Scripture Daily

Context No. 484 of 4322 · Genesis

Context · Reflection

Genesis 11:1-9: in context

1The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. 2As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. 3They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. 4They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” 5The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. 6The LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. 7Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8So the LORD scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. 9Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. From there, the LORD scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.

After the flood, the whole earth still shares one language, and humanity gathers on a plain in Shinar with a plan. Come, they say to one another, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the whole earth. It sounds like ambition and engineering, and it is, but the two motives they name are the heart of the story. They want to make a name for themselves, and they want to keep from being scattered. In other words, they are building to secure their own significance and their own safety, by their own effort, reaching up to the heavens without any reference to God at all.

Notice what they are really after. A name for ourselves: they want to be somebody, to establish their own greatness, on their own terms. And lest we be scattered: they want to guarantee their own security, to hold themselves together by the sheer scale of what they can build. It is self-made significance and self-made safety, a monument to human sufficiency that needs no God. And then comes the quiet irony of the whole account. The one thing they built the tower to prevent, being scattered, is exactly what happens. God comes down, confuses their language, and scatters them over the face of the earth. The great project meant to secure them against scattering becomes the occasion of it. Self-security reached for apart from God delivers the very thing it was built to escape.

That drive is very much alive in me, usually in less dramatic form. I want to make a name for myself, to build something that establishes my own significance, and I want to secure myself against the things I fear, largely by my own effort and achievement. Babel warns that significance and safety grasped this way, as a monument to my own sufficiency, tend to collapse into the very insecurity they were meant to prevent. Where am I building a tower to make a name for myself and to secure my own safety apart from God, and what if the thing I most fear is exactly what that building is bringing on me?

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