THE STORYTELLER'S BIBLE
Script by Bob Allen
Act I - The Pentateuch, Scene 4

For four readers

Scene 4

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                        3                                                                                              4

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VOICE TWO:             Seba rose early that morning so he could survey the building site before work actually began for the day.  He knew that within the hour the place would be buzzing like a beehive with thousands of slaves hauling bricks and mixing mortar to keep hundreds of masons busy through twelve hours of daylight.

VOICE THREE:          His brother Nimrod would have had men working all though the

night if there had been a way to do it.

VOICE ONE:              The sheer volume of workers involved in the building of the tower was tremendous.  In just twelve months they were up to the seventh level, half-way to the top.  That was what Seba wanted to see—the seventh level.  The Seba layer.  Today they would start on the portion of the tower that would assure his immortality.  Every brick in the entire level would be marked with his name.  And around each name would be the circle of eternity.

VOICE FOUR:            The entire tower would, of course, be named after Nimrod.  Nimrod the mighty hunter.  Nimrod the city-builder.  Nimrod the founder of Ninevah and Babylon.

VOICE ONE:              Only Nimrod had the slave labor available to him, a result of his many wars and conquests as a mighty hunter of men.

VOICE TWO:             Only Nimrod had the resources necessary for such a mega-tower, due to the tax base in his kingdom that stretched through the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley.

VOICE THREE:          Only Nimrod had the vision to unite a large group of people under one government instead of breaking up into the small clans everyone else was forming.

VOICE FOUR:            Only Nimrod had the courage to disobey the command that Great-Grand-father Noah said had come from God: the command to increase and fill the earth. 

VOICE ONE:              Nimrod’s name would be on the tower.  But Seba’s name would be on the seventh layer just as the names of other major contributors decorated the bricks of the first six floors.

VOICE TWO:             He sat down on the upper level of the sixth layer of the tower and watched as a slave set two buckets of his bricks down in front of a mason.  The Seba layer was about to begin.

VOICE THREE:          (CROSS TO # 1 AT CENTER)  Suddenly the mason shouted something at the slave that Seba could not understand.

VOICE ONE:              When the slave yelled back, Seba couldn’t understand him either.

VOICE FOUR:            (CROSS TO # 1 AT CENTER)  Rushing over to them he was astounded to see that the bricks were not Seba bricks.  So he started shouting—but neither of them seemed to understand what he was saying.

(ALL TURN BACKS TO EACH OTHER AND PANTOMIME TALKING)

VOICE ONE:              The shouts soon attracted a crowd, but of the dozen or so men who gathered on top of the half-finished tower not one of them could make heads or tails of what anyone else was saying.

VOICE TWO:             Confusion reigned throughout the morning, and by noon the entire project had ground to a halt.

(READERS # 1, 2 AND 4 TURN AND WALK AWAY FROM # 3)

VOICE THREE:          Nimrod raged and Seba wept, but within days the half-finished city of Babylon with its half-finished tower resembled a ghost town.  Small groups of settlers who could understand each other set off to the north, south, east and west to form their own clans and languages, territories and nations.

VOICE FOUR:            (TO AUDIENCE)  Nimrod said, “Let us make us a name.”

VOICE ONE:              (TO AUDIENCE)  And God said to Abraham, “I will make thy name great.”