Tag Archives: genesis

The builders of Babel

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OK, I’ve taught on Genesis 11 several times over the last few years. Good lessons. Interesting stuff. So imagine my surprise last night when I’m teaching and realize that I’ve missed a very basic point every time I’ve taught it.
You remember the story. We call it “The Tower of Babel.” We call it wrong. Here it is:
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:1-9)
Their project wasn’t a tower. It was a city. With a tower. The tower probably refers to a ziggurat, a type of tower that was common in that area at that time. I know, people have misunderstood the language of the KJV which read “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven,” and the story was twisted into a tale of people who were trying to build a staircase to heaven. But these people were building a city, a city with a tower. And they were doing it for the one of the reasons we discussed yesterday: they wanted to be remembered. They wanted to “make a name” for themselves. It was all about human pride, the quest for fame. It was about man depending on man, rather than man setting out to repopulate the earth, trusting on God to protect them, trusting that God would “make their name great,” as he did with Abraham.
It was the building of a city, a sinful act on this occasion.

Where did cities come from?

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Have you ever thought about that? God didn’t tell people to build cities. Where did they come from?
“Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.” (Genesis 4:17) [No, I don’t want to get into the question of where Cain’s wife came from; we’re talking about cities. ;-)]
This verse sets us up for a lot of what we see in Genesis. It’s not God’s people that build cities, it’s those that are living away from God. One of the purposes of building a city was the idea of leaving a legacy. In Argentina, there is a saying that talks about how a man can leave a legacy: “Have a son, write a book, plant a tree.” In the ancient world, they might have inserted “Found a city.” Like Cain, however, many founders of cities named them after someone else, so in a way they served as a monument to another person.
Another clue about ancient cities is in the previous verse: “So Cain went out from the LORD’S presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16) As I said, it wasn’t Gods people who built cities. Cain has been talking with God about his fear that someone will kill him to avenge Abel’s death. Living away from the presence of God, he feels the need for protection. Remember that ancient cities were typically walled for defense purposes. They were built to allow men to band together for mutual defense. Cities were about men depending on men instead of depending on God.
The building of cities reflects basic human tendencies: the desire to be remembered and the inclination to seek protection in other men rather than in God.