Genesis Chapter 11 part 1: They Built a Tower to Reach God He Had to Come Down Just to See It

They said come let us build a tower whose top will reach into heaven.

And God had to come down to even see it.

That is not a small detail.

That is Moses making one of the most important theological statements in the entire book of Genesis. However high humanity builds God is higher. However impressive the tower it does not move God from His throne. However unified the effort it does not threaten the sovereignty of the One who sits above the circle of the earth.

But in this lesson we discover that the Tower of Babel is not primarily a story about a building.

It is a story about a decision.

Four verses. Three declarations. And the most complete picture of human pride in all of early Genesis.

Come let us make bricks. Come let us build a city. Let us make a name for ourselves. Lest we be scattered.

Every one of those phrases is a theological statement about the direction of the human heart when it organizes itself around anything other than God.

In this lesson we cover

What the two Hebrew words lech lecha mean and why they are the most emphatic command in the book of Genesis

Why journeying east in Genesis is never a good sign and what it tells us about the direction of this story before a single brick is laid

What a ziggurat actually was in the ancient world and why the Tower of Babel was not a stairway to heaven but something far more audacious

Why the phrase a tower whose top will reach into heaven is the language of Isaiah 14 and what that tells us about the spiritual impulse behind the project

The direct contrast between let us make a name for ourselves in Genesis 11 and I will make your name great in Genesis 12 and why that contrast is the entire difference between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God

Why their greatest fear was exactly what God had commanded them to do in Genesis 9

The ancient Near Eastern background on ziggurats including the great ziggurat of Ur that still partially stands today and the Etemenanki of Babylon whose foundation was excavated in 1899

Why Babel is not ancient history but the permanent condition of human civilization whenever it organizes itself around its own name rather than God’s

How Pentecost in Acts 2 is the exact mirror image of Babel and why every element of the Babel story finds its reversal at Pentecost

The name above every name in Philippians 2 as God’s answer to let us make a name for ourselves

This lesson will change how you read Genesis 11 and how you recognize the Babel spirit operating in the world around you today.

This is part of our ongoing verse by verse Genesis Bible study series covering creation, the image of God, the Fall, the flood, the table of nations, and the entire sweep of early Genesis with Hebrew word studies, ancient Near Eastern background, early Church Fathers, modern apologetics, and New Testament connections in every lesson.

Previous lesson   Genesis 10:21 through 32   The Line of Shem and the Road to Abraham

Next lesson   Genesis 11:5 through 9   The Lord Came Down

Watch the full lesson at the link below and share it with someone who has never thought carefully about what Babel was really saying.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

And welcome back to our study. Before we get started today, I just want to give a quick reminder. If you can, a couple of different things. If you could go to our website, drnathanlock.com, just review that, share that with your friends. The place uh there's a place on there to order our books that we have out, one uh leading in student ministry and one on the history of the gospel and evidence for why we believe what we believe. That would really help us out. If you could go to YouTube and subscribe to that, and then of course follow us on all of our social media pages, on uh Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok. It really, really helps out whenever you're doing all of those things. It um it allows the content to go just a little bit further. So today we're gonna be in Genesis chapter 11. We're gonna be in verses one through four, and we're gonna look at one language, one brick, one brick, one name, and the anatomy of human rebellion. Um and and as we go through this, as we as we contemplate what we finished in Genesis chapter 10 so far, we've watched 70 nations spread across the earth from the three sons of Noah. And now we step into Genesis chapter 11, and Genesis chapter 11 immediately turns the camera around. Remember that in Genesis chapter 10, uh, we were shown uh the end of the state. 70 people, uh 70 lands with 70 languages. And Genesis chapter 11 takes us back to show us what happened before, and kind of in the middle of all of that, before the languages were confused, before the people were scattered, there was a moment, a specific moment in a specific place when humanity made a collective decision. Let us build, let us make a name, let us not be scattered. Three sentences, three declarations, all of human independence, and the most direct act of collective rebellion against God's design in all of early Genesis. So today we're gonna go slowly through just the first four verses of Genesis 11, because in these four verses, I believe they deserve that kind of attention because every word is deeply theological. Every phrase is a statement about the nature of human pride and the direction of human rebellion. And when you understand the Hebrew and the ancient Near Eastern background, you'll never read the Tower of Babel the same again. So let's read Genesis chapter 11, which is gonna be in the first four verses. It starts off as this, Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. It came about as they journeyed east that 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 used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. And they said, Come let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name. Otherwise, we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. Now, in these four verses, again, we see one language, one plane, one decision, and what I believe the most be the most one of the most revealing statements about the human heart in the entire Old Testament. So let's start with verse one. When the whole earth had one language, the chapter opens with a statement of unity. Now the whole earth used the same language, the same words. Two phrases are used in the Hebrew here: one lip, one language, one set of words, or possibly one shared vocabulary. And the doubling there is deliberate, not just the same general language, but the same specific words. In other words, perfect communication between everyone, every person on earth speaking the same tongue with the same vocabulary. Now, this raises a question that we address just briefly in Genesis chapter 10. In Genesis chapter 10, verse 5, and Genesis chapter 10, verse 20, and verse 31, they all refer to the nations according to their languages, plural languages. And in Genesis chapter 11, verse 1, it says the whole earth had one language. As we note it, Genesis chapter 10 shows the end state of the dispersion. Genesis chapter 11 zooms back to show the moment before this all happened. And so the languages of Genesis chapter 10 are the result of Babel in chapter 11. In other words, Genesis chapter 11 is the explanation of how the languages got there. And Moses is not contradicting himself. As we mentioned in an earlier lesson, he is using the Hebrew technique of a telescoping narrative, showing the destination in chapter 10, and then explaining the journey in chapter 11. So here's the question: What was the original language? This is a question people always ask. What was the language spoken before Babel? The Bible doesn't tell us explicitly what it was, but there are a lot of traditions. An ancient Jewish tradition, as we mentioned in chapter 10, held that the original language was Hebrew, and that Eber's house preserved it through Babel, and that Abraham was taught the Hebrew language, and it became the language of divine revelation, the Old Testament. Other scholars have proposed languages like Akkadian and Sumerian, and are possibly languages that preceded all other known languages. The honest answer is we don't know what it was, and the text doesn't tell us. What we do know, what the text does say, is that the unity of the language became a vehicle for a unified rebellion. And God's response was to use language itself, the very gift that enabled that rebellion, as the instrument of his corrective judgment. Now, here's a theological observation I believe worth sitting with for a while. Perfect unity of language sounds like a good thing. We celebrate communication, we we value being understood, we long to be part of a community. And yet Genesis chapter 11 shows that perfect human unity without reference to God is actually dangerous. God Himself acknowledges this in verse 6, where he says, And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language, and this is what they have begun to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. One language, one people, nothing's impossible. And that's an extraordinary statement. God is acknowledging that unified humanity is capable of anything, and it's genuinely dangerous. The problem with Babel was not that the people were capable, the problem was that their capability was directed away from God and toward their own names and their own glory. That means unity in the wrong direction is not a virtue. It becomes an amplifier, making whatever direction humanity has chosen more effective and more entrenched. And that's worth applying in our own world. We talk about things like global communication and shared language through technology. We have unprecedented human coordination. And all of it is morally neutral until you ask this question in which direction is it unified and in whose name? And the direction matters. Notice this scripture it says, it came about as they journeyed east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. I want you to notice this. This is the direction in which they're headed. They journeyed east. In Genesis, the direction east carries a consistent theological weight. And it's worth tracing before we go any further. This is the direction in which the people of Babel were heading. Genesis chapter 3, verse 24, God drove Adam and uh out of the place of him and placed him east of the garden. Genesis chapter 4, verse 16, Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Notice it's a constant eastern expansion. Genesis chapter 13, verse 11 says that Lot separated from Adam and journeyed eastward toward Sodom. And so east here is the direction of the wrong choice. Eastward journey in Genesis is a movement away from God. Every westward, westward return is a movement back to God. And the builders of Babel, they journeyed east. Moses is telling us something before a single brick is laid. The direction of this journey is the direction of exile. It's the direction of Cain. It's the direction of a departure from the presence of God. And once there, they found a plane and they settled there. The word settled means to sit down, to establish oneself, to make a permanent home. This was not a temporary camp. This was a decision they made to stay. They journeyed east, they found a plain, they settled, and they started building. And the plain they found was in the land of Shynar. Now we've been here before. Genesis chapter 10, verse 10 told us that the beginning of Nimrod's kingdom was Babel and Eric and Akkad and Kalnah in the land of Shinar. The same land, the same city, Nimrod's land was Nimrod's city. Genesis chapter 11 is not introducing a new location. It's zooming back in on the center of Nimrod's empire to show us what happened there. The Tower of Babel is not a spontaneous grassroots project. It is the fullest expression of the Nimrod spirit, the empire builder, the mighty hunter before the Lord, the man whose name means rebellion, reaching its most explicit and ambitious form. Shinar in ancient sources correspond to what we call Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Specifically the southern part of that region, ancient Sumner and Akkad. Now, this is often called the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of cities, the land where human pride first organized itself into an empire. The plain of Shinor was flat and featureless. It had no natural mountains, no stone, no elevation, which makes what they decided to build all the more significant. Now we we come to the first of the two let us come statements in this passage. And both of them were loaded with theological meaning. First they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly. Come, let us. Hold on to those words because this is mankind. This is humanity speaking. In Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, God said, Let us make man in our image. The divine let us is the triune God in a creative council. In Genesis chapter 11, verse 3, humanity says, Come, let us make bricks. The human let us, humanity in a rebellious council, mimicking the language of divine creation without reference to the divine creator. And this is one of the most profound literary contrasts in Genesis. The builders of Babel are doing something God does. They are creating, they are building, they are using collective language of shared purpose, but God is nowhere in their conversation. He is not consulted, he is not honored, come let us, without any reference to the one who first said, Let us make man in our image. Now, the the detail in verse 3 is not incidental. It says they use brick for stone and they use tar for mortar. In the ancient Near East, stone was the building material of permanence. The great temples and monuments of Egypt were built from stone. The enduring structures of the ancient world were stone structures. But in Mesopotamia, in the land of Shinar, there was no stone. There was this plain with no natural rock. So the builders of Babel had to make their own stone. They had to make their own brick. And the Hebrew word for brick comes from a root meaning white. Fired bricks were white. Man-made stone, human-manufactured, permanent, and they burned them thoroughly. The word for burn means to burn completely the fire intensely, which means these were not sun-dried mud bricks. These were kiln-fired bricks, the strongest building material available in the ancient world. And for the mortar, they used tar. The Hebrew word there is the same word used in Exodus chapter 2, verse 3, for the tar that sealed Moses' basket. The same material that protected Moses and this little ark here is used to build a monument of human pride. And so the builders of Babel, they were not primitive. They were actually somewhat sophisticated. And they used the best materials available and they fired their bricks to maximum strength. And this was a serious construction project by capable, resourceful, organized people, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. The problem at Babel was never human incompetence, it was human competence directed away from God. Now, here's where the ancient Near Eastern background transforms how we understand this passage. When Moses says they plan to build a tower whose top will reach into heaven, every person who studied or would have read this with the ancient Near Eastern knowledge knew exactly what was being said. It was a ziggurat. And a ziggurat is where these great-shaped temple towers in ancient Mesopotamia, they dominated the skyline of every major Sumerian and Babylonian city. They were massive, some reaching over 200 feet high. And they were built for very specific religious purposes. They weren't built so humans could climb up to God. They were built so that their gods could come down to earth. And in the Mesopotamian religion, the ziggurat was the cosmic mountain. It was the meeting point between heaven and earth. It was the place where the divine presence descended and received worship to bless the city. And so the builders of Babel wanted to build exactly that. Not a stairway to heaven so humanity could ascend up, but a landing pad for divinity, a structure that would make their city the center of the cosmos so that their gods could come down. And the theological problem is not the architecture, it's the theology behind it. They wanted to define where God comes and goes. They wanted to control the terms of divine access. They wanted heaven on their terms in their city. They were making their own religion. This is the oldest religious impulse in the human heart. Not the rejection of God outright, but the attempt to manage him, to put him where we want him, to make the sacred serve our purposes. Now here's something that strengthens the historical credibility of the Babel account enormous enormously. The great ziggurat of Ur, dated to approximately 2100 BC. It still stands today in modern Iraq. It is a massive three-tiered structure of kiln-fired brick, exactly the kind of structure that Genesis chapter 11, verse 3 describes, burned thoroughly, built on a plain with no natural stone. The ziggurat of Babylon is described in ancient texts as a seven-tiered tower. There's a Greek historian named Herodotus who visited Babylon in the 5th century BC and described a massive tower at its center. He was describing what Genesis chapter 11 records. A world-famous archaeologist, Robert Coldway, excavated the site of ancient Babylon beginning around 1899. And he found the ziggurat, a massive square platform of 300 feet on each side, the foundation of the tower that Genesis 11 describes. The Tower of Babel, I'm telling you all that, so you'll know this. The Tower of Babel is not mythology, it is a historically attested construction project in a historically attested city and a historically attested region. The archaeological record of the Mesopotamian religious structures and constructions confirms every detail that Genesis gives us. Now, let's look at the second, come let us. And this one is the most revealing statement in the entire passage. They said, Come let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad all over the face of the earth. There's three declarations here. Each one is a direct theological statement, and together they form the most complete picture of human pride and rebellion in all of Genesis. Declaration one was this: a tower whose top will reach the heavens. And the Hebrew is literally its head in the heavens. And it's a Hebrew idiom. Having a person's head or having one's head in the heavens was an expression of extreme height and ambition. It doesn't necessarily mean a literal physical tower touching the sky. What it does mean is a tower of extraordinary height, whose purpose and uh pretension is heavenward. This is the language of divine aspiration. If you remember in Isaiah chapter 14, verse 13 through 14, the king of Babylon says, I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars of God, I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High. So the builders of Babel are speaking the language of Isaiah chapter 14, the language of one who wants to ascend where God is, uh, who wants to define the meeting point between heaven and earth, who wants the top of his tower to be in the heavens. And Isaiah later connects this aspiration directly to Lucifer, the fallen one, the desire to ascend to God's level without ever actually submitting to God's authority. This is the oldest temptation in the universe. And the builders of Babel are expressing it in brick and tar. Now, look at the second declaration. Let us make for ourselves a name. And this is the heart of the Babel project. And it's a direct reversal of what God will say to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, verse 2, when he says, And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and so you shall be a blessing. I can't wait to get to those lessons with you. I will make your name great. God says that to Abraham. Let us make for ourselves a name, is what the builders of Babel said before Abraham is called. There's two approaches to greatness, two sources of a name. Babel, we will make our own name through our own effort, through our own building, through our own organization. And Abraham, God will make his name great through a promise, through a covenant, and through a purpose. And the contrast is the entire difference between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. Now, the Hebrew word name in Hebrew is the same word for Noah's son, Shem, through whom the line of promise of God travels toward Abraham. The builders of Babel wanted greatness, they wanted Shem, uh reputation, fame on their own terms. And God's response was to build his Shem, his name, his reputation, his fame through a man who would receive it as a gift. And this is one of the great ironies found in the book of Genesis. The builders of Babel tried to make a name for themselves, and their name became synonymous with confusion and pride and failure. Abraham never tried to make a name for himself, and his name became the foundation of faith of three world religions and the father of all who would believe. You do not make your name great. Let this be a lesson to all of those who are in occupational ministry, who are serving, who are working so hard to build their reputation and their names. You don't make your name great. God does. And he does it through surrender, not through manipulation, not through construction. Now, declaration three is this lest we be scattered. Otherwise, we'll be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. And here Here is the third declaration, and it's the most revealing of all. Because what the builders of Babel were afraid of was exactly what God had commanded them to do. If you go back to Genesis chapter 9, verse 1, it says, And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. In other words, spread out, be scattered. God's command was to go out. The builders of Babel's greatest fear was that they would be scattered. They were afraid of exactly what God had told them to do. And their building project was designed to prevent what God had told them to do. This is the clearest possible statement of what the Tower of Babel was really about. It was not primarily about architecture, it was not primarily about religion. It was about refusing God's command to fill the earth. God said, go everywhere. The people of Babel said, no, we're going to stay here. God said, be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. The people of Babel said, let us build a city so that we have a center to come back to. God said, scatter. Babel said, not if we can help it. The tower was the architectural expression of disobedience. It was a monument to the human determination to stay where God said go and to gather where God said scatter. Now, let me offer one more observation before we close this section. I want you to look how many times the word ourselves appears in verse 4. Let us build for ourselves a city. Let us make for ourselves a name for ourselves, for ourselves. And the unstated assumption underneath means that it's not for God. This is the theological diagnosis of the heart of Babel. Not the absence of God. They were still building something they thought reached toward heaven. Not atheism. They had not denied God's existence. They had replaced God, catch this, with themselves as the center of purpose. Who is the city for? Wasn't for God, it was for them. The name was for themselves, the project was for themselves. God was an afterthought at best, an obstacle in their way at worst. And this is what theologians uh often refer to as the soul curved in on itself. Augustine used this phrase to describe the fundamental posture of sin. Not necessarily the dramatic sins of violence and corruption, uh, though those were in the pre-flood world, of course, but the more subtle, the more respectable sin of organizing your entire life around yourself, for ourselves, for ourselves. The two most revealing words in Genesis chapter 11, verse 4. Now, I want to make an apologetic and pastoral argument here. Most people read the Tower of Babel as a story about something that happened once, a long time ago, like a Star Wars reading, uh, to a group of ancient people on a plain in Mesopotamia. Babel is not ancient history. Babel is the permanent condition of the human heart, the human civilization, apart from God. Every generation builds its own tower. The materials may change, but the project is always the same. The Tower of Babel was built with brick and tar. The modern tower is built with technology and wealth and power and sometimes media. The builders of Babel wanted their top in the heavens. Every totalitarian ideology has promised a utopia, a heaven on earth built by human hands. The builders of Babel said, let us make a name for ourselves. Every celebrity culture, every pursuit of fame, every social media platform built around self-promotion is a babel with a screen. The builders of Babel said, lest we be scattered. Every empire that has tried to force unity through uniformity, political, cultural, religious, is a Babel with an army. The Babel pattern is human beings with great capability organizing their capabilities around themselves rather than God, building something designed to make their name great, and resisting the scattering, the diversity, the dependence, the submission that God designed. That pattern appears in every century, and it ends the same way every single time. Now, here's a specifically modern application worth developing. Our culture that we live in now has made unity an absolute virtue. Unity is celebrated without qualification. Division is treated as a great sin. Come together, break down barriers, build bridges, be one people. And there's something true in that impulse. We are one human family. And I've said this many times: racism and tribalism are real evils. Unity in the right direction around the right things can be good. But Genesis chapter 11 warns us that unity in itself is an idol. Unity around the wrong center, around human pride, around human achievement, around anything and freedom from God is not a virtue. It's Babylon. The question is never simply, are we unified? The question is always, are we, what are we unified around? And in whose name? A church can be unified around a personality rather than Christ. A nation can be unified around pride rather than justice. A movement can be unified around an ideology rather than truth. And all of it is Babel, regardless of how impressive the tower looks. Now, I want to be clear about one more thing before we close out this lesson. The answer to the Babel impulse is not individualism. It's not isolation. It's not every man for himself and scattering for his own sake. God's design was always community. It was always families and nations and languages and people and relationships with one another. The problem at Babel was not that they were together. It was what they were together for. The answer to Babel is community centered on God, unity around his name rather than our names, building for his glory rather than your reputation or your power that won't last long. And willing to be scattered, to go wherever he sends, rather than gathering ourselves around our own comfort and our own security. Abraham will model this perfectly in Genesis chapter 12. We see in Abraham that he leads, he scatters from his homeland, he goes where God says go. He trusts God to make his name great. Abraham in chapter 12 is the anti-Babel. And his life is the answer to every tower human beings have built for themselves. Now, let's very quickly look at a New Testament fulfillment. We're going to develop this more fully in our next lesson when we look at the confusion of languages, but I want to plant a seed here because it begins in these four verses. At Babel, remember, humanity said, Come let us. They gathered, they built, they sought a name, and they refused to scatter. And God confused their language and scattered them. But at Pentecost in Acts chapter 2, God did something extraordinary. We read the first forces, first four verses of Acts chapter 2. Said, When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting, and there appeared to them tongues as a fire, distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit was giving them utterance. And so what you have at Babel, you have one language being divided into many languages. At Pentecost, you have many languages that were heard as one. Later you're going to see when Peter preaches, every person heard in their own native tongue. At Babel, the people were gathered to make their name great. At Pentecost, the people were gathered to proclaim the name of Jesus. At Babel, the people refused to scatter. At Pentecost, the disciples were commissioned to scatter to every nation. Babel and Pentecost are mirror images of one another. Everything Babel did, Pentecost undoes. And the reversal begins not with human effort, but with the descent of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit who moved over the waters in Genesis chapter 1 moved over the flood waters in chapter 8, now descends again at Pentecost and began to undo what Babel had done. The builders of Babel said, Let us make for ourselves a name. The New Testament answers that declaration with one of the most important Christological passages in all of Scripture. Paul wrote in Philippians chapter 2, verses 9 through 11, for this reason also, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, the name above every name. The builders of Babel wanted a name so great that it would prevent their scattering. But God gave his son names so great that every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth would bow before it. The builders of Babel said, Let us make for ourselves a name. God said, I will give my son a name above every name. The name that Babel reached for and can never grasp belongs to the one who descended, the one who humbled himself, the one who became a servant, the one who died on the cross. God highly exalted him. You do not build your way to the name above every name. You and I can simply receive it as a free gift through the one who already has it. Now here's what I want to leave you with today. The builders of Babel, they were not villains twirling their mustaches with evil laughs. They were capable, organized, resourceful people who decided that their capability, their organization, and their resources were for themselves. And that is the Babel temptation, not a dramatic rebellion, just a quiet, brick-by-brick decision to build your life around your own name rather than God's. And the question, Genesis chapter 11, verse 4, ask every one of us is the same question that I pray we're asking ourselves. In whose name are we building? Our next lesson will be in Genesis chapter 11, verses 5 through 9. And there we're going to see the Lord came down to see the city. We're going to see the divine counsel, let us go down. We're going to see the confusion of languages, the scattering that God said would not happen, uh is now happening. And the city that wanted to make a name for itself called forever by the name that means confusion. Again, I hope that you've enjoyed today's lesson. I hope that you've learned something new. Until next time, I hope that you have a blessed time.