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‘Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.’
Gen_11:9
The history of Babel is far more than a record of the defeated attempt of wicked men to accomplish an impossible folly. The building of that tower was the first great act of presumptuous rebellion against God subsequent to the Flood, and therefore it was meet that a measure of vengeance should fall upon it such as, while the world stood, should never perish from the memory of mankind. And, as God so often orders, the crime of these men became their punishment. ‘Let us make a name,’ they cried, ‘lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth.’ And this very thing it was which caused them to be scattered.
II. God, who hath made of one blood all nations of men, did, by that exercise of His power, the best thing that could be done to check and retard the rapid growth of evil, and to prepare the means by which man might be brought back to obedience. While there was but one tongue, men easily corrupted each other; when there were many, evil communications were greatly hindered. God marred the Babel-builders’ work, but it was in order to mar their wickedness; and meanwhile He had His own gracious designs for a remedy. It was on the day of Pentecost that that remedy was first applied. Those cloven tongues of fire which, on that day, rested on the heads of the apostles, undid, to as great an extent as will be permitted in this world, the confusion of Babel.
Rev. F. E. Paget.
Illustration(1) ‘Many things which we do are not wrong and sinful in themselves; only sinful because of the bad motives with which they are done. No sin in building a city, nor yet in building a lofty tower; all depends upon the character of the object or motive.
The Babel builders had several motives:
(a) To provide a place of abode. Innocent so far. The whole region had few large stones or rocks, hence they would require to make bricks, as Israelites did later in Egypt, and use slime for mortar. Must have done this largely; industry good. No blame yet.
(b) Ambition. “Let us make a name.” Probably when the city began to grow larger they began to grow proud, and said, “This shall be the greatest and most famous city in the world. All others shall be as nothing to it; we will build ‘a tower whose top may reach unto heaven’ ”—i.e. be exceedingly lofty—“and all the world will talk about it; we shall be famous” (compare Dan_4:30).
(c) That they might be united. “Lest we be scattered”; no harm in that if they wished for union for good purposes; but God had told them to “replenish the earth.” But they wished to keep together to “make a name,” merely to gratify vanity and ambition; a kind of ambition which could lead only to tyranny and godlessness.’
(2) ‘Gen_11:2 seems to say that Babel was built by men who had come into the land of Shinar, “from the east,” as if the line of migration taken by this race of men had proceeded from its primeval seat in Armenia first southwards and then westwards, a view which disagrees both with the history mentioned above and with the native inscriptions which have been lately deciphered. Accordingly, the phrase “from the east” has been interpreted to mean “towards the east,” as is the case in Gen_13:11, and is thus made to agree with the view that the men who built Babel entered the country from the south and west. But if the race of Cush came, as we have supposed, by sea, it is evident that their line of advance from the Persian Gulf was in a direction from south-east to north-west, i.e. one which, with no great violence of language, may be described as moving “from the east.” ’