Yeah, see this is where the warning lights start to go off as far as I am concerned. I don’t believe we can derive a “spiritual lesson for us” before we identify the original meaning for the original audience. Otherwise we descend into the worst of the medieval spiritualizing exposition, which is nothing more than sheer speculation and guesswork. We decide arbitrarily that anything can mean anything, and just make it all up as we go along.
And this is precisely the kind of problem which arises when we don’t read the text as it read to the original audience. We come along and say “Oh this doesn’t make any literal sense”, because we’re applying our own category of “literal” and we don’t try to understand what it was originally intended to mean. We then think that gives us the right to make something up which is more accessible to us. But that’s not exegesis.
Irrelevant, it doesn’t change the fact that the ziggurats were built specifically to bring the gods down to earth (typically by offering them food to entice them). That is the key issue in this narrative.
Note there that he says the same thing I already said, that other commentators understand the story to be saying " once all people used the same language to worship Enlil, but Enki’s rivalry with Enlil led Enki to confuse the tongues of people".
The idea that “. In the biblical text, diversity of language was necessary as an antidote to human pride” isn’t found anywhere in Genesis 9. Look up that word used for “confused” in Genesis 9 and see how many times you can find it referring to comprehensible languages.