What would it be like to be working on a project and, all of a sudden, you can’t understand anyone else? And what’s the joke about Babylon in Hebrew? We’re going to talk about the Bible and its tendency to make Dad jokes in the original languages. And we’re also going to tackle the question of whether or not it is okay to settle down, or are we always supposed to be on the move?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will be in Genesis 11 again.
This is probably the last part of our series on the Tower of Babel, and each week we read a bit more but this week we are going to read the whole thing. The crazy thing about this story is that for as famous as it is, it is absolutely never mentioned again which, of course, makes it even more mysterious. However, we also have to consider that the reason it isn’t ever mentioned again is because God wanted us to learn the story of all the nations and their languages and that besides that, the story isn’t really related to much of anything else in the future. If you think about it, that’s more than enough because there are a lot of nations and a lot of different languages. In fact, right now there are over seven thousand languages on earth—is that crazy or what? I don’t care how smart anyone is, no one except God can possibly know them all! I have trouble with just one, personally. I bet at least some of you know two or more languages, lots of people do. Just not me—I learn stuff and then forget it. It’s just awful.
11 The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. 2 As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make oven-fired bricks.” (They used brick for stone and asphalt for mortar.) 4 And they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let’s make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered throughout the earth.” 5 Then the Lord came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building. 6 The Lord said, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let’s go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 Therefore it is called Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth.
Wow, seems kinda drastic, right? Last week we talked about the dangers of getting ahead of ourselves and in over our head, which are idioms (and you know I love idioms) which mean that we’re getting ourselves into trouble that we won’t be able to handle. God says that they will be able to do anything they set their minds to do and for whatever reason, He has decided that isn’t a good thing. God knows best. He loves us. And He gets in our way sometimes to stop us from making mistakes. I only wish He did it all the time because I have made some real doozies and He let me do it. Or maybe I wasn’t listening—that might be the case too. I can be a real gooberhead sometimes. Now, what’s the best way to get someone to stop doing something—by just telling them to stop, right? Wait, did that work with Adam and Eve when God told them not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Nope, not really. How about when Cain was so angry and God told him that he needed to stop what he was doing? Not then either. We really don’t like it when anyone tells us to stop and not even when it is God telling us, and not even when we know He is right and we just don’t care because we want to do what we want to do. Well, I guess what they were doing was bad enough and dangerous enough that God couldn’t just tell them no, He had to make sure that they would stop—He had to make sure that they had no other choice. Sometimes He has to do that with us too, and it is never a fun thing when it gets to that point. Let’s see what He does with these city and tower builders who are determined to make a name for themselves and to keep everyone all in one place:
7 Come, let’s go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Oh dang, that’s really serious. No one is going to get hurt or anything but one of two things are going to happen—either they all spoke the same language and now all of a sudden there will be a ton of different languages, or they already had many different languages depending on where they came from but also had a language, an international language, a common language that everyone knew; one they could all understand and use when they needed to talk with people outside of their own tribes but all of a sudden they won’t know that language anymore. It depends on when Genesis 10, the chapter that told us all about the sons of Ham, Shem and Japheth who were divided into their lands, clans, nations, and languages happened. If chapter ten came before the Tower (and the Bible doesn’t always put things in the order they happened), then they already had all those languages but if chapter eleven came first, they still only had one language.
No matter which came first, this would have been very alarming. But you might not have noticed the really strange thing about this—God is saying “let’s go down.” Who is He talking to? The first time He went down there, it seemed like He was alone. But now it seems as though He is inviting someone else or many someone else’s to go down with Him. Now, the whole reason that people built Ziggurats in the first place, if that is what this is, is so that their gods could come down to bless them and this will be the second time that God is coming down so it kinda worked. The first time He just looked and now the second time He is going to do something so that they won’t be able to cooperate anymore. Only this time, He says “let us go down.” And a lot of very smart people have a lot of ideas about this. Some people think that God was talking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Others think that maybe God was talking to Himself because kings used to call themselves “us” or “we” as though they are more than one person. But, the kings and queens in Europe have only been doing that for about nine hundred years and this was more like five thousand years ago. But there is another interesting possibility, because we see in the Bible that God often talks to His angels who are in His throne room. People who are experts at studying the Bible call them the Divine Council. A council is a group of people who help someone else make decisions or who help them to get things done. The President has a council, and so does the Prime Minister, called cabinets, and every leader who has ever lived. Everyone needs help. Except for God but in the Bible, it seems like He enjoys talking things out with His angels and asking them what should be done and who should do it. We see them in Job, and the Psalms, and in I Kings 22.
And you might be thinking, “Why on earth would God ask anyone anything if He already knows everything and doesn’t particularly need help?” The answer is that we don’t know, but maybe God just enjoys the company and conversation. The Bible tells us that God loves to be in relationships with humans so why not angels too? Do you remember Him walking in the Garden with Adam and Eve? Do you remember that Enoch walked with God and so God took him away, to be with Him, I guess. God also spent a ton of time in the Tent of Meeting with Moses. God doesn’t need company but He seems to love it. I know He loves it when you talk to Him and no matter what language you speak, He totally understands and He also hears you when all you can do is think. I mean, not everyone can talk, you know, but He still hears us when we call Him whether we do it with our outside voice or our inside voice!
8 So from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth, and they stopped building the city.
Just think if this happened at your school or your church or in a group you belong to. You have this big project and the instructions are written out for you and different people are doing different jobs to get the project done. And it is very complicated and you all have to lift heavy things and if you aren’t careful then you or someone else is going to get hurt. But you are cooperating, you know? Like, “Hey Alice, can you help me lift this up there?” or “Jerry, please hold this down while I cut it.” And because you all understand one another, the job is getting done very quickly and everyone is feeling really good about the team effort. But then, all of a sudden, something happens and no one can understand each other and no one can read the instructions either. Everyone sounds like they are speaking gibberish and of course, everyone would just flat-out panic. I would totally panic, I would be scared out of my mind. I wouldn’t really care about the project anymore. I would want to find someone, anyone, who understands me and whom I can talk to. And once I found that person, it wouldn’t even matter if I liked them or not because at least they can understand me. And maybe after everyone who spoke the same languages got together, we might try to do the project again, but people would be getting hurt and angry and two people might try to do the exact same job and that would be frustrating and after a while everyone would just give up and go home.
Of course, we understand that God wasn’t splitting up husbands and wives and kids and parents. He was just making it impossible for people who were from different groups to cooperate together. Families are incredibly important to God. Your family is important to God and so is mine. So, the groups of people couldn’t work together anymore and they went their separate ways and they stopped building as a group. Maybe one group stayed there and kept building, I don’t really know. But I do know that the story says that God scattered them throughout the earth—which is exactly why they built the tower in the first place, so that wouldn’t happen! Is being all in one place terrible? Nope, but after a while it gets harder and harder to grow enough food nearby if everyone is jammed into one place. God’s original plan was for humans to turn the earth into a garden paradise, remember? Adam and Eve were supposed to work and keep the Garden of God and as they had children, they would need to make it bigger and bigger and as their children and grandchildren scattered and spread out, the whole earth would be filled and wouldn’t be a wilderness anymore. In the Bible, the word wilderness doesn’t mean forests full of trees and beautiful mountains or anything like that. Wilderness was a place that wasn’t useful for anything—like when the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They weren’t in the forest, they were in a place where they couldn’t grow anything and needed to get their food and water straight from God!
9 Therefore it is called Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth.
Okay now, we have another joke here and another mystery but you can’t see the joke in our English bibles! I mean, what the heck does it mean? That it’s called Babylon because it was there that God confused the language of the whole earth? And you might say that it sounded like they were “babbling on” but remember that Genesis was written in Hebrew, and not in English and just because words sound alike in different languages doesn’t mean they are the same thing or related to one another. Sometimes, usually, words from different languages sound alike one another and it is just a coincidence. Sometimes, when a company makes a product in their country with a name, and they try to sell it in another country with a different language, no one will buy it because it means something bad or silly there.
We learned back in Genesis 10 that Babylon was the beginning of Nimrod’s Kingdom—but here in chapter 11 we see that people stopped building it, so I am not sure it makes sense that Nimrod was there as part of the builders but maybe he and his soldiers came there when they were traveling through the area and said, “Dudes, there’s totally a city here and it’s ours for the taking! We just need to finish it.” I mean, if no one was there, that’s what I would do, and if there was only a small group there, a guy with soldiers would just take over. Or maybe he was there when it was being built, no one knows for sure. It can work either way and we know from the lesson we did on all the different Nimrod legends that a whole lot of people thought a whole lot of things about what happened because, as we know, when the Bible doesn’t say, people like to fill in the blanks with what they think might have happened. But the word Babylon in English, is not the original name for the city—it’s just what we call it now in English. The Babylonians called it Bavilu, which means “gate of the god” in their language. But it sounds kinda like the Hebrew word for confused and so they were making a joke that the mighty city of Babylon got its name because the people there were totally confused! That’s what we call a “play on words” or a pun and the Bible is full of puns, I guess because God thinks they are totally hilarious. He actually uses them a lot in the Bible. Remember, we are funny because God is funny.
Most terrible dad jokes are puns, plays on words like we see in the Bible about Bavilu being Balal, Babylon being confused. How about this one, “Always trust a glue salesman. They tend to stick to their word.” Or “Everyone thinks my runny nose is funny, but it’s snot.” “I was struggling to figure out how lightning works, and then it struck me.” How about this newspaper story called, “Big Rig Carrying Fruit Crashes on 210 Freeway, Creates Jam.” And we laugh or we roll our eyes and groan, and that’s exactly what Moses’s audience in the wilderness would have done. They’d say, “Oh Moses, that was so bad, but it was so funny!”
Moses told them this story because people are curious about things like this—if we are all human beings, why do we look so different and sound so different while still being the same on the inside? Our blood is the same color, and we all have eyes and ears and mouths and noses, and humans all smile and laugh when something is funny, no matter where they come from. In fact, humans from every different culture on the planet have the exact same expressions in response to what is going on around them. Scared people all look pretty much the same and so do happy people and angry people. That would be impossible if we didn’t come from the same place, right? But then why are we so different in other ways? Why can’t we understand each other when we are talking? Why is their music so different and maybe their art too? Why are they so many different shades of skin? Why do the descendants of Japheth tend to be light skinned, the descendants of Shem brown skinned, and the descendants of Ham black skinned? It was very confusing to them because the other nations often claimed that the people from one country are not the same as the people from another. They had different creation stories and everything and said that different gods were responsible for them. Remember when we studied Genesis 10, I told you that it was unique, meaning one of a kind. It is the only story in the ancient world that says all humans come from the same beginning, the same exact family and that all of them were created by the same God to be His image-bearers and to rule the world wisely. Not just some but all.
And so now they had an explanation—because, you know, they didn’t have DNA tests and didn’t even know what DNA or genetics were anyway. They just knew that everyone was different from them in one way or another. But it was also important for them to know that this was God’s plan from the beginning, for humans to populate the entire planet, and boy did we do a great job at that!
So God created man (humans) in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.” (Gen 1:27-28)
“Fill the earth,” God said—and you can’t do that by all staying in one place, right? Now, there isn’t anything wrong with settling down in a house, no matter if it is out in the country or an apartment in the city. But it does mean that people were supposed to spread out from one end of the earth to the other so that the earth could be ruled wisely and cared for. And I want to talk about something because I met someone once who was having a terrible problem. They read some things in the Bible and the husband decided that the Bible was telling them, here in Genesis and other places, that it was a sin to get a house or a permanent place to live because God said to spread out and she wanted my help because he wanted to sell everything they had and just start walking around, I guess. I really didn’t understand. But that’s the problem a lot of grownups have when they just read a small part of the Bible and not the whole thing, they can misunderstand because they only know a tiny bit of the story. They take a couple of verses that seem to say something but ignore every other verse that disagrees with what they believe.
In this case, they had to ignore that God gave the Promised Land to Israel as a gift for them to live and stay and build houses and grow food on the land and keep their animals. God also gave Mount Edom to Jacob’s brother Esau and his descendants. Lot’s sons were given the lands of Moab and Ammon. When the children of Israel came into the Holy Land, God chose a permanent place for His Temple to be built and it was surrounded by a city. He set aside special cities and fields where the priests could live and grow things. Jesus had a house in Capernaum. The Bible is a book about walking and traveling with God but it is also a book about living where God puts us and being fruitful. Maybe someone is fruitful on their farm making food for us all to eat. Someone else might be fruitful in the middle of a city preaching about God and Jesus. Someone who feeds people who are homeless is being fruitful too. We can be fruitful almost anywhere, unless we are so far away from the world that everything we do is just for ourselves. The only people in the Bible who were allowed to live in caves were people who were running away from people who wanted to kill them! And they left eventually.
And I teach you that so that when someone tells you that the Bible says to do something and it’s just really, really, strange and doesn’t seem right, I want you to ask someone you trust about it. You can even ask me if you want to. A lot of grownups have a lot of really strange ideas. We aren’t right about everything. Sometimes we lie. Sometimes we are just plain wrong. Sometimes we say we know a lot about the Bible when we really don’t. Sometimes we know how to use our voice to sound very convincing and very sure of ourselves even though we don’t really know what we are talking about. Just like kids do, right? Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t trust anyone, that would be just horrible, but it does mean that adults aren’t perfect. And really, adults need to apologize and admit when we have been wrong a whole lot more often than we do. And especially when we are wrong about the Bible!
So, this is the end of the Tower of Babel story. All of a sudden, everything has changed. God was just dealing with one big family of humans and now they are all split up and God is about to do something really amazing. God is going to choose one ordinary man as the very beginning of His plan to rescue the world from sin and from death, because ever since the Garden, human life has been just one big mess, one disaster after another. Dealing with the whole world as a group isn’t working. Everyone isn’t willing to do what God wants, and they all have their own ideas about what is best and how to do it and God said that every imagination of their heart was just evil from the time they were born. God needs to make a different kind of man—Jesus—but there is still a long way to go.
I love you, I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful time studying the Bible this week with the people who love you.