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.