So you know when you're listening to somebody talk and you just don't understand what they're saying, you say, oh, they're just babbling. They're babbling. Yeah, that's a funny word. Where does that come from?
Well, it comes from the Bible. No, really? From the passage we're going to look at today in Genesis. Babbling comes from the tower of Babel. More on that today.
I'm more than ink.
Well, this is Jim. And this is Dorothy. And this is More Than Ink, where we read the Bible together and we are surprised at what's around every bend. We've read Genesis so many times over the course of our lifetime, and we're still finding surprises. Yeah, it really is.
And there is a kind of a pivot point in all of Genesis, and that's in chapter 11. And that's where we are today. And after chapter 11, we start following all the descendants of Abraham or Abram, as he's known. And before chapter 11, we're talking about how the world came to be and where the peoples came from. And so last time, we looked at this table of nations.
Remember that? Yeah, more nations almost than you can count, 70-something nations, right? And chapter 10 ends with them being spread out all over the known earth at the time, which encompassed a huge area. But we didn't actually include all of the descendants of Shem in that list.
So we have this little story first, that very, very familiar story, the Tower of Babel, where, you know, up to this point in Genesis, God was growing the nations. And the people were all, as it says, one language and one word, right? But we heard all about what God intended for his creation in these first 11 chapters and what happened to it, right? Right. And interestingly enough, in that table of nations, nations, in fact, as we go through Genesis, we will recognize, which is why they're listed there.
But he gives us the whole ancestry down from Noah and his three sons. Right. And then how the entire world gets populated from those three sons.
So that's what we looked at last. Time. But you're right. We didn't finish Shem. He's coming.
And that's an important one because that's where Israel comes from as well.
So before we get to continuing Shem's descendants, we come to chapter 11, verse 1: The Tower of Babel. And almost everyone recognizes that, but I don't think they catch what's going on here.
Well, most everybody knows something about languages and something about what really the. Details of the story, we need to kind of pause at and see what was their intention, what were they doing, why were they doing it? Because that's central to the story of Genesis.
So, and we're kind of at a chronological sequence because in the previous chapter, we looked at all the descendants of Noah and where they went. This is how they got scattered across the world, right?
So, this actual story takes place. We're kind of doubling back, like a flashback. It probably takes place before the peoples that had been growing had spread out very far. Right, right. And so, it makes sense that Noah and his three sons, that when their three sons start having descendants and stuff like that, they would all speak the same language and live in the same place.
And so, now we get the backstory about how it is that nations in the world started living in faraway places all over the world. They filled the earth and they also spoke radically different languages, not many generations after the sons of the world. After this event, right? Yeah, so it happened at Babel.
So, let's do this.
Okay. Yeah, let's start reading in verse 1 of chapter 11.
Okay. Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shannar and settled there. And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
And then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower, with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. When you stop there, there's a lot of stuff right there. Yeah, yeah. There really is.
So people migrated from the east. They found a plain in the land of Shinar or Shinar. I don't know how you say that.
Okay, well, it's interesting that it says they from the East, because in other translations, it implies that they went toward the East.
So if you think back into chapter 10, we find that the descendants of Ham had moved that direction.
So this is probably those generations down from Ham who are in the East in this plain of Shinar or Shinar. Right. And Shinar is easily defined if you go back to Genesis 10:10. Right. And Genesis 10:10, the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Eric, Echad, Kalna, in the land of Shinar.
So there we know it's actually Babel.
So we're talking about the Mesopotamian Valley. Yeah, well, Babel was a city, it was a place. It wasn't like a region at this point. The land of Shinar, I'm talking about the land of Shinar. Yeah.
So this is not an unusual place to us. Yeah.
Yeah.
So. What do you make of the fact that it says they all had one language and the same words? Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know. Did you have a good attachment?
Well, I was just thinking about, you know, we have other English-speaking countries in the world, but we don't all use the same vocabulary. Oh, that's true. And you can go and visit Scotland and they say they're speaking English, but it sure isn't what we understand, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, but it's possible that at this point, they were still all living so close together that the languages simply hadn't changed regionally, which language naturally happens, right, when isolated populations move away from one another. But they were still all close enough that they were all speaking this. Not only the same language, but using the same words for things. Yeah, I wonder if the same words kind of hints at having the same culture, you know, using the same words for things. I don't know, but they're but they're very unified, and they ought to be because they're all the descendants of Noah, right?
Right, they're all relatives, yeah, yeah.
So they so they settle in this place. Their ambitions in verse three is what's fascinating here.
Okay, yeah, yeah. They say, let's make bricks and burn them thoroughly. And they made brick and stone for stone and bitumen for mortar. And they said, okay, let's build ourselves a city and a tower with its tops in the heaven, and it's top in the heavens, and let's make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
So they want to make their mark. They want to be somebody. They want to be somebody. Well, and it's interesting because God had said way back in the beginning of Genesis, now spread out, fill the earth, multiply it. Right, that was the command.
But this, this portion of the population said, hey, we like it here. We're going to build a city. We're going to quit spreading. We're going to. gather up and build something for ourselves and make a name for ourselves.
We do not want to fill the earth, basically. Genesis 9, 1, he says, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. They say, no, I don't think so. We like this piece. We'll build a city right here and we're going to build this tower.
We're going to build this tower with its top, literally its head in the heavens.
So what are they trying to do? What is it they want to do? They're trying to make something impressive like God. And they want to get up to where God is. Yep, yep, yep.
And they want to make a name for themselves. Yeah, they want to be famous. And we remind you, when you talk about names in the Old Testament, a name is really a reflection of the full character of the person or being that has the name. I mean, it's kind of a clue about who they are that's unseen.
So when you talk about name, I always, in the Old Testament, when I see name, I always substitute the word reputation because it's everything about that person from what they've done, who they are, everything, the whole gamut of who they are.
So what they're saying is that we want to make for ourselves a reputation. Want to be king of the world. We want to be some, we want to be somebody's. We want to be someone important. And we want to have access to that information that's up there in heaven.
Yeah.
Right. And then, and historically, this region of people became star watchers. Yeah, that's exactly right. In an effort to understand the movements and motives of people by watching the stars. Yeah, because the idea was, and it's kind of more of a metaphor, is that God is up there somewhere.
God is where we can't get to.
So what we're going to do is we're going to make a tower so we can get there. We can go there ourselves.
So this is actually pulling yourself up by the bootstraps and being where God lives by building your own tower, making a name for ourselves, a reputation. This is bad.
Okay, so just a little aside here, these very ancient cultures at this time, there are lots of records of ancient cultures building this kind of tower. Right. Right. It was, it was a, it was an impulse in the heart of man. Let's gather together, let's build ourselves a tower so we can be great.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, it's, It's kind of a, what would you call it? It's kind of like an accomplishment so that you can say, we're great people. Right. To band together and be somebody and elevate ourselves instead of elevate God.
Yeah.
And just as an aside, historically, the Greek historian Herodotus, a very famous historian about five centuries before Jesus, he claims in one of his writings that he saw this.
Now, and he could be mistaken as well, but he describes the size of it. It's pretty big. And it turns out that Nebuchadnezzar, the guy who hauled away Judah in the second captivity, Nebuchadnezzar made a name for himself by rebuilding an old ziggurat. And it was a gigantic ziggurat. It was square at the bottom, like two football fields on the side.
So it was gigantic.
So he really made a name for himself by restoring something that was very old to what its old grandeur was. But at the time Nebuchadnezzar comes around and restores this very old ziggurat, it's a couple of millennia. Yeah, it's probably a couple thousand years old at this point. It's still really very old, yeah. But Herodotus says, oh, I saw it.
I saw it.
Now you mentioned Nebuchadnezzar. We need to just let people know Nebuchadnezzar was in power. When did he drag off Jerusalem, 586 BC? Five to six centuries before GC.
So we're still, we're roughly in the time of Herodotus. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so they're building this to kind of make a name for themselves.
So we're going to be great. We're going up there. It's going to put the head up in the heavens. And look at verse 5. I wonder how God reacts to this.
It's almost funny. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. They thought it was so high, but God had to come down to see it. He came down. He stooped down.
And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they'll do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore, its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth. Wow. Oh, that's pretty interesting.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So God comes down kind of implies in human form. I mean, he comes down, checks it out. They have one language, one people. They're very unified, which today we'd say, well, isn't that a good thing?
Well, right. All together we can do it. Yeah.
Right. Well, the problem is they're pretty full of themselves. And they say, if we band together and do something great, we'll be kind of God-like. Right. We don't need God because we can do this for ourselves.
They're very capable. Boy, we're back in the garden.
So God says we need to knock them back a few steps here.
So I'm going to bust up this unity by doing two things. I'm going to confuse their languages and I'm going to spread them over the face of the earth, spread out geographically. And on top of that, they won't be able to talk to each other. But you know, before that Isn't it interesting that God says to himself, Look what they've done, right? They have all one language, one set of words, and this is only the beginning of what they'll do.
I kind of wonder if that isn't land. Look, this is the first thing they do, right? Is band together to become God rather than worship God. Right, right. This is, you know, we're talking fallen mankind now.
These are right. These are people who are infected with sin and they're using their unity and their capability that God has given them to advance sinful evil by doing and promoting themselves.
Well, to make themselves great. Promoting themselves. And that's really the essence of sin, promoting yourself rather than promoting God. There's only one who's worthy of worship, and that's God himself. But they're saying if we make a name for ourselves, maybe we'll worship each other.
Well, and okay, there's nothing in here that implies that building a city is wrong. No, not the city. But they said, we're going to stay here and stay together so we can become great. Yes. When God had said, spread out and fill the earth.
Yeah.
Right. Cities will come. Right. And that was his command, and that's what they're disappointed. Being.
It is interesting, though, at the end of six, he says that, you know, nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. It tells you something about the grandeur of how God made man in his own image and his capabilities. And God says, you know, this is going to be evil unchecked.
So instead of squashing them and, you know, and killing them all or something like that, he basically wants to slow them down because eventually they are going to get sort of like that. They're going to use their advanced capability as time goes on and they're going to continue to promote themselves and make themselves great. History has demonstrated that, right? Human unity and human ingenuity can do incredible, marvelous things, which can be easily bent toward evil. Right.
Because man will look back and say, gee, aren't we great? Aren't we great? And look what we can do. That's what this is all about. And, you know, as a data point, Right now, with the emergence of Google Translate and stuff like that, if you've traveled in foreign countries, you can read street signs, you can even translate on the fly.
You need to understand that this, in our generation, now in the last, I don't know, 10 years of that. This whole curse of Babel has been reversed. It's been reversed.
Now, the scrambling of languages doesn't make any difference. And on top of that, we talk to anybody anywhere. Even before that, I mean, we have had communications, international communication, worldwide communications with your phone. You can talk for free with someone on the other side of the world.
So the geographical isolation that God also does where he disperses them across the earth doesn't matter now. I mean, you can talk to someone over there and cooperate with them and work together as though you live right next to each other.
So it's fascinating that not just in our generation, but in this last decade, Effort that God has made to slow mankind down has now finally been, after millennia, reversed. The languages don't matter. The geographical separation doesn't matter.
Okay, it's not necessarily that God has reversed what he said would happen. No, I didn't say that.
Well, yeah, you said the curse is reversed. I think we only need to.
Okay, a better way to put it, God is slowing them down.
Okay, there we go. And man has finally caught up. Knowing that it was coming. Right. God says, I'm going to slow you down so that you don't get there ahead of me.
So the tactics God used to slow down man are no longer operative. Right. Yeah.
Right. We're picking up speed.
Okay. So that's a better way to say that. All that actually means is that man's bent for evil is going to speed up. Right. That's all that means.
That man is going to worship himself and his capabilities. And he's going to be wonderful about himself and say, aren't we great? We can do anything we can think of. And we're back to the Tower of Babba before the scattering. And so you're going to see a real acceleration of evil now.
That just makes me think we're seeing that in our age. Oh, we are. Right. How quickly the spread of an evil thought, an evil idea, an evil plan spread. These days, through social media, through the ease of communication, through the one language.
Yeah.
Wow. So it's fascinating in our generation.
So God slows them down. Yep. God slows them down, spreads them out. And then you get all the nations we talked about in the previous.
Well, and we get this little note in verse 9: therefore, the name of the place was called Babel, right? That word to Babel, that's where it came from. Still told me to speak in unintelligible languages, right? Because the Lord confused the language of the whole earth. And we were told back in chapter 10 of Genesis, just the previous chapter, that it was Nimrod, the first of the mighty conquerors, who built the city of Babel.
Right, right. So, it's really important to be kind of pulling forward all those little details we were given into the current story where we're reading. Wow. So, Babel is a fascinating thing, and we are living now in an interesting reversal of the Babel slowdown.
So, all I can say is evil is going to speed up like something we've never seen before. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's move on because that's a fascinating by the way. In the previous chapter, we saw those nations so few generations removed from Noah and his sons.
Now, we understand why they're all over the earth, and now we understand why they speak different languages.
Well, and we're going to read this genealogy of Shem. In about 10 generations, it's going to take us all the way to Abraham. Yeah.
So, or Abram. Abram. I'll read first. What do you say?
So we are starting with Shem's descendants in verse 10.
So these are the generations of Shem. When Shem was 100 years old, he fathered Arpechad. Yeah.
Two years after the flood. And Shem lived after he fathered Arpechad 500 years and had other sons and daughters. When Arpechad Shad, I don't know how to say that, had lived 35 years, he fathered Sheila, and Arpech Shad lived after he fathered Sheila 403 years and had other sons and daughters. And when Sheila had lived 30 years, he fathered Eber, and Sheila lived after he fathered Eber 403 years and had other sons and daughters.
Okay, pause for a minute because we mentioned Eber in the previous thing, the previous genealogy, and that is the term from which the word Hebrews arose later on.
So here we're zeroed in now on Eber or Eber. Yeah, well, so when Eber, this is verse 16, when Eber had lived 34 years, he fathered Peleg. And Eber lived after he fathered Peleg 430 years and had other sons and daughters.
Okay, pause again. Peleg. Because again, in the previous chapter, we were told that Peleg had a brother, Joctan, right? Yes, yes. And in the previous chapter, it traced Joctan's descendants.
But now we're going to trace Peleg's descendants. Very important, yeah. And we're told that in the time of Peleg is when the earth was divided, right?
So that probably places us at the Tower of Babel event. That's what most people think. The world was divided because God scattered them. Divided according to languages. Yes.
In the generation of Peleg.
So verse 18, when Peleg had lived 30 years, he followed Ru. And Pelag lived after he fathered Rue two hundred and nine years and had other sons and daughters.
Now when Ru had lived thirty-two years, he fathered Serug, and Ru lived after he fathered Serug 207 years, and had other sons and daughters.
Now when Sareg had lived 30 years, he fathered Nahor. and Sareg lived after he fathered Nahor two hundred years and had other sons and daughters. When Nahor had lived twenty nine years, he fathered Terah. And Nahor lived after he fathered Terah 119 years and had other sons and daughters. When Terra had lived seventy years he fathered in Abram.
Nahor and Hevran.
Okay, so this Nahor is named for his grandfather. For his grandfather. Yeah, different Nahor, yeah. And so here's the first time we hear Abram's name mentioned in that whole genealogy. Right.
Well, and we get multiple sons. Yeah, yeah. So here's Terah's descendants.
Now, these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran fathered Lot, who will figure pretty soon here. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred in Ur of the Chaldees, again, a Mesopotamian reference. And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife was Milca, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milca and Iscah.
Now Sarai was barren. She had no child. Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his grandson, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife, and they went forth together from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan but when they came to Haran they settled there. The days of Tera were two hundred and five years and Tera died in Haran.
Okay, so we've been marching along at a tremendous pace through these generations, and all of a sudden we come to a screeching halt at Terra, right? And we get the names of his three sons. And then we zero in even farther really fast and get some very specific details about this, and suddenly we have a wife's name. Yes. Two wives' names.
They are going to figure in the narrative as we push on. Yes. So it's just fascinating to me that we're going big view, big view, big view, big view. And then all of a sudden, zoop, we zero right in on this one little family. Yep, yep.
We focus on Abram and his father, and they're moving out of this place where the Tower of Babel was from Mesopotamia. Except for the son Haran, who died during his father's lifetime before they ever left. Right. Right. So it's interesting to me that we're told in verse 26 or yeah, 26 that there were the three sons, Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
And then we're going to find out what happened to each of those sons, right? Haran died before they ever left Ur. Nahur stayed behind with his family and his wife because they were so intimately related. And then Abram marries a non-family member. We don't have any family connections for Sarai.
Although we learn later that she was connected by family, but we're not told that here. And then. And what happened to each of them?
So it's interesting that the whole story now has been set up and narrowed down to this one little group of people. Right. And that makes sense because after this, we're going to look at Abram and his descendants for the next many chapters in Genesis. I mean, that's the important thing because the nation of Israel comes out of Abram.
Well, because up to this point in Genesis, God had been dispersing the nations. But now he's going to focus on the one nation that he will raise up through whom he will bring salvation to the rest of the nations. Right, right. Yeah.
So it's important to get this all set up. This is all set up to get down to Abram. It is kind of a fascinating problem here. We know that Abram's name means father, and yet in verse 30 he mentions, but Sarai was barren.
So mister Father marries someone who can't have children. Yeah.
Well, and we'll get a lot of information about Sarah. Yeah.
Right? Because we're told that Tarah took his son Abram and Sarai by name, his daughter-in-law, Abram's wife, just so we make sure that we know the woman we're talking about. We didn't take Nahor and his wife Milka, who, by the way, was the daughter of Haran, the father of Milka and Iska. Like we're given a lot of information about her too.
Well, that's going to come up a generation from now when Abram goes hunting for a wife for his son. He's going to send him. back to the homeland, back to Nahor's relatives.
So, you know, all of this little information, the seeds of this is right here. But Abram, with the barren wife, he's not a father, but he has to trust God to go forward. And then we have all this information about his wife. Yeah, yeah. I love it.
We are set to go. And interestingly enough, you know, we faulted them earlier in the Babel account because God said, be fruitful and multiply and spread out on the earth. And they did not do that. But here, here, we have Abram's family leaving, you know, leaving the New York city of the world in Ur of the Chaldees, Mesopotamia, and going to Canaan, the land of Canaan.
Okay, think about that. The land of Canaan. This is very important. The land of Canaan. So here they do go out.
I look at this as an act of obedience on their part. Oh, absolutely. This is what God asked them to do. And finally, they're doing it.
So they're leaving. And this is the beginning. Do you remember Noah had said the people that grow up out of Canaan will be servants to the peoples of the two older brothers, him and Ham and no, Ham. Seth or anyway, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. There we go.
Shem and Japheth were the good guys, right?
So this is kind of the beginning of that. They're going back to the land of Canaan, which God had said would be the place. A problematic place. Yep, your descendants would be here.
Well, we're running out of time. And if you're reading this, you're thinking, well, we did focus down on Abram. Was Abram someone special? And I might just mention the fact that he's called the friend of God. In several places, even in the book of James, in the New Testament, he's called the friend of God.
So there's something unique about Abram and his relationship with God, and as a result, his obedience to go to the land of Canaan, you know, sight unseen, live in intents, and to obey what God's saying. And even Stephen when he's stoned. Includes a little bit about that because Stephen says, Brothers and fathers, hear me. The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haram and said to him, Go out from your land and from your kindred and go into the land that I'll show you. And here he is doing that very thing.
Well, boy, we're going to talk about that next week. Why, Abram? Absolutely. Why Abram? And he does walk with God in a fascinating kind of way.
So we're going to follow him because we've got our spotlight focused on him like a microphone. That's right. And his wife. And we need to follow up with what happens with this conflict of the father who has a barren wife.
So I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we'll see you back here next time as we follow Abram here on More Than Inc. Yeah.
There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, morethanink.org. And while you are there, take a moment to drop us a note. Wow, isn't it amazing? We're only 11 chapters into Genesis and all of a sudden we've already arrived at Abraham. Yeah, very important name, in fact.
I mean, even to this very day, he's identified all across the world by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Abraham. We're going to talk about him more as we come back. Bye. Bye.
This has been a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City.
