T HE DIVINE TRANSGRESSIONS OF GENESIS 3 AND 6 ARE PART OF A THEOLOGICAL prelude that frames the rest of the Bible. These two episodes, along with a third we’ll cover in this chapter, are core components of the supernatural worldview of ancient Israelites and the Jewish community in which Christianity was born.
Taken together, these episodes are a theological morality tale about the futility and danger of trying to recover Eden on any terms other than those God has set. After Eden, God still intended to dwell with humanity. But there would be opposition. Divine beings in service to Yahweh could defect. Enemies of Yahweh and his rule, from the human to the divine to something in between, lurked over the horizon. Heaven and earth were destined to be reunited, but it would be a titanic struggle.
In the meantime, any effort to recapture God’s original intent apart from God’s own strategy and will for restoring Eden would end in disaster. There would be no Edenic utopia revived by human beings or other gods. It would be a painful lesson.
There are several features of Genesis 6 that an Israelite would have picked up on that informed his reading of other passages in the Torah. Verse 4 is especially noteworthy:
The Nephilim were upon the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of humankind, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty warriors that were from ancient times, men of renown.
The Nephilim are cast as “mighty warriors” ( gibborim ) and “men of renown”— literally, “men of the name ( shem ).” 1 The terms gibbor ( im ) and shem appear in several places in the Old Testament story. 2
Immediately after the flood, Nimrod (whose name most likely means “rebellion”) is called a gibbor . 3 Nimrod is cast as the progenitor of the civilizations of Assyria and Babylon (Gen 10:6–12). Once again, as with Genesis 6 , the Mesopotamian context is transparent. Assyria and Babylon are the two civilizations that will later destroy the dream of the earthly kingdom of God in Israel, dismantling, respectively, the northern kingdom (Israel) and southern kingdom (Judah).
The language is not coincidental. It links Babylon back to Genesis 6 and its divine transgression. The Nimrod description in Genesis 10 , in the so-called Table of Nations, is therefore a theological bridge between the violation of Genesis 6:1–4 and the next momentous event in the Torah that will frame the entire story of Israel. 4
The famous story of the building of the Tower of Babel is about much more than an ill-fated construction project and language confusion. The episode is at the heart of the Old Testament worldview. It was at Babylon where people sought to “make a name ( shem ) for themselves” by building a tower that reached to the heavens, the realm of the gods. The city is once again cast as the source of sinister activity and knowledge.
Genesis 11:1–9 reads:
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to each other, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone and they had tar for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches to the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 Then Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that humankind was building. 6 And Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people with one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. So now nothing that they intend to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand each other’s language.” 8 So Yahweh scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, for there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth, and there Yahweh scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
You’ll notice right away that there’s the same sort of “plural exhortation” going on in verse 7 as we saw in Genesis 1:26. The verse has Yahweh proclaiming, “Let us go down and confuse their language.” As was the case in Genesis 1:26, the plural announcement is followed by the actions of only one being, Yahweh: “So Yahweh scattered them” (11:8).
It’s at this point that most Bible readers presume there’s nothing more to think about. That’s because other Old Testament passages that speak of this event tend to be omitted from the discussion. The most important of these is Deuteronomy 32:8–9 ( ESV ):
8 When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
9 But the LORD ’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes how Yahweh’s dispersal of the nations at Babel resulted in his disinheriting those nations as his people. This is the Old Testament equivalent of Romans 1:18–25, a familiar passage wherein God “gave [humankind] over” to their persistent rebellion. The statement in Deuteronomy 32:9 that “the LORD ’s [i.e., Yahweh’s] portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” tips us off that a contrast in affection and ownership is intended. Yahweh in effect decided that the people of the world’s nations were no longer going to be in relationship to him. He would begin anew. He would enter into covenant relationship with a new people that did not yet exist: Israel.
The implications of this decision and this passage are crucial to understanding much of what’s in the Old Testament. 5
Most English Bibles do not read “according to the number of the sons of God” in Deuteronomy 32:8. Rather, they read “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” The difference derives from disagreements between manuscripts of the Old Testament. “Sons of God” is the correct reading, as is now known from the Dead Sea Scrolls. 6
Frankly, you don’t need to know all the technical reasons for why the “sons of God” reading in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is what the verse originally said. You just need to think a bit about the wrong reading, the “sons of Israel.” Deuteronomy 32:8–9 harks back to events at the Tower of Babel, an event that occurred before the call of Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel. This means that the nations of the earth were divided at Babel before Israel even existed as a people . It would make no sense for God to divide up the nations of the earth “according to the number of the sons of Israel” if there was no Israel. This point is also brought home in another way, namely by the fact that Israel is not listed in the Table of Nations.
So what happened to the other nations? What does it mean that they were apportioned as an inheritance according to the number of the sons of God?
As odd as it sounds, the rest of the nations were placed under the authority of members of Yahweh’s divine council. 7 The other nations were assigned to lesser elohim as a judgment from the Most High, Yahweh.
That this interpretation is sound is made clear by an explicit parallel passage, Deuteronomy 4:19–20. There Moses says to the Israelites:
19 And do this so that you do not lift your eyes toward heaven and observe the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of the heaven, and be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that Yahweh your God has allotted to all of the peoples under all of the heaven. 20 But Yahweh has taken you and brought you out from the furnace of iron, from Egypt, to be a people of inheritance to him, as it is this day.
Deuteronomy 4:19–20 is the other side of God’s punitive coin. Whereas in Deuteronomy 32:8–9 God apportioned or handed out the nations to the sons of God, here we are told God “allotted” the gods to those nations. God decreed, in the wake of Babel, that the other nations he had forsaken would have other gods besides himself to worship. It is as though God was saying, “If you don’t want to obey me, I’m not interested in being your god—I’ll match you up with some other god.” Psalm 82 , where we started our divine council discussion, echoes this decision. That psalm has Yahweh judging other elohim , sons of the Most High, for their corruption in administering the nations. The psalm ends with the psalmist pleading, “Rise up, O God, judge the earth, because you shall inherit all the nations.”
It might seem that God’s response at the tower of Babel incident was overly severe. But consider the context. The point is not that Yahweh was a glorified building inspector.
As we noted in an earlier chapter, gods were perceived to live on mountains. The tower of Babel is regarded by all scholars as one of Mesopotamia’s famous man-made sacred mountains—a ziggurat. Ziggurats were divine abodes, places where Mesopotamians believed heaven and earth intersected. 8 The nature of this structure makes evident the purpose in building it—to bring the divine down to earth.
The biblical writer wastes no time in linking this act to the earlier divine transgression of Genesis 6:1–4. That passage sought to portray the giant quasi-divine Babylonian culture heroes (the apkallus ) who survived the flood as “men of renown” or, more literally, “men of the name [ shem ].” Those who built the tower of Babel wanted to do so to “make a name [ shem ]” for themselves. The building of the tower of Babel meant perpetuating Babylonian religious knowledge and substituting the rule of Babel’s gods for rule by Yahweh.
Yahweh would have none of it. After the flood God had commanded humanity once again to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen 9:1). These words reiterated the original Edenic intention. But instead of obeying and having Yahweh be their god, the people gathered to build the tower. The theological messaging of the story is clear. Humanity had shunned Yahweh and his plan to restore Eden through them, so he would shun them and start again.
While the decision was harsh, the other nations are not completely forsaken. Yahweh disinherited the nations, and in the very next chapter of Genesis, he calls Abram out of—you guessed it—Mesopotamia. Again, this is not accidental. Yahweh would take a man from the heart of the rebellion and make a new nation, Israel. But in his covenant with Abram, God said that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through Abram, through his descendants (Gen 12:1–3).
The covenant language reveals that it was God’s intention, right on the heels of his decision to punish the nations, that the Israelites would serve as a conduit for their return to the true God. This is one of the reasons Israel is later called “a kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:6). Israel would be in covenant with “the God of gods” and the “Lord of lords” (Deut 10:17). Those disinherited would be in spiritual bondage to the corrupt sons of God. But Israel would be a conduit, a mediator. Yahweh would leave a spiritual bread-crumb trail back to himself. That path would wind through Israel and, ultimately, Israel’s messiah.
From the fateful decision at Babel onward, the story of the Old Testament is about Israel versus the disinherited nations, and Yahweh versus the corrupt, rebel elohim of those nations. The division of the nations and their allotment under other elohim is behind the scenes in all sorts of places in biblical history. I’ll give you a glimpse of what I mean in the next chapter.