We come to the Tower of Babel and discover the hubris of humanity and God’s dividing up and separating the peoples of the earth. In my last issue, I described how some scholars think this section of Genesis should have come before the genealogies and geographies of Genesis 10.
There are also hints about the Tower of Babel in the genealogies toward the end. Peleg was so named because of the separation, should we say dispersion, of the peoples of the earth (Genesis 10:25). But in another sense, the genealogies refer to the nations that were made after the Tower of Babel incident.
I think there’s a reason Moses put the table of nations first and then the Tower of Babel. The hints in genealogies foreshadow this incident we will discuss. The genealogies of Noah’s three sons have to come before the Tower of Babel because that’s when they were alive and repopulated the earth after the Flood.
The People Gather to Build the Tower of Babel
Genesis 11:1-4: Now the earth had one language and used the same words. And they traveled east and they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they settled there. And they said to their companions, “Come! Let us make bricks and dry them completely in the fire,” and they used sunbaked bricks for stone and they used bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come! Let us build for ourselves a city and a tower, and its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves so we don’t spread out over all the face of the earth.”
People began to gather in one place and had the idea of building the Tower of Babel. There’s a sharp contrast from the genealogies and table of nations showing that people develop their own language. They dispersed to different parts of the earth.
The biblical account of the Tower of Babel explains how nations and languages came upon the earth. Genesis 11:1 begins by telling us that there was one language on the earth and everyone could speak with the same words and understand each other. The question is what people will do with such unity.
We know from Ham’s genealogy that this was the kingdom and territory of Nimrod (Genesis 10:9-10). But we cannot know for sure if he is behind the building of the Tower of Babel. He was also responsible for building Nineveh in Assyria.
Genesis 11:2 tells us the building of the Tower of Babel happened in Nimrod’s land. It mentions the same geographical area of Nimrod’s kingdom. At first, the people do what they’re supposed to do. They dispersed toward the east. But then they decide to go against God’s wishes.
I say that because from the beginning, God told Adam and Eve to multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28). After the Flood, God reaffirmed His command to multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 9:7). This was always God’s goal. He made a lot of earth for humans to explore and settle.
But the people after moving east settled together instead of continuing to fan out over the earth. Instead, they all settled in one place. Once the people settle on that plain, they decide to build a city, a tower that rises to heaven.
Most scholars recognize this tower to not be a straight up and down tower like we build today with our skyscrapers but a ziggurat. This was a structure common to the Mesopotamians. It consisted of fired brick and rose to about 70 feet tall with a shrine at the top.
Ziggurats were away for the Mesopotamians to get closer to the gods. They were religious structures that operated on the idea that the gods being high in the sky. Because there were no mountains or heals in the Mesopotamian plain, the Mesopotamians built these huge structures to get closer to the gods.
They made the bricks and baked them in fire. They were sun-dried bricks as well. This makes for an extremely hard brick, durable for building higher structures. They use the bricks for stone and bitumen like mortar. Bitumen is like a tar, asphalt in its natural state.
You can see the motives of the people in the words he speak to one another. In Genesis 11:4, they use the bricks to build a city and tower that will rise into the sky. In what they say, they show that they have no intention of spreading out over the earth and filling it.
There is nothing inherently evil about building a city or a tower. What is evil is their motive and intention to not spread out on the earth. Instead, they want to make a name for themselves. None of this in their motives is right before God.
The Lord’s Reaction to the Tower of Babel
Genesis 11:5-9: Now the Lord went down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they began to do, and now nothing of all that they plan to do will be impossible for after the them. Come! Let Us go down and confuse their language so that one person cannot hear the language of his neighbor. So the Lord spread them out away from there over the face of all the earth and they stopped building the city. Therefore, the city’s name was called Babel because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord spread them out on the face of all the earth.
Yahweh reacts to the building of the Tower of Babel and the motives of the people for building the city. The city of Babel, later known as Babylon, is fabled throughout the Bible as a wicked city. We can see that its origins are no different.
The Lord comes down from heaven to examine the city and the Tower of Babel. Perhaps it became of interest to Him because the people were not spreading out on the earth. Maybe the Lord knew the intentions of the hearts of these people. For whatever reason, the Lord comes down and sees what they have done.
I find what the Lord says about the building endeavors of the people incredibly interesting. He does not say that their efforts will come to nothing. In fact, He says quite the opposite. He comments on the unity of the people, that they are one, and that they have one language. This allows them to communicate with one another and they do not have any barriers to the possibilities of their ability.
This is what they began to do. They began to make a name for themselves, to build a structure that would ascend into the heavens. The heavens are the realm of God and flying creatures. But the people attempt to come up to where God dwells. Hubris, arrogance, and pride are the reason.
They do not say they want to know God or to come see Him. Their goal is to not obey God, to spread out over the earth. They want to be in the place where God dwells. It is the repeat of the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve wanted to make their own decisions and be God’s over themselves.
What the Lord says next makes my ears perk up. He does not say it’s no big deal. He does not sit back and relax. He comes down to see what the people have done and reacts. The Lord of all heaven and earth says, “And now nothing of all that they plan to do will be impossible for them.”
This is the Creator of the universe who says that free will coupled with unity makes things impossible even for people. The word for “be impossible” and the word for “propose, plan to do.” Both these verbs or their ideas occur in one other place, Job 42:2.
In Job, the roles are reversed. Job is saying that nothing God does can be stopped by humanity. In Genesis 11, God is saying that nothing humans propose to do with such unity can be stopped. It’s an incredible statement about unity and the possibilities when humans are unified.
In one sense, even God says humans who are unified in a project, even though it is evil, will succeed. He basically says that building a tower to ascend to the same place the gods dwell is just the beginning of the evil purposes humans will have and evil things they will do.
It’s almost like God is saying that they are on their way to making the world the way it was before the Flood were wickedness and all kinds of evil were rampant. So God purposes to spoil their efforts. We must understand that God was not afraid they would come up to His dwelling.
God dwells in the heavens much higher than the sky or even in the universe. He was more concerned that this would lead to an even more wicked humanity and earth. In Genesis 11:5, even though the people build this tower into the heavens, God still has to come down” to the earth to see it.
We see once again that when God speaks, he uses the plural pronoun “Us.” We saw this in Genesis 1:26 when God said, “Let Us make humanity in Our own image.” These either refer to the royal plural of majesty, God speaking among the Trinity, or God speaking to the divine council and broadcasting what He is about to do.
I think here I would lean on God speaking to members in the Trinity because that is the best idea that fits this context. What God does may be strange to us. You and I would think, “Knock down the tower and they would have to start all over again.”
While this may be true, it does not solve the root issue. The people would still be united by language. They would still be able to make another tower. The Tower of Babel would only be the beginning of what people would do if they had complete unity.
God does not put a Band-Aid on the problem. He deals with it decisively by confusing the languages. I have translated literally that one person will not “hear” the language of his neighbor. The idea here is that they can hear one another but not understand what they are hearing.
There’s only one letter difference in Hebrew between “Babel” and “confuse.” God confuses or confounds the people at Babel by making their language sound like babel to the other person. This is brilliant! Without free communication between the people, they cannot do anything together.
Have you ever tried to talk to someone who has a different language than you but you do not know their language? It is so hard! You make gestures and try to point to things and say your word for that thing. They look at it and say there were for that thing. Can you imagine how long it would take the people to figure out how to finish the city or the Tower of Babel?
That’s just for concrete objects. Try explaining “love” to someone in a different language. There is no way to explain it with a picture. It is an abstract word for an emotion. The people would never be able to figure out how to communicate with one another.
At least for the immediate future, the people are stuck finding other people who can speak their language, people they can understand, and moving into a different place in the earth with those people to start a civiliz that tried explaining ation.
That’s exactly what God wants to do. When the evil motivations and intentions of the heart would use unity to do evil things, God put a stop to it. In the immediate future, God confounds their language, which leads to them stopping building of the city because they cannot communicate.
People spread out from Babel and moved to other lands with other people who have the same language. We see this idea of the same languages moving together in the table of nations in Genesis 10. Each clan in each land has its own language.
The Lord accomplishes His purposes no matter how much we try to stand in the way. He will do as He has purposed from the beginning. God wanted the people to spread out, enjoy His creation in the earth, and He gave them plenty of room to do it.
When the people refuse to do what God wishes, gather instead of spreading out, and building a city and the Tower of Babel to thwart His divinity and make a name for themselves, God deals with them definitively.
Lessons from the Tower of Babel
The first lesson we can learn from the Tower of Babel is that we must have pure motives and intentions as we serve the Lord. He can give us unity, but it is misused if we do not first have a heart that is pure before the Lord.
Using unity to be disobedient to the Lord is to incur His judgment in whatever way He wants to keep us from being even more wicked. It all starts with a heart humble before God and obedient. Otherwise, whatever we intend to do with our abilities will be thwarted by God.
Another lesson we can learn from the Tower of Babel is that unity is a very powerful thing. We don’t realize the heights to which we can soar when we are unified. We’re so used to the disunity we see in the world that we don’t understand how much we can do for Jesus if we are unified in the Church.
Unity is something that even God acknowledges as an unstoppable force. But if we use that unity for ill gain, God will not allow it to succeed. In the same way, when we use our unity to preach the gospel, heal the sick, and bring others to Jesus, nothing in this world can stop us.
A third lesson from the Tower of Babel is that pride, hubris, and arrogance may get a somewhere in the short-term, but in the long-term, our behaviors and actions will amount to nothing. God does not stand for pride. He will oppose the proud but give grace to the humble (James 4:6).
We cannot take God’s place. It is His place alone to have. I would not want to be God because I would be a worse god then He is. It is not my place because I am not Him. I would have no idea what to do and how to act. It is not my place, and I do not want it. I prefer His judgments, grace, mercy, and favor–even though I don’t deserve any of it.
Finally, as we have looked at the Tower of Babel, there is an element of God confusing language to keep humanity from becoming the very worst of His creation. Many Pentecostals believe that on the Day of Pentecost, God reversed this confusion of language for the purposes of His Kingdom.
In one sense, I agree with this assessment and see how God used languages to spread the gospel and build His Kingdom beginning on that day when Christian believers’ hearts were set on Him and His ways. At the same time, Scripture doesn’t give us any indication this is the case in Acts 2.
Language is a powerful thing because it can unite us in a common cause. But that cause must be a godly one. The Tower of Babel proves that God will do whatever He must to keep us from having unity at the cost of humility and obedience. Language can “make us a break us.” But with the unity it brings, we can shake this world for Jesus and bring many to Jesus.
Consider the Tower of Babel and its lessons for you. Do you have a humble heart before the Lord, seeking to do His will in all things, and a yielded spirit to His ways and His desires for you? If you do, God will give you that unity and the power that it brings to change the world for His glory.
The Saga Continues…
Can you believe we are almost finished with the first 11 chapters of Genesis? I can hardly believe it myself. In the next issue, we will finish this volume by talking about the genealogies of Shem and Terah. These will lead us into our Volume 4, where we will begin character studies of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
Benesis? I can hardly believe it myself. In the next issue, we will finish this volume by talking about the genealogies of Shem and Terah. These will lead us into our Volume 4, where we will begin character studies of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
