The Tower of Babel
Chapter 11:1-9
Babel is a name that came to mean confusion, and illustrates humanity's rebellion against God: having been instructed to fill the earth (9:1), about a century after the Flood the descendants of Noah left for the West, settled on a plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and decided to build a city and a tower going up to heaven, to become famous and prevent their spread throughout the land.
In the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers several ruins of brick towers have been found built thousands of years ago similar to the Tower of Babel – they are called ziggurats by archaeologists. Their construction is solid, funnel-shaped, with an external walkway circling to the summit where there is an altar for sacrifices. The tower of Babel was probably their predecessor, serving as a model for those built later.
It not only expressed an arrogant, rebellious attitude of humanity against God, but was also a religious symbol, like the ziggurats that copied it, where people worshiped the sun, moon, and stars (Nimrod, great grandson of Noah, and his wife Semiramis came to be deified and represented by the sun and moon in the Babylonian religion and others that derived from it).
As they all spoke the same language, with the intelligence and natural resources they had and the desire of aggrandizement, their progress would have been swift in the path of self-sufficiency and material comfort, doing everything they wanted - and their heart continued to be evil, rejecting their Creator.
The LORD could not allow this rebellion against Him to proliferate in this way, and so introduced a barrier, which proved very effective to stop the progress of humanity: he confused the language of each one, so that they could not understand each other - a kind of gift of tongues without an interpreter! As a result, humanity was divided and dispersed over the earth, and the construction of the city was stopped forever. Even today it is the languages that separate people. Mankind is now again gathering around a language - English - propelled by science and cybernetics, no doubt another sign that the end of this age is near.
We cannot stop thinking about the second time God intervened in human language: on the day of Pentecost and on the three other occasions in which the Bible teaches that the first components in Christ's church from these four initial groups began to speak in the languages of other people present there (they did not speak in an unknown tongue, as some think): the opposite of what happened at Babel.
It was as if God were saying "I have good news to give you in your own language." This is what He has done, and today the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other book, including hundreds of languages of primitive tribes. The Gospel is for all mankind, and the gift of tongues was intended to show that the confusion of tongues in Babel, now has its remedy in the union of those who are saved through the redemption that is in Christ. ".. . I saw, and behold a great multitude ... of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb ..." (Revelation 7:9).
R David Jones
1 Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.
3 Then they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar.
4 And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
6 And the LORD said, "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.
9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Book of Genesis chapter 11 verses 1 t0 9