The Tower of Babel and the Division of the People - 10
Another factor producing mankind's diversity
As fathers continued to rule within their families, for better or worse, too many of the “for worse” kind began to consolidate on the side of unrighteousness. They trained their children, grandchildren, servants, etc. to think in terms of a life apart from God.
These various households were still all descended from Adam and Noah, and so everyone of them spoke the same language, the basic language that God had given to Adam. It was a shared tongue. And, with this common language, unfaithful men began to define a world with a vocabulary and grammar built to exclude God. This tainted language was then used to teach their children how to speak and to think.
In his book, In the Beginning Was The Word: Language A God-Centered Approach, Vern S. Poythress writes, “According to his [God’s] own purposes, he has not created each individual human being in total independence of his surroundings, but has made him part of a family and a culture. And his connections with family and culture can have bad as well as good effects…We may conclude that one of the effects of idolatrous practices within a culture is to corrupt the thinking of that culture, to introduce confusion about the nature of the spirit world, and in the long run to corrupt the language as well.”1
Furthermore, they committed their resources of land, buildings, livestock, and produce to further their autonomous2 aims, promoting a view that replaced God with man (mankind) as the center of their world.
Also, since they shared the same language, communication and progress were verbally unhindered, or at least not so strictly limited.3 And so that early civilization progressed rapidly. Knowledge of building and growing and calculating and science was quickly communicated and disseminated, but unrighteousness held its hand and went with it. The knowledge of God’s creation was discovered but then quickly redefined by the interpretation of sinners.
This brings us to Genesis 11:1-5.
1Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then 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.” 5And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
The city and tower, in the plain of Shinar, represented the ideal of those ancient men. Self-government (autonomy) was the cause they shared. And as they built their city and tower, brick by brick, they worked against God’s will for them. What was their purpose? “Let us make a name for ourselves.” And they must have reasoned, “There is safety in numbers, so let’s stick together.” And, “If we all agree, then who can blame us?”
This is bad leadership. Where were the good elders (fathers, householders) while these unashamed defiers of God were ruining the culture as well as their descendants?
Of course, there were some who did not go along with the tower. God has always kept some who call upon Him, even when the majority rebels. These were the fathers, with their households, that the Scriptures say, “called upon the name of the Lord.” It appears that some of Shem’s descendants were like this.
We get this from what Noah said of the three lines of his descendants:
“Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.”
The bible records that it is from Shem’s line that Abram descends. Abram was a righteous man of faith who subsequently trains his household to worship God. Abram appears in history after the Tower of Babel incident. Still, God’s people descend from Abram and therefore from Shem.
The rest of Noah’s descendants, stemming from Ham and Japheth, were not identified as worshipers of God. They presumably had similar goals to each other and combined their efforts to build the city and its tower. These were corrupt householders. Such leadership ruins a family. It hampers the church. It decays a nation.
In regard to concerted efforts of the wicked to be tower builders, God will show them how quickly He can break apart their alliances and dismantle their towers. In Babel, He divides the people by changing their tongues. The Lord will simply multiply the sounds of their lips and they will no longer understand each other. And this will become an important alteration to the course of humanity.
Poythress, Vern Sheridan, In the Beginning was the Word: Language A God-Centered Approach, Crossway Books, Wheaton, 2009, p.136.
Auto = self; nomous = law. To be autonomous means that you create your own standards, your own law, your own ethical reality. You decide to be self-governed. This was passed on as a nature to all mankind from Adam. He decided to choose what was good and evil for himself when he stepped out of God’s will for him.
Of course, communication is still impaired by educational levels, deception, stubbornness, the complexity of grammar and vocabulary and more. The same word may be used to mean different things.