The Tower of Babel

The event

"Now the whole earth had one language and the same words." In the region of Shinar, humanity's descendants decided to settle rather than obey God's command to spread out and fill the earth, and they set about building a city and a tower "with its top in the heavens," determined to "make a name" for themselves. It was ambition dressed up as achievement: unity turned toward self-glory instead of God's glory.

God's response was as decisive as it was merciful. Rather than let humanity's combined pride and power run unchecked, He "confused the language of all the earth" so the builders could no longer understand one another, and scattered them across the face of the planet — exactly the outcome they had been trying to avoid. The city was named Babel, a name that plays on the Hebrew word for "confusion," and it would later grow into the great city of Babylon, whose shadow falls across much of the rest of the Old Testament.

Babel is where the scattered peoples of the Table of Nations come from, and not coincidentally, it's the very region God would soon call one man out of: Abram, from Ur of the Chaldeans, not far from Babel itself. Where humanity tried to build its way up to heaven by its own effort and make its own name great, God would instead come down, choose an ordinary man, and promise to make his name great by grace — the pivot point where the story of Genesis turns from the whole human race to one chosen family.

Dating

Traditionally associated with the days of Peleg (c. 2247 BC in Ussher's chronology, sometimes cited as c. 2242 BC in other traditional reckonings); Genesis gives no exact date, and the figure here should be read as an approximate marker within the post-Flood, pre-Abraham era, where chronology is least certain even among Bible-believing scholars. Young-earth and old-earth evangelicals differ on how much real time this era represents, but both read Babel as real history standing behind the real diversity of the world's languages and nations.

Scripture references

• Genesis 11:1-9