By The Waters Of Babylon Sparknotes

“By the Waters of Babylon” Paper In the short story, “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet, the setting is post-apocalyptic and is about what Benet thought the world would be after the events of WWII. In this story, the world was destroyed and people forgot the important knowledge that was known during that time period. The simple knowledge they know now is how to hunt, and that there is a place where the gods live. When the main character, John, went to the Place of the Gods, which was forbidden, he discovered the truth of what happened during the Great Burning. John’s journey shows that the people of the village and the priests have knowledge, but do not have the truth. Examples of this is that the people did not know the gods

When John goes on his journey to the Place of the Gods, he discovers that Gods destroyed their world by using weapons that his people have never seen before. In his vision, he saw how they used the atomic weapons and tried to kill one another. “I have seen men die. But this was not like that. When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned.”(Benet, Page 9) These major details that were left out of what actually happened during the Great Burning was vital information to John and the people in his village. This quote also shows how the knowledge that the people had received over the years was not the entire truth of what happened during the Great

In the passage John slept in one of the buildings and woke up in the morning and discovered the body of a god in a room he has not been in. “...for then I knew he was a man--I knew then that they had been men, neither gods nor demons. It is a great knowledge, hard to tell and believe. They were men--they went a dark road, but they were men.”(Benet, Page 9) This quote shows how the people of his village did not know the gods were men just like them. When he figured this out he was dumbstruck by the fact that this was great knowledge and went back home to tell his father immediately of the knowledge he had learned. When he told his father the truth that the gods were people, his father urged him not to tell the people all of the knowledge at one time, but little by little. “Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. It was not idly that our fathers forbade the Dead Places.”(Benet, Page 9) From this quote you can see how the developing theme that the People of the Hills have knowledge but not the truth is played out through the