“Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence, turns to two biblical stories in its opening lines: one about the Tower of Babel, the other about the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. The Babel story becomes a warning against technological arrogance; the Nehemiah story is a model of ethical reconstruction and human solidarity. Yet the biblical texts themselves are more complicated than what the encyclical presents.
Before turning to the encyclical’s use of the Bible, however, it is worth pointing out that “Magnifica Humanitas” is not a work of biblical scholarship. Like a sermon, it draws selectively from Scripture, highlighting particular themes rather than cataloging every historical interpretation or scholarly debate. No encyclical could do justice to all the complexities of Genesis 11 or the Book of Nehemiah. The question is not whether Pope Leo’s readings are exhaustive—they are not meant to be—but whether the dimensions of these stories that he chooses to emphasize are the ones most relevant to the political and moral challenges posed by artificial intelligence.
The problem begins with Babel.
The encyclical treats Genesis 11 as a story about humanity forgetting the true source of its power. But in the biblical text, the danger is not that human beings mistakenly think they are powerful. The danger is that they actually are.
“This is one people, with one language for all of them,” God says in Genesis 11:6, “and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing that they propose will now be impossible for them.”
Within the larger arc of Genesis, the story belongs to a recurring pattern in which human capacities are progressively diminished. Just as immortality in Genesis 3 (the story of Adam and Eve) is reserved for the divine realm, so too unified language in Genesis 11 appears as a form of power God does not wish humanity to possess. God scatters humanity and confuses its language not simply to punish pride, but to prevent humans from consolidating too much power.
That insight may be even more relevant to artificial intelligence than the encyclical suggests.
The real danger of uniformity is not merely that communication breaks down. It is that communication becomes totalizing. A world reduced to one language is not simply unified; it is governable. Human beings become easier to coordinate, monitor, predict, manipulate and control when all information flows through the same systems and structures. In this sense, Babel reads less like a warning about the breakdown of communication—what Leo describes as a world in which “languages are confused and people no longer understand each other”—and more of a warning against the concentration of human power into a single technological order. This is indeed the more insidious promise of A.I. that the encyclical rightly recognizes: “the pretense that a single language—even a digital one—can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
The encyclical’s second biblical paradigm, the story of Nehemiah, raises a different but equally difficult set of questions. Leo presents Nehemiah as a figure of communal rebuilding and moral leadership: “He did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition.” Certainly, the biblical text portrays Nehemiah as a rebuilder of Jerusalem after a catastrophe. Yet the Book of Nehemiah also presents a vision of restoration inseparable from concerns about boundaries, purity and social control.
In Nehemiah 13, Nehemiah boasts of violently confronting Judeans who had married non-Judeans: “I beat some of them and pulled out their hair.” His reforms are inseparable from projects of exclusion and purity politics. Despite the encyclical’s characterization of Nehemiah as a prophet of solidarity, the biblical text presents him as an administrator who manages imperial resources, organizes labor, enforces compliance and consolidates authority.
These features do not invalidate Pope Leo’s use of Nehemiah. They do, however, complicate it. In an age when many worry that artificial intelligence will intensify systems of surveillance, bureaucratic management and centralized control, the neglected dimensions of Nehemiah’s story may be as important as the ones the encyclical highlights.
The imagery of rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls, for example, carries political dangers the encyclical does not fully confront. Leo interprets those walls metaphorically as moral safeguards and ethical limits on technological power. But walls divide as well as protect. The same structure that secures a community also determines who belongs outside it. In contemporary political life, images of walls are already saturated with the language of exclusion, securitization and defensive nationalism.
This is no less true of Nehemiah’s story in the Bible. The book’s vision of restoration is inseparable from its emphasis on enforcing borders. Choosing Nehemiah as an uncomplicated paradigm to look to unintentionally evokes the very kind of centralized control the encyclical otherwise warns against. This choice sits uneasily with the vision of shared human flourishing that Leo’s encyclical wishes to promote.
The deeper issue is that the encyclical presents Babel and Nehemiah as moral opposites: arrogant technological unity versus virtuous communal restoration. Leo concludes by calling on Christians to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel.” Yet the biblical traditions themselves resist such neat binaries. Babel is also a story about extraordinary human cooperation and the dangers of concentrated power. Nehemiah is a story of rebuilding, but also of boundary-making, coercion and administrative control.
Recognizing these tensions does not undermine Leo’s concerns about artificial intelligence. On the contrary, it may deepen them. Indeed, the most relevant warning of Babel may not be against pride, but against the fantasy of concentration of human power into a single system. If we seek biblical models for governing new technologies, we should be cautious about celebrating figures whose visions of order depend upon exclusion and centralized authority.
Scripture offers politically and ethically rich, if often ambivalent, resources for thinking about A.I. Recovering those neglected dimensions may help us confront not only the moral dangers of artificial intelligence but also the political forms of power it makes possible.
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Cathleen Chopra-McGowan is an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible at Santa Clara University.
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