Lonang Commentary on Genesis 11

Gen. 11:1-9 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 Shinar 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. 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.” And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will 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 all the earth.

Tower of Babel

Both the ESV and the KJV indicate that in verse 2, the people migrated from the east, meaning that they were heading west. Whereas the NASB and NASB95 indicate they were heading east. If we accept that Noah and his family disembarked from the ark somewhere in the mountains of Ararat in modern Turkey, and the plain of Shinar is essentially the land of Babylonia (which would make sense, if Babel is essentially Babylon), then I take it the mass of humanity was heading east. Remember, it was only 100-130 years from leaving the ark until Babel.

But immediately there is a problem. For both in the Dominion Mandate and again in the Noahic covenant, God specifically told mankind to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” Which at the very least would require everyone to not settle in the same spot, and to spread out over the face of the earth. Yet in verse 4, the people expressed an intention to not be dispersed over the whole face of the earth. So while it may seem a small thing to us, the reality is that in the totality of human experience, God had only given mankind a total of ten commands or less (depending on how you parse the language) between the Adamic and Noahic covenants. Only one of which was repeated – be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

Which means that the decision of the people was a unified and deliberate disobedience of the command of God. Truth be told, the group action would not have been perceived by God merely as disobedience against His command, but as rebellion against Him. Just as the refusal of the Jews to enter the Promised Land was viewed by God as a rebellion, leading to a judgment that they wander for forty years. Heb. 3:15-19. And here at Babel, as with the Jews many years later, the rebellion of the group resulted in a group punishment. Specifically, by the confusion of their language, God’s judgment accomplished the purpose He had originally given them, and forced them to do the one thing they had expressly said they did not want to do – to fill the earth.

Besides explaining the reason and manner of dispersion from Babel, there are a number of ancillary lessons to be gleaned from this account. One of which is the theme running throughout the Bible of the distinction between stones and bricks. Stones refer to people and events fashioned by the hand of God, just as Jesus is the stone made without hands (Dan. 2:34) and the stone the builders rejected (1 Pet. 2:6-7). Thus, when God gave the Israelites instructions on how to make an altar, He required that only uncut or unchiseled stones could be used (Exo. 20:25), in other words, a natural stone (one that God had made).

Bricks, on the other hand, are man-made. Bricks are often symbolic of slavery (as in Egypt) and godless human ambition (such as here the Tower of Babel). Bricks are not unique, but are uniform, and designed to be mass produced. Rather than being conformed to the will of God, they are made to be conformed to the will of man. And, in this case, bricks are indicative of raw human ambition, untempered by God.

A second theme is the connection between the Tower of Babel and the origin of the false religions of the world. It is not for nothing that the Tower of Babel was located in Babylonia, and when the false religions of the world are judged in the future, they are collectively referred to as “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes and of earth’s abominations.” Rev. 17:5. For Babylon always did, and always will, produce a profound confusion among men. In other words, nations and languages were not the only thing dispersed from Babel, and the languages of men were not the only thing that became confused.

Notice that in the whole account of the Tower of Babel, no mention is made of anyone having a change of heart as a result. The dispersion from Babel was not a spiritual experience, at least in the sense that anyone repented of their sin, that anyone professed or exhibited belief or faith in God, or that God redeemed or saved anyone from their sins. What we must assume, and what history and prophecy have only ever confirmed, is that all the nations and clans dispersed from Babel carried with them their beliefs in their own greatness, a disdain for the laws and commands of God, and an undoubted propensity to believe in false deities.

Thus, Babel’s true legacy (which remains today) is that it was the mother of all false religions. Whatever unity the people had before they were scattered, it was not a unity of the Spirit of God, but was a unity of rebellion and sinfulness before God. Which every nation then carried with them as they made their way to distant lands. It is no wonder the Jews regarded the Gentile nations as a cesspool of idolatry. And it is only by the grace of God through Jesus Christ that provision was eventually made for the Gentiles to escape their legacies of ignorance and darkness.

Tower of Babel 2.0

Another lesson we can learn from the Tower of Babel experience is that human nature has never really changed. Here people were, some 4,200 years ago or more, congregating all in one place, engaged in a single task to do what, really? To build a monument to their own greatness. And God sees that since they are one people having a common purpose, “this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

So here we are centuries later, doing what? Trying to unify the world by obliterating borders and forming a one-world economic system of co-dependency. Global markets, global communications, global transportation, and global surveillance. Getting ready, like an episode of Star Trek, to present ourselves as one people eager and willing to make First Contact with an alien race, to finally figure out we are not alone in the universe. Meanwhile, to keep the momentum going, we are rushing headlong down the path of forming a global government as a monument to our own greatness. All while being completely oblivious of the fact that we have never been alone – God has always been with us. Immanuel.

Nothing has really changed – our vision has just gotten larger. Our ego is more puffed up, and our authority is more supreme. Our technology is vastly superior. We have evolved. See how wonderful we are. What on earth do we need God for? Thus we see that God created the nations specifically for the purpose of preventing the world’s population from being unified and acting as one people. Because when all of humanity gets together, its primary purpose is to rebel against God.

All of which plays right into the Devil’s plan. The world is much easier to control when all the people are coordinated and acting together, and it also makes it much easier to foment a rebellion against the God who split them apart in the first place. So you may think that the globalization effort is very new, but in fact it is very old. It is just that the forces of darkness never had the means to bring about a unification of the world since Babel until now. This is the moment they have been waiting for.

Meanwhile, churches will continue preaching self-actualization and self-empowerment, in order to become part of a global spiritual body. Do you see how, with kernels of truth, the Gospel message can be turned into the message of a global brotherhood of man? God made us all, and He loves us all. A message which prepares people for the triumphant unification of humanity. Except, of course, it will be an evil empire. No matter – as long as you feel good about yourself …

Yes, what the people at Babel accomplished, compared to what people have done since, is positively puny. Our modern accomplishments are so much more magnificent. But our natures have not changed. The people at Babel were every bit as ambitious as people today – they simply lacked the skills and the resources we have. But those were the very people who determined, notwithstanding being later scattered across the earth, that they would persist in their ambitions until they had the skills and resources they needed to pull them off. They were us, and we are them. The technology we have is the fruit of their ambition, applied over time. We are their children, after all.

God knew this all along. He knew people would eventually get to exactly where we are right now. But He didn’t want that to happen millennia ago, so He built into the world’s population a delay mechanism which held back cooperative efforts and discoveries to slow our progress. This delay mechanism – differing languages – has now been overcome, thanks to computers and the internet. So all the original ambitions are now free to be pursued uninhibited. Nothing can stop us.

And in a certain sense, this new one world government to come is merely a return to the historical method of combining church and state, or at least, religion and government. The goal of which is – as always – to exact and extract the maximum amount of submission from the people. That is, to use the purported authority of God, and the collective authority of mankind, to speak with one voice, thereby quashing all dissent or opposition. The old sins are the best sins, after all.

Except, of course, God did not allow man’s ambitions to be pursued unchecked the first time. And He is of no mood to allow them to go unchecked a second time. We are fast approaching the time when God will say, “Enough!” Because, ultimately, we are not in charge of this earth, the cosmos, or even ourselves. God is in charge, and He will reign us in, along with our false claims of authority. After all, no one can ever become greater than their creator – and that goes for each of us. This little rebellion of ours will itself be quashed when the time comes – make no mistake.

Gen. 11:10-26 [Abridged] These are the generations of Shem.
When Shem was 100 years old, he fathered Arpachshad two years after the flood. He lived another 500 years and had other sons and daughters.
When Arpachshad was 35, he fathered Shelah, lived another 403 years and had other children.
When Shelah was 30, he fathered Eber, lived another 403 years and had other children.
When Eber was 34, he fathered Peleg, lived another 430 years and had other children.
When Peleg was 30, he fathered Reu, lived another 209 years and had other children.
When Reu was 32, he fathered Serug, lived another 207 years and had other children.
When Serug was 30, he fathered Nahor, lived another 200 years and had other children.
When Nahor was 29, he fathered Terah, lived another 119 years and had other children.
When Terah was 70, he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

Nationality and Ethnicity

I suggest that ethnicity or nationality also follows the law of the nature of inheritance. Meaning, that every person takes his or her ethnicity from the father and no part from the mother. The rule applies to women and men equally. And while the principle is easily observed with respect to ancient Israel (though not without some controversy), it is by no means limited to that nation. I assert the principle is universal and applies to all nations and ethnicities.

The national identity of ancient Israel was essentially defined as “the sons of Israel.” We see this when the initial seed population of the nation, i.e., Jacob and all his household, first came to Egypt in the time of Joseph’s rule and was referred to as the sons of Israel. Ex. 1:1. We see it when the nation coming out of Egypt was counted in the first census. “Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head.” Num. 1:2. Similarly with respect to the second census in Num. 26.

Thus, when God called out the house of Jacob and the people of Israel as a special people among all the nations of the earth (Ex. 19:3-6), it is understood to refer to the sons of Israel and their households. The Israelites are referred to as the sons of Israel some 30 times in the Bible.

Historical evidence (albeit anecdotal) suggests it is quite possible Solomon had a son with the Queen of Sheba, who returned to her home country (somewhere in the vicinity of Ethiopia, most likely). When the son came of age and married, most likely he would have chosen a bride from the local population of Africans. He and his descendants would have looked African, but ethnically would be Jewish, if indeed parentage traced back to Solomon. Coincidentally, an identifiable culture of Ethiopian Jews a/k/a Beta Israel still exists today.

Yet that result is no different from what happened to all the Jews in the diaspora. To the extent the sons of Israel intermarried with local populations their descendants would take on the physical characteristics of the local population, yet would still be ethnically Jewish via the male line. This is no mere hypothetical. If you are interested, just look into the history of the Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews – both the results of intermarriage between Jews and varying local populations.

There is a longstanding tradition (via the Halakha) that Jewishness is determined not by one’s father, but by one’s mother. Although, there is a minority report, as it were, which is even older, that Jewishness is determined by one’s father. Both sides have citations from the O.T. scriptures and rabbinic writings to back up their claims.

What people fail to take into account is that God has His own way of doing things. He has His own rules for determining Jewishness and He keeps His own records. Thus, when the 144,000 Jews are called out from among the nations in the Tribulation, 12,000 males from each of the tribes of Israel (Rev. 7:1-8), God will know exactly who the sons of Israel are at that time. Then as now, the question will not be about Jewish self-identity. Rather, the question is how God operates.

What is ethnicity, if not an inherited nationality? And the universal rule used to determine national identity in the Bible is the law of inheritance. See, e.g., the Table of Nations (Gen. 10:5, 20, 31):

The sons of Japheth: … From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations. …
These are the sons of Ham, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations. …
These are the sons of Shem, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.

So we see that before the nation of Israel even existed, the Bible uniformly refers to all national identities as being determined by who the father was, and those ethnicities carried exclusively through the male line. Refer back to the discussion of the Law of Inheritance at the end of chapter 5, if you need to be reminded of the proofs.

Gen. 11:27-32 Now these are the generations of Terah. Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran fathered Lot. Haran died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his kindred, in Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abram and Nahor took wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah 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 Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan, but when they came to Haran, they settled there. The days of Terah were 205 years, and Terah died in Haran.

World Population Growth

Allow me to digress at this point, to consider one of the fundamental upshots of both chapters 10 and 11. Namely, that the entire population of the world today consists of the offspring of six people (i.e., Shem, Ham and Japheth and their wives) who lived less than 4,500 years ago.

Currently, the world population stands at slightly more than 8.2 billion. Most of this growth has occurred in the last 200 years, as the world population is estimated to have been only 1 billion in the year 1800. Before that, as I’ve already mentioned, the world population is estimated to have been about 200,000,000 in 1 AD, and about 5,000,000 in 8000 BC at the supposed dawn of agriculture. One of the objections to the biblical timeline of events is that it is just too short – all the people on the earth today cannot possibly be the descendants of just a single mating pair (Adam and Eve) some 6,000 years ago (so the experts say). But of course, if we take the Genesis genealogies at face value, the Table of Nations in chapters 10 and 11 were dispersed around 2240 BC, a mere 4,265 years ago. This would make everyone alive today the descendants of only three mating pairs (Noah’s sons).

The starting point of conventional wisdom is that mankind originated at least 100,000 years ago, people gradually evolved from lower ancestral forms of life, and multiple family lines developed more or less concurrently. And significantly, the origin point for human evolution was in – South Africa? Yes, that’s what is claimed. In other words, popular science completely rejects a history of mankind that is only 6,000 years, the separate (or special) creation of man distinct from the origin of other animals, and the idea that the whole human race is the product of only two original people. Geographically, it also rejects the Garden of Eden having been near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and rejects the Tower of Babel as the place of later dispersion from Babylonia. Really, it rejects those two places and events as non-existent for a mythological African origin.

However, there is a slight mathematical problem, wonderfully described in Evolution and the Population Problem, Institute for Creation Research, by Henry Morris, Ph.D., March, 1975. The problem is this: if humanity originated the way conventional wisdom posits it, at current or relatively recent population growth rates (between 1% and 2%; currently at about 1.13% per year), there would be a current world population several orders of magnitude greater than what we actually have. Thus, either mankind originated significantly less than 100,000 years ago, or the historic population growth rate was just a tiny fraction of what it is today.

Morris takes the former approach: “an initial population of only two people, increasing at 2% per year, would become 3.5 billion people in only 1075 years. … [A]n average population growth rate of only (1/2)% would generate the present world population in only 4000 years.” Worldometers takes the opposite approach, positing that human population grew at a rate of only 0.05% for most of world history until A.D. 1800. In other words, that people reproduced at only 0.04% of the current growth rate for 99,000 years.

Now start from a biblical perspective, as informed by the genealogies. Namely, that the entire world population started with only two individuals about 6,000 years ago; that all but 8 persons were wiped out about 4,360 years ago in a worldwide flood, and that everyone alive today is a descendant of those eight survivors. I will not rehearse here the math and science involved, but suffice it to say the biblical record is sufficient to explain the origin of the human race and the present population of the world from a very few individuals only a few thousand years ago.

If you want more information on this matter, I gratefully acknowledge and recommend for your perusal: ABO Blood and Human Origins, Institute for Creation Research, by Daniel Criswell, Ph.D., February, 2008. Criswell concludes: “Whether the origin of blood type O was in Adam and Eve at Creation or whether it arose as a mutational event that took place shortly before or after the Flood, it strongly supports that all humans today are descendants of two individuals or a small group of people that eventually populated the globe.” Thus, the biblical account of biological anthropology can be reasonably corroborated and ought to be trusted.