Heaven. The Greeks called it hubris, from the word “hyper” – to go beyond.
And though the result of their collaboration and unprecedented innovation is darned impressive, the building collapses not from structural failure but from spiritual poverty. The people are scattered and struck with a sudden cacophony of languages that prevents them from ever achieving universal collaboration again.
To put it another way, the Noah portion of the Torah contains not one but two floods. The first, more famous, is physical: the flood of water washes away corrupted flesh. The second flood, separated from the first by only a few generations, is the flood of Babel, a disaster that strikes at the essence of being human, our abilities to communicate, collaborate and co-create. God shatters the single tongue of humanity into mutual incomprehension, punishing us for misusing exactly His most Divine gifts to our species.
The contrast between the Ark and the Tower is therefore sharper and stranger than it first appears. After the Flood, God sets a rainbow in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world again. But as the sixteenth century Italian sage Sforno observed, the rainbow is the rarer, stranger double rainbow, whose second arc inverts the colors of the first. Sforno said it was both a promise but also a warning: the double rainbow reminds people that calamities looms if they become inverted again and stray.
Together, the Ark and the Tower give us two images that frame every serious conversation about technology that has followed. although the tension is acute and the outcome is still in doubt. In this essay, I argue that this tension does not leave us suspended in permanent ambiguity. The arc of technology is not merely capable of bending toward redemption, it does in fact. The Torah’s warnings against Babel-style hubris are real and urgent today, but they are warnings about how and why we use our inventions, not about the tools themselves. The creative intelligence God implanted in humanity has done what it was commissioned to do, on balance: it has preserved life and moved the world, yes through threats of nuclear annihilation and catastrophe, haltingly, with every great technology offering the potential for great evil, but unmistakably toward fulfilling the divine promise of redemption.
Torah and Tech
The Hebrew Bible is obsessed with how things are made. It is a curious and underappreciated fact that the Torah is saturated with technology. For instance,
Abraham’s Wells: Abraham dug his wells not only for himself but for travelers, for neighbors, for the animals of passing caravans. It’s technological, albeit primitive, altruism. The Midrash imagines him keeping open house at the crossroads, feeding and watering all comers as an act of chesed, loving-kindness. The well is the infrastructure of generosity, a form of sanctity. The kabbalists say that the patriarchs themselves served as channels (or we might say, wells) from which divine abundance flowed into the world.
Moses’ Basket: is Infant Moses’ basket is a second ark. The Hebrew is the same as for Noah’s grand vessel: tevah. Yocheved’s construction is also, like Noah’s, redemptive: it rescues Moses from Pharaoh’s infanticide. He survives to deliver the Hebrews out of slavery, bring down the Torah, and forge the nation of Israel.
The Mishkan: Five full chapters describe God’s instructions for the mishkan’s construction; another five describe its execution. No other narrative in the Torah receives this proportion of detailed technical attention, not the plagues and the Exodus, not the revelation at Sinai, not the even creation of the world itself. The mishkan is a masterpiece of integrated design. Its structure combines fine carpentry (acacia wood), metallurgy (gold, silver, bronze worked with extraordinary precision), textile art (spun linen, embroidered tapestries of blue, purple, and crimson), leather-working, and the preparation of aromatic compounds and anointing oils.
Further, the mishkan startup like the Tower of Babel is also a product of universal collaboration. All those Israelites “whose heart moved them,” were invited to bring materials, and the response was so overwhelming that Moses eventually had to stop the donations (Exodus 36:6). But its purpose couldn’t provide a starker contrast to the tower. It’s a portal to another dimension, a technology built by willing generosity, designed to bring the divine Presence to Earth, to allow God to “dwell among them” wherever they wandered. When it is finally beta tested (turned on) by Moses and Aaron, and in an unsanctioned way by Aaron’s sons, it summons divine fire. The machine works. The interface between heaven and earth is live.
The Holy Ark: The other kind of ark designed to hold Moses’ two tablets, the aron in the innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies, is a rectangular chest of acacia wood overlaid inside and out with pure gold, topped with two winged cherubs. It is an artifact of such refined craftsmanship that God appoints specific artisans, Bezalel and Oholiab, describes them as filled with”the spirit of God,” and with three other qualities— wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, chokhmah, binah, and da’at, ChaBaD — distinct kinds of divine intelligence that God Himself used in fashioning the world and infused into humans.
The Roof Parapet: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet (ma’akeh) for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt upon your house if anyone falls from it.” (Deut 22:8). Of all the Torah’s technological descriptions, this is perhaps the most deceptively simple yet most philosophically rich. In this short verse, the Torah establishes what is, in effect, the first recorded building code in Western history — and one whose rationale is moral, what we now call design ethics: the creator of a technology bears moral responsibility for the foreseeable harms that technology enables.
The commandment has been generalized by the rabbis into a broad obligation to eliminate hazards from one’s domain, becoming in Talmudic interpretation the seed of an entire jurisprudence of safety engineering, encompassing wells, unstable walls, dangerous animals, and any structure or artifact that poses a foreseeable risk.
In our age of artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, autonomous vehicles and genetic engineering, the commandment to build a parapet on your roof speaks across the three millenia with startling poignance. It tells us that technology carries with it the obligation of anticipatory safety. The engineer is not absolved of responsibility for possible harm by the difficulty of predicting its uses, or the genuine benefits the technology also provides. To build is to bear responsibility.
How you deploy the technology, what it is for, what you intend to do with it, who or what it glorifies, remain essential. The same internet that enables a protester to tweet just before being gunned down on the streets of Iran enables a demagogue to spread hate and lies instantaneously and globally. The same AI that accelerates medical research and mathematics can create all sorts of yet untold mischief. [Insert your favorite apocalyptic scenario here.] Policy has not yet, and is not likely to, specify the parapets of regulation, ethical design, and moral accountability effectively, but like nuclear energy, everyone tacitly understands them: identify possible harms and mitigate them. Without governance are we supposed to remain in constant tension between the Ark and the Tower, in suspense between hope and fear, redemption and doom?
Policy has not yet, and is not likely to, specify the parapets of regulation, ethical design, and moral accountability effectively, but like nuclear energy, everyone tacitly understands them: identify possible harms and mitigate them
In his landmark 1965 essay The Lonely Man of Faith, Joseph B. Soloveitchik identified two Adams embedded in the dual creation narratives of Genesis. Adam I, fashioned in the divine image of Genesis 1, is homo faber — “maker man” — mandated to “fill the earth and subdue it.” He strives to enhance his dignity through reason, technology, and the conquest of the natural world through an ethic of what Soloveitchik called “triumphant achievement.” Adam II, the solitary figure of Genesis 2, seeks communion with God and with other souls. Crucially, the Rav insists that both Adams are divinely commissioned. The drive to build, to engineer, to dominate the environment through intelligence and skill and imitate God the Creator. God, in Soloveitchik’s reading, is among other things, the First Craftsman, the First Architect (oman) the First Engineer.
Further, technology creates an idolatrous delusion. Because it extends human power and simulates nature so well, it is intrinsically dispiriting. The builders of Babel were punished not for their ambition but for their particular theological error: they were convinced that sufficiently advanced technology renders the metaphysical dimension of our cosmos not only obsolete or irrelevant but disproves it! When human beings imagine that their hyper-sophisticated bricks — whether fired in a Mesopotamian kiln or trained on a trillion tokens of human text — show that the cosmos is not really animated by a transcendent spirit; that there is no transcendence needed, as if the universe was Created only by stuff, coincidences and mathematics, the second rainbow appears on the horizon, a warning against forsaking, discounting or ignoring the illuminating spirit behind
The act of Creation itself is structured as a series of deliberate, purposive, God-executed constructions: God separates light from darkness, waters from dry land, plants and animals and finally humans. The universe is not a spontaneous emanation but a designed artifact, shaped by intention and evaluated by quality. When human beings are given the mandate to “fill the earth and subdue it” we are being handed the commission to participate in that work of bringing order, and divinity to inchoate stuff. Technological progress is intrinsic to the very purpose of Creation. We are not merely permitted to innovate but mandated. The moral imperative to build parapets, Arks not Towers, is not just there to chide us to play nicely, to be civilized and kind and thoughtful, but because proper human behavior is continuous with the divine structure of the universe itself which we are to bring forward.
The Redemptive Arc of Technology
So the Torah offers neither a blanket endorsement nor a blanket condemnation of technology It warns us against a specific kind of technology that seeks to replace the divine structure of the universe with a human one.
And yet, the arc of technology, considered honestly across the full sweep of human history, does bend toward. It bends toward redemption not catastrophe. Despite every doomsday prediction, we’re still here. Progress is not smooth, not without terrible detours and the genuine possibility of new and more devastating life-ending hazards. But the direction is unmistakable. And it proceeds on the vector upwards.
Consider what technology has actually done. It has extended human life and reduced infant mortality to fractions of what they once were. It has fed billions who would otherwise have starved.
Jeremiah heard God promise that the day would come when “no longer shall each man teach his neighbor… for they shall all know Me, from the least to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:34). Isaiah saw a world in which ‘the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isaiah 11:9). Maimonides codified both visions into a prediction: in the messianic era, “the sole occupation of the entire world will be to know God.” The Torah’s wisdom will be not just the province of a learned elite in yeshivahs and kollels but available to every human being on earth simultaneously, crossing every barrier of language, geography, and social circumstance.
For most of human history, this prophecy seemed wildly farfetched. The Torah was written on scrolls that took years to copy. Books were luxury goods. Literacy itself was restricted to small minorities. The idea that everyone in the world might together simultaneously read the living text was a messianic fantasy, the kind of thing Maimonides said to gesture at how radically transformed the redeemed world would be from the fallen one.
And then the internet arrived.
It has given voice to the voiceless, connected the scattered, and enabled the marginalized individual to speak to the whole world. It has ameliorated physical suffering, cured plagues, made childbirth routine and survivable, reduced starvation in the last century to 2% of what it was in the twenty centuries before. It has democratized knowledge in ways no previous civilization could have imagined. A child today with a telephone holds more retrievable knowledge than library of Alexandria, the accumulated scholarship of every civilization simultaneously, in her own language, for free. It has, with increasing power, enabled human beings to access each other’s immediate subjectivities: to instantaneously read the words, hear the voices, see the faces, and read the intimate expressions of people separated by oceans and languages.
And, to the point of Jewish prophecy, every human being on earth with a phone — which is to say, the vast majority of humanity — can open Sefaria and read the Torah in forty languages, with Rashi and Ramban and the Talmud cross-referenced and searchable, for free, at any hour of the day or night. A student in the jungles of Brazil can study the same daf as a student in Jerusalem and they can discuss it in real time.
Technology can go beyond the dispiriting mechanics of reducing everything to processes and stuff and self-glorification. Through our tech, humans can mirror the transcendental nature of nature itself. Physics and metaphysics together suffuse the cosmos with indestructibile spectral radiance as Sforno’s first rainbow promises. But the second rainbow tells us that nature will fully yield its treasures to our ambitions only when we acknowledge that the world is continuously vitalized by divine attention.
The Torah commissioned us, from the very first chapter, to be builders. And the evidence of the millennia is that we have built well more often than we have built badly, that the tools of each generation have on balance extended human dignity further than they have contracted it, that the arc of human creativity — fearful, fitful, prone to catastrophic error — nonetheless trends, as Isaiah said it would, toward redemption.
April 20, 2026
*AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay is based on a prior essay, found here The Two Floods, Double Rainbows, and the Cosmic Limitations of Engineering (2019). This version was given a massive assist by AI – Claude and Genesis – on research and occasional phraseology, though I spent more time rewriting their verbosity, overheated bad writing, mistakes and confabulations as benefiting from their work.
