This narrative wraps up Genesis’ account of prehistory: sin has reached its widest limit with a united attempt on mankind’s part to reenter God’s presence by storm, to establish the glory of man through ingenious use of technology. The attempt to gain fame and a lasting center for human society that define its relationship with God on its own terms not only fails but is woefully inadequate. Man’s “massive” tower is so small that God must come down even to see it, and man’s attempt to entrench himself ends with his being not only scattered physically but divided in his speech, so that humanity can never again work together on such an ambitious project, a judgment whose bitter fruits reach down to the present day. United humanity gave its best effort to finding its own way back to God but failed. What hope is there now for a divided world desperately seeking God in all the wrong ways and places? Why would any individual think that he could now reach God through his own insight and wisdom? If there is to be hope for a new relationship between God and Noah’s offspring, it will come not through human initiative’s stretching upward but by God’s coming down to meet us where we are.
This hope of a God-given pathway of salvation is the unfolding message of the rest of the Scriptures. It begins in Genesis 12, with God’s coming down and calling Abram—who originally is living not very far from Babylon—and promising to give him a great name and make him a great nation, through whom blessing will come to all the scattered nations of the earth (Gen. 12:1–3). God’s answer to a scattered and divided world is to raise up a united people, a worshiping community of nations (Hb. qehal ʿammim; 28:3), bound together in their covenant commitment to God and their mutual calling to be a blessing to the world.
The staircase to heaven that God shows Jacob at Bethel (Gen. 28:12) is his answer to the confusion and chaos of Babel, a new way of access to God that finds its fulfillment in Christ (John 1:51). In Christ God will reveal himself to men and women from many nations, giving them new life in him and calling them into his kingdom. The day of Pentecost marks the beginning of this work of undoing the effects of Babel, as people from all over the diaspora each hear the gospel in their own tongue (Acts 2:7–11). The rest of the book of Acts maps out the spread of the gospel to the “end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). But the ultimate fulfillment of the promise is found in the multitude from every tribe and language and people and nation who together will serve God forever in a renewed and restored earth (Rev. 5:9, 10), while Babylon will be cast down and destroyed forever (Rev. 18:2–3; 21–22).Genesis 11:1–9
Babel sounds like the Hebrew for confused
11:1–4 The narrative does not begin by identifying the precise location of these events—that information is held back to the end of the story. Nor is a precise date given. Rather, as in Genesis 6:1, a general circumstance forms the introduction: the earth has a single language and vocabulary (“the same words”; Gen. 11:1), and indeed at this point humans are still traveling together as a single group.
As they journey, humanity moves eastward, which is not a positive direction of travel in Genesis. The garden of Eden itself is “in the east” (2:8). Yet when the man and woman are driven from the presence of the Lord, they settle in a land on the east side of the garden (3:24). When Cain is sent to wander, he settles in the land of Nod, a land “east of Eden” (4:16). Similarly, when Lot separates from Abraham in chapter 13 and follows his eyes into a land “like the garden of the Lord,” the place where he heads is “east” (Hb. miqqedem) from the Promised Land (13:11). As John Sailhamer puts it, “In the Genesis narratives, when people go ‘east’ they leave the land of blessing (Eden and the Promised Land) and go to a land where their greatest hopes will turn to ruin (Babylon and Sodom).”
Moreover, the wanderers end up settling on a plain (biqʿah) in Shinar, or Babylonia (Gen. 11:2; cf. Dan. 1:2). It is not coincidental that Nebuchadnezzar will later erect his massive golden statue on a similar plain (biqʿah) in the province of Babylon—the flat land of Babylonia is the archetypal home of idolatry (Zech. 5:5–11), the antithesis of the high mountains where the Lord is to be worshiped (cf. Ezek. 40:2). Mountains in the Bible, as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, symbolize God’s connection with man, which is precisely the rationale driving the building of the Babylonian tower.
There in Shinar mankind works together to harness the latest technological advancements in material science (bricks and pitch) and build himself a city and accompanying tower. The combination of moving eastward and building a city, alongside a fascination with technology, aligns these people with the history of Cain’s line, not Seth’s (Gen. 4:16–22). The communal building of a city is very unusual in the ancient Near East, where the founding of cities and the building of sanctuaries is usually attributed to kings or other powerful individuals. Moreover, in general deities would send instructions to the king to build them a sanctuary, specifying the materials as well as the location. In the case of the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem it is to be made out of naturally occurring (or more precisely God-made) materials such as stone and wood, rather than the products of human hands, such as bricks or bitumen (1 Kings 6:7, 18). It is therefore striking that the inhabitants of Babel feel bold enough to build their own access point to heaven without prior authorization, constructed out of the best bricks they could manufacture (Gen. 11:3).
The clue to the builders’ intentions lies in the name they give to their city: Bab-ilu, which means “The gate of the gods.” They are also open about their purpose for building it, which is to make a name for themselves and not be scattered throughout the earth (v. 4), in contrast to what God had commanded in his earlier blessing (9:1). To achieve these goals they build not only a city but also a “tower,” or ziggurat—a stepped pyramid functioning as an artificial mountain. Since they live in a flat area, there are no naturally occurring mountaintops on which to worship, and so, as with the brick and pitch, they decide to create their own.
What the Babylonians are doing is constructing a counterfeit Eden, the place where God visited with man in the garden. Babylonian technology attempts to imitate Eden by building the tower as a man-made mountain “with its top the heavens” (11:4). It could also be thought of as a convenient staircase for the gods to come down and visit the earth (cf. 28:17). The Babylonians believe that their “gate of God” could bypass the cherubim and the flaming sword preventing humanity’s return to the garden (3:24).
This city with its tower is intended to serve as a center for their society. But it is striking what is not said about the builders of Babel: there is no mention of calling on the name of the Lord, as the Sethites did (4:26). There is no attempt to offer up acceptable sacrifices, as Abel did (4:4). The builders of Babylon do not want to be dependent upon God. Rather, they want to return to Eden through their own efforts and technological innovations, bypassing God’s route.
11:5–9 If the goal of the builders of Babel is to make their own way back to God, they fail miserably. They plan a tower so big that it will reach heaven—but the result is so small that God must come down to see it (v. 5). They vastly overestimate their own resources and vastly underestimate the scale of the task they have set for themselves. The builders of Babel said, “Come, let us make bricks . . . come, let us build” (vv. 3–4), but God’s “Come” is the decisive word. God simply says “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language” (v. 7), and it happens. Just as God had once said, “Let us make man in our image” (1:26), and out of the dust sprang Adam, so also here God simply speaks the word and judgment falls.
God is not threatened or troubled by these human attempts to storm his residence; he is more amused at the impertinence of such a foolish enterprise (cf. Ps. 2:4). There is more than a hint of sarcasm in God’s “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen. 11:6), since they have clearly failed to achieve their more limited goals. They are, after all, merely bene-haʾadam, the children of Adam (v. 5), mortal ones, in contrast to the all-powerful deity. Man may propose, but ultimately only God disposes—and here he will dispose of even a potential threat by scattering man and dividing his languages.
The centrality of God in the passage is highlighted by its chiastic structure, which focuses on verse 5 as the key turning point in the passage:
(A) “the whole world had one language” (v. 1)
(B) “there” (v. 2)
(C) “each other” (v. 3)
(D) “come, let us make bricks” (v. 3)
(E) “come, let us build ourselves” (v. 4)
(F) “a city, with a tower” (v. 4)
(G) “the Lord came down” (v. 5)
(F') “the city and the tower” (v. 5)
(E') “that the men were building” (v. 5)
(D') “come, let us . . . confuse” (v. 7)
(C') “each other” (v. 7)
(B') “from there” (v. 8)
(A') “the language of the whole world” (v. 9)
When God comes down to investigate and to judge, everything changes. The builders of Babel built their city “lest [they] be dispersed” (v. 4); God scatters them anyway (v. 8). They sought to make a name for themselves, finding security and significance through the work of their hands (v. 4); God makes their name a laughingstock. He sees to it that they will be remembered down through history not for what they achieve but for what they fail to do. Finally, what they seek to build is what Babel means: the gate of God. What they actually built is what Babel sounds like: balal, which literally means “confusion” or, as we might render it in English, “Blah, blah, blah.” Finally, we should not miss the polemic against Babylonian ideology here: the Babylonians proclaimed that their city was as old as the earth itself, having been established by the gods and then rebuilt after their flood. The biblical text, however, affirms Babylon as a relatively latecomer to the world, established by mere mortals (bene-haʾadam; 11:5), who fail utterly in their designs.