Commentaries:
This is the legacy of Nimrod (which means "let us revolt"): a place he called Babilu, called by the Hebrews "Babel." It was a place of revolution. It was the administrative center of his revolution against God, and thus we can see why some interpreters translate that word "before" in Genesis 10:9 as "against." Even though "before" is literally correct, Nimrod was standing before the Lord as an enemy. God's scattering of the builders reveals Nimrod's, and therefore Babylon's, attitude toward God.
From this point Babylon became a worldwide political, military, economic, and religious system bearing the same basic attitudes as its founder. It can be a nation or a system, but its core characteristic that is against the Lord. Babylon became the Bible's code word for what its New Testament writers call "the world." As they used the Greek term cosmos, it is an organized worldwide system opposed to God. Just as surely as Nimrod was opposed to God, Babylon is an organized worldwide system opposed to God. It is a culture that is anti-Christ, anti-God, and it is everywhere!
This is what the context shows in Genesis 11. The people scattered from the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, taking much of the antagonistic-to-God culture with them, and each language group adapted it to some degree to their ethnic traditions. Undoubtedly, each group altered it somewhat, but secular evidence reveals a common strain connecting all civilizations worldwide to the Tigris-Euphrates region. It is the womb of man's civilization.
It took centuries for the people to migrate to and to settle in their new lands, but occur it did. And so the pattern of worldly government after the Flood was established in Genesis 10 and Genesis 11. God even foreshadows in Genesis 6 that it would rise again: "There were giants [Nephilim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward." Nimrod was the greatest of those Nephilim.
Even though this spread worldwide, not everybody migrated. Some people remained in Babylon, and through the centuries, they became the Babylonian nation. The Chaldeans dominated them. Babylon was the name of their capital city. Hammurabi was one of their great early kings, but later, Nebuchadnezzar became Babylon's greatest king. He was given the dream of a great image, and was told by Daniel that he, Nebuchadnezzar, represented the head of gold (Daniel 2:38).
Each of the other portions of that image represented powerful kingdoms that, in terms of time, would follow Babylon in dominating the western world through the centuries: Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. They did not dominate the entire world—perhaps they could have—but there is no doubt they dominated the part of the world that the Bible is concerned with, and that portion of the world is the one that the Israelitish descendents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived in.
But because the head represented Babylon—and the head directs the entire body—the image in Daniel 2 also shows the continuation of the same general Babylonish system right to the end of the system represented by the feet and the toes. In other words, that image shows that the pattern established under Nimrod continues right on down until today.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Where Is the Beast? (Part 2)
The people were uniting themselves in disagreement against God, led by the arch-criminal and mastermind of this project, Nimrod. This time, instead of wiping them out in death as He had done through the Flood, God permitted them to live, but He segregated them by confusing their means of communication. In the end, they are separated from one another. All their glorious plans of building a great city and tower had to be abandoned because they could not communicate with each other.
Another tragic resulted from what happened in Genesis 11. All of these people who were scattered over the face of the earth were also separated from the holy line—a family through which God almost exclusively worked, that began with Shem. Actually, the line began after the death of Abel with Seth, the son of Adam, and came down through Enoch to Noah and from Noah to Shem. From Shem the descent finally produced Abraham. After Babel, the scattered people were, in fact, not only separated from that holy line, but also from God's Word, which this family preserved and passed down. This was another tragic result of their sin!
John W. Ritenbaugh
Division, Satan, Humility
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Verse 6 clearly indicates that God confused the language and scattered the people at Babel in order to restrain the misguided inventive genius of man! When human beings come to freely speak one another's languages, and share scientific and technological knowledge as they are doing today, then virtually anything man's mind can conceive of would be possible for him to achieve—witness his exploration of planets and the invention of weapons capable of destroying all life.
By confusing the language and scattering the people at Babel, God prevented man from accomplishing long ago what he has done today. It was not yet within God's plan to allow man to advance that far that soon!
Why Study the Bible in the Space Age?
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Other commentary entries containing this verse:
Acts 2:6-11
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