The Tower of Babel

Brick by brick, a tower climbs into the sky above a flat plain. Thousands of hands are building it. Everyone speaks the same words, and everyone wants the same thing. “Let us make a name for ourselves.”

After the great flood, Noah’s family grows into many families, and God had told them to fill the earth. At this time, Genesis says, the whole world has one language and a common speech. As people travel, they find a wide plain in the land of Shinar and settle there. Shinar is the old name for the land between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, in what is now Iraq. It is flat, fertile country, with river mud everywhere, and hardly any stone.

The people have an idea. “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them hard.” They use brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they have a bigger idea. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we can make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” So the work begins. Kilns glow day and night. Workers call to one another across the scaffolding. The walls rise. Everyone understands everyone, and it feels as if nothing could ever stop them.

But listen to how Genesis tells what happens next, almost with a smile. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. They were trying to build all the way up to heaven, and God has to come down just to look at it. Then the Lord says, “If as one people speaking one 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 that they will not understand one another.”

Imagine the building site the next morning. A worker calls for more bricks, and the man beside him stares blankly. Someone shouts a warning, and nobody understands it. Plans can’t be shared. Instructions can’t be followed. Voices rise in a dozen different tongues. The building grinds to a halt. And the very thing the builders feared comes true. The Lord scatters them from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stop building the city.

That is why, Genesis says, the city was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. In Hebrew, Babel sounds like balal, the word for confuse. The people wanted to make a great name for themselves. Instead, their city became known for confusion. And here is something worth noticing. Just one chapter later, God speaks to a man named Abram and makes him a promise. “I will make your name great, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” The name the builders tried to grab for themselves, God chooses to give as a gift.

The building details in this story fit ancient Mesopotamia closely. The plain between the rivers had very little good building stone, so people made bricks from mud, and for important buildings they baked them hard in kilns and set them with bitumen, a natural tar that seeps from the ground in that region. Cities there built huge stepped temple towers called ziggurats. The remains of a great ziggurat still stand at Ur in southern Iraq, excavated by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s and 1930s. And Babel is the same Hebrew name the Bible uses for Babylon.

The Tower of Babel. You’ll find it in Genesis chapter 11, verses 1 to 9. The builders wanted to reach heaven and make a name for themselves, and God had to come down just to see their tower. So here’s something to think about. What are you building your life to be known for, and who gets the glory?