1And it was: all the earth was one language and the same words.
2And it was when they were traveling from the east: and they found a valley in the land of Shinar and lived there.
3And they said to one another, “Come on, let’s make bricks and fire them.” And they had brick for stone, and they had bitumen for mortar.
4And they said, “Come on, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower, and its top will be in the skies, and we’ll make ourselves a name, or else we’ll scatter over the face of all the earth.”
11:4. we’ll make ourselves a name. The story of the tower of Babylon has its ambiguity at its center. It tells of an attempt by humanity to build a tower whose top is in the sky, but it never tells what they will do when they finish the tower, what is meant by “make ourselves a name,” or why they fear being scattered if they do not have this tower. When YHWH sees the tower He is described as concerned that “now nothing that they’ll scheme to do will be precluded from them.” Their actions appear to be an act of rebellion of some sort, and in this sense the episode fits with those of Adam and Eve, Cain, and the flood, i.e., that humans as a species are continuously in conflict with the initial “good” state of creation. And so God disperses them and gives them languages that make them less intelligible to one another and thereby less united. The story thus prepares the way for a shift in the narrative away from dealing with the fate of the species and, instead, dealing with individuals. At the same time, this narrative provides the etiology of languages and of the dispersion of humans all over the earth. It also provides a Hebrew etiology for the name Babylon (Hebrew bbl) “because YHWH babbled (Hebrew Ml) the language of all the earth” (11:9). This would have come as a surprise to the people of Babylon, who understood the name to derive from bab-ilu, the “Gate of God.”
5And YHWH went down to see the city and the tower that the children of humankind had built.
6And YHWH said, “Here, they’re one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they’ve begun to do. And now nothing that they’ll scheme to do will be precluded from them.
7Come on, let’s go down and babble their language there so that one won’t understand another’s language.”
8And YHWH scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9On account of this its name was called Babylon, because YHWH babbled the language of all the earth there, and YHWH scattered them from there over the face of all the earth.
10These are the records of Shem: Shem was a hundred years old, and he fathered Arpachshad, two years after the flood.
11And Shem lived after his fathering Arpachshad five hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
12And Arpachshad lived thirty-five years, and he fathered She-lah.
13And Arpachshad lived after his fathering Shelah three years and four hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
14And Shelah lived thirty years, and he fathered Eber.
15And Shelah lived after his fathering Eber three years and four hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
16And Eber lived forty-three years, and he fathered Peleg.
17And Eber lived after his fathering Peleg thirty years and four hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
18And Peleg lived thirty years, and he fathered Reu.
19And Peleg lived after his fathering Reu nine years and two hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
20And Reu lived thirty-two years, and he fathered Serug.
21And Reu lived after his fathering Serug seven years and two hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
22And Serug lived thirty years, and he fathered Nahor.
23And Serug lived after his fathering Nahor two hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
24And Nahor lived twenty-nine years, and he fathered Terah.
25And Nahor lived after his fathering Terah nineteen years and a hundred years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
26And Terah lived seventy years, and he fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
27And these are the records of Terah: Terah had fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran had fathered Lot.
28And Haran died in the lifetime of Terah, his father, in the land of his birthplace, in Ur of the Chaldees.
29And Abram and Nahor took wives. Abram’s wife’s name was Sarai, and Nahor’s wife’s name was Milcah, daughter of Haran—father of Milcah and father of Iscah.
30And Sarai was infertile. She did not have a child.
31And Terah took Abram, his son, and Lot, son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law, the wife of Abram, his son; and they went with them from Ur of the Chaldees to go to the land of Canaan. And they came as far as Haran, and they stayed there.
32And Terah’s days were five years and two hundred years. And Terah died in Haran.
