Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
As I pointed out earlier, this clearly fits somewhere in the middle of the genealogy record from the previous chapter, since by the end everyone is sorted out by their different languages.
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
Make a name for who? For God? No? Uh-oh…
So that what? So that we can “fill the earth” as God commanded? No? Uh-oh…
I see problems with this plan.
If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
Now, I understand the idea of them trying to get glory for themselves, or not listening to God’s command, and why God would be against these things, but what is this nonsense going on here? God’s going to break them up and confuse everything because he’s afraid of what they’ll do later? That somehow if they do this, then they could do anything, and that’s some issue? God has a problem with them being successful? What?
To begin to get some background, let’s start off with the premise that these guys were pretty smart. We know that even back with Adam, people could talk, possibly even write to start keeping records. Cain built a city, and people were working with metal and doing all sorts of stuff, still within Adam’s lifetime. Noah built an ark for goodness sakes. And now, a large group of these guys are working together to build bigger and better stuff. I don’t know how much technology they actually have at this point, but it seems that humans so far have basically been advancing through science with no problem.
Now for some speculation: What if they were going too fast? What if these guys were going to invent the internet a few thousand years early? What if they were going to develop guns, missiles, bombs? With the human race still so small, a group that discovered some sort of advanced weaponry could literally take over the entire world. And since these guys obviously aren’t the ‘good’ guys, as they’re ignoring God and trying to gain glory for themselves, they must be the ‘bad’ guys, and the ones we definitely don’t want in control of everything.
Or maybe it’s not so drastic as that, but rather that the society is simply advancing too fast in general. I mean, think about this for a second: what if Jesus came for the first time in today’s world? Virgin birth? Yeah, whatever. Some scientist probably just implanted a fertilized egg in her. He’s claiming to be God? So what? Plenty of crazy people do that. Miracles? I saw David Blaine do it better. And of course, there’s no way we’re going to crucify some guy, or even kill him at all, simply for claiming to be God. Maybe lock him up in a mental hospital if he gets too out of control, but not kill him. Jesus came at a specific point in history, when the society of the earth was just right to allow him to complete his mission. Maybe these guys at Babel were simply too smart, and were threatening to mess with the timing of this ultimate plan. I don’t know.
Anyways, for whatever reason, God steps in to slow them down, and poof! Language mix-up, and everybody finally starts getting spread out to fill the earth like they were supposed to in the first place.
This is the account of Shem.
Section transition. More genealogy. Shoot yeah! This time, though, we’re specifically interested in only this one special line that will eventually lead us to Christ. We have a little bit of overlap at the beginning with the tree from chapter 10, but then we keep going down, in the familiar form of ‘so-and-so lived x years, had a son, lived x more years, having other sons and daughters.’ Notice anything new though? How about how instead of living to 900+, we’re down to the 400’s, and then we take another drop down into the 200’s. This is probably somewhat due to climate changes after the flood and whatnot, but another real possibility is simply genetic issues. With the ‘bottleneck’ caused by the flood, any bad genes Noah might have picked up from his father(who only lived to 777 back when the 900s were average), he then passed to his sons. They, of course, simply spread the same issues, and could easily account for the dropoff of lifespans.
The other interesting thing I notice is that the ages for the first son have dropped quite a bit now, probably because of shorter lives. Anyways, now it’s all between 29-35, until we get to Terah, who takes twice as long, and is 70 before having his sons. This of course reminds me of Noah, who was really late in having his first son, and I have the same question as I did then. Was he just having a lot of daughters, or was something else going on? Now Terah isn’t going to build an ark or anything, but he does father Abram, who turns out to be our next main character in this story. And since fathers get their sons’ glory, all the awesome stuff Abram experiences reflect back on his father. So I guess the real question I’m asking is something about whether the fact that these guys didn’t have sons till later reveals that they were spending more of their time seeking God, and his blessings, or something like that. As it turns out, Abram is going to be late in having his first son as well, as his wife happens to be barren.
…together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there.
Well how about that? They were planning to go to Canaan, but just stopped early. I wonder if that will come back to them later…
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