We talked about this a bit back in episode 107, but this episode is actually about a lot more than it looks like on the surface. When we know what to look for, this is the most powerful promise yet about the Messiah, Jesus. God made a promise to Eve, and now He makes an even greater promise to Abram! This will be the last lesson in Gen 15.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s 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, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)

Today we are finishing up Genesis 15, and you guys have learned so much. But you haven’t learned the most important part yet! God promised Abram the Land, a child, and told him to go fetch a bunch of critters for a special ceremony that we only ever see one more time in the Bible, and, as you remember, that one didn’t go so well for the citizens of Jerusalem! But this is possibly the most important covenant anywhere in the Hebrew Bible because this one is the forever promise that gave us Jesus! When normal people would perform this ceremony, which is called the Covenant of the Pieces, they would cut the animals in half and place the pieces on opposite sides to make a path down the middle. The two people would say, “Whoever breaks this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to him!” Then they promised by the names of their gods to be faithful, and they believed their gods would take revenge for making them look bad if they didn’t. That’s why Abram has been shooing all those birds away—he has been waiting for God to show up somehow to walk through the animal parts with him. But then Abram was put into a deep vision where everything was scary and dark, and God told Abram what would happen to him and his family in the future. What happened next was completely shocking and unexpected.

When the sun had set, and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the divided animals. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I give this land to your offspring, from the Brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.” (Gen 15:17-21)

What??? Abram didn’t walk between the pieces? And why on earth did a smoky firepot and a flaming torch float through them instead? This just doesn’t make any sense at all, right? No Abram and no God either. Or was there? What was the smoke and the fire all about anyway? God tells His people all through the Bible that He doesn’t have a body, even though everyone else believed that the gods of the nations had bodies like ours. God isn’t a human. He doesn’t have DNA, so God isn’t really even a man either, or a woman. God is just described in ways that help us to understand that He can be like a father, like a mother, like a mamma bird, like a king, like a husband, and like a whole lot of things. But God isn’t a person in any way that we could possibly understand—even though sometimes He does seem to show up in human form or speaks through the Angel of the Lord. It is just all very confusing because our brains are small, and God is big. I suppose it would be really nice not to have a body sometimes—a lot less complicated, that’s for sure.

So, what’s the deal with the smoke and fire?? One of the ways we see God showing up in the book of Exodus is specifically as a cloud of smoke and a column of fire. The cloud of smoke protected the Israelites from the hot sun during the day, and the fire kept them warm all night—pretty awesome, right? And maybe you remember God speaking to Moses through a burning bush where the fire didn’t hurt that bush at all! And later, God told Moses and Aaron that He would appear above the ark of the covenant in the Tabernacle, with His glory hidden in a cloud. When the Temple was built, and Solomon threw a huge celebration in God’s honor, a cloud came into the Temple that was so big and amazing that the priests had to get out because it was too intense for them to handle! When Elijah was proving to the priests of Baal that their god wasn’t even real, God proved that He was very real by sending fire down from heaven to burn up an animal on an altar that was completely soaked with water and even had a moat around it! Other times in the Bible, God says He is coming on the clouds, and that always means that somebody is in big trouble and someone else might even get rescued. Jesus said in the Gospel stories that He would be coming in the clouds and that it would be bad news for the people who were lying about him, including the high priest, just so that they could get the Romans to kill him. And let me tell you a secret–when Jesus said that, it made those guys just furious because they believed that only God could judge the high priest.

The smoke and the fire were a promise of protection. This promise told Abram that until the end of the world, God would always have His eye on the children of Abram—no matter what. Abram doesn’t know all of this, of course, because none of it had happened yet, but God was giving Abram a clue about how He would appear to the children of Israel in the future. Abram was probably very confused about the smoke and the fire until he heard God’s voice saying that the covenant between them was forever and that his children would inherit everything the Canaanites had all around him. And some of those Canaanites were even called giants! But what did it mean that only God passed through the animal pieces? Certainly, God wasn’t going to break His promise to Abram or do anything wrong. But whoever goes through the animal parts is supposed to die if they break the promise. And, one day, Abram’s descendants would completely break their pledge to serve, obey, love, and worship God. They would fill His land with idols and even His own Temple. They would bow down to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and when they did that—it meant they were putting their butts in the air toward God’s Holy of Holies. They baked unleavened bread for the Queen of Heaven, who was either Ishtar or Asherah—we aren’t really sure. Women cried and cried at the Temple for the Babylonian shepherd god Tammuz during the summer months when they thought he was trapped in the land of the dead, and there was no rain. They did absolutely everything God told them not to do. And so, one day, the cloud that God’s glory was hiding in just up and left and never came back. Isn’t that sad? God loved them so much that He stayed for hundreds of years while they did those things to Him. And the prophets had all warned the people, but nobody listened.

When God left His Temple, the people weren’t protected anymore, and the Babylonians came and destroyed the city and the Temple and took all the wealthy and powerful people so far away that they would never be able to go home again. But God wasn’t through with His people. He still loved them because He remembered how much He loved Abraham. Abraham’s descendants had broken God’s covenant, but because Abraham hadn’t walked with God through those animals, someone else had to make things right again. God’s people, even when He brought some of them back to the land of Israel, had to serve cruel pagan kings for another five hundred years! And they were always praying for the Messiah to come and rescue them, and to destroy all their enemies. They wanted their own kingdom again, with their own King. They wanted everything to be like the “good old days” but a whole lot better because the “good old days” are never really all that good for most people. They studied the Bible, and they could see that God had promised a new and better king who would come from King David’s family. Sometimes, that King would seem like a mighty warrior, but at other times, it seemed like he was rejected, hated, and very humble. Some even thought that maybe God would send them the King they deserved—one kind if they were worthy and doing what God wanted and another kind if they weren’t doing what God wanted.

What they never suspected was a King who would be both—a King who would be gentle, trustworthy, and loving toward people who were hurting but who would be a mighty warrior against demons, sickness, and everything that was hurting His people. A King who loved them all so much, not just them but all the world, that He would make everything right between them and God again and teach them how to trust God. He showed them exactly what God is like by just being Himself. And that King, of course, is Jesus. Do you remember when we learned about God’s Creative Word all the way back in episode #2? Jesus has always been with God (no one knows Him better!), and Jesus is how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Everything good that we see around us, including the stars in the sky and all the planets, is God’s love for us poured out through Jesus. God didn’t need a planet, and He sure doesn’t need food or water. He created all of those things because we need them, and He was making a good home for us. But when Adam and Eve sinned, the world got broken. It was still good because God’s creation is good, but things were broken. God told Adam and Eve that there would one day be a child who would come from a woman who would fix everything they had messed up when they tried to be like God.

When the smoke and the fire passed in between the animal parts, God was making a forever promise that the child would somehow come out of Abram’s family—but this isn’t the first time God had hinted at that. Do you remember when God first spoke to Abram at the beginning of chapter twelve? God told Abram that he would be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Did Abram understand what that meant? His family were all idol worshipers from Babylon. Abram was commanded to get away from them! Many generations had passed since Noah and Abram’s ancestor Shem had come off the ark. Did anyone still remember that God had promised to send someone to crush the head of the serpent who had tricked Adam and Eve into rebelling against God? Or had people given up hope so long ago that they had to be reminded again? Whether Abram understands everything or not, we know that God is always busy setting up His plans to rescue us from sin and death. This was a big step. The family was chosen at last, and now that Abram had finally obeyed everything God had commanded him (it took ten years), God is rewarding Abram. It’s like God is saying, “Okay, Abram, you did what I asked, and so now everything comes down to you and me. You are my choice to start a new family, and that family will become a great people, and one day, one of your own children will bless every person who will ever live. And whatever goes wrong between now and then, I will make things right. My plans don’t depend on you and your kids doing everything right. One of your kids will do everything right, and He will change the world forever.”

Just imagine if Abram had known that it would take almost another two thousand years for the time to be just right for Jesus to be born, the Messiah, Savior, and King of the world! But what does any of that even mean? Why is it important that Jesus is our King? What does that mean to us? Remember how I told you that the descendants of Abram weren’t sure if the Messiah would be humble, gentle, and rejected or a mighty warrior? Well, let me tell you about the mighty warrior King we see in the Gospel of Mark. We see Jesus fighting against demons, even a whole legion of demons at once, and destroying them. Jesus also destroys sickness, disabilities, and every kind of disease and even brings people back from being dead. It’s like Jesus goes into evil places and rescues people. When Jesus is fighting the forces of evil, He isn’t messing around—no mercy and no forgiveness. But when Jesus is dealing with people who are hurting, He is gentle and kind. He treats demons one way and people another. In fact, we rarely see Jesus being unkind, but when He is, it’s because He is talking to the religious leaders who aren’t helping the people and who are even hurting them. Some of the religious leaders followed Jesus, but not very many. Most of them were trying to keep the people from believing that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the King. It was the same thing as telling people that God isn’t God either. Many of them, especially the chief priests and the high priest, were just jealous and were afraid they would lose their power. If they lost their power, they would also lose their money because they were making a lot by using the Temple as a business. They had teamed up with the cruel Romans, who had soldiers everywhere, so everyone had to do what they said. Others were just afraid that if people were listening to Jesus, they wouldn’t listen to them anymore. It can be really hard when you are used to people wanting to hear what you have to say, and then all of a sudden, those people are listening to someone else instead. And especially when that someone else can work miracles! Who can compete with that?

Jesus is a King who shows one side of Himself to demons and another side to those who are hurting. Jesus knows who the real enemy is. Jesus wants everyone to turn away from doing bad things, from making other people’s lives miserable, and to follow Him instead. You see, there are two Kingdoms in the world—the Kingdom of Heaven, where God rules over everything and everyone and things are good, and the Kingdom of the Beast, where rich people hurt poor people, and strong people hurt weaker people; where some people believe that they are better and more deserving of good things than others and people hate each other for totally stupid reasons. When we choose Jesus as our King, when we believe that He crushed the head of the Serpent like God promised Adam and Eve, that Jesus is how God promised to bless the world through Abram’s family, that it was Jesus who went through those animals disguised as smoke and fire and promised to fix the covenant between God and Abram that was broken by his descendants, it means that we are choosing to live by the rules of the Kingdom of God—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love other people as we want to be loved and we would want people to treat the people we love. Anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to hurt the person you love most in the whole world, serving Jesus means that you wouldn’t do that to anyone else either.

To have Jesus as King means that He is our example and that He is the only human being that we can really trust totally and obey completely because He will never tell us to do anything that is evil. God wanted us to have an example to follow—but Noah wasn’t perfect, and neither were Abram or Sarah, Moses, Aaron, David, or anyone else. They are going to do really awful things sometimes. We have them in the Bible to teach us that there isn’t a human on earth, no matter how special or chosen by God, who is a perfect example. Goodness sake, God chose me to teach you guys, but it doesn’t mean that I am right about everything I will teach you, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t get pretty salty when I am cranky or feel like I have been backed into a corner or am embarrassed. I am still trying to become more like Jesus. I have a long way to go. And so, if someone was to tell you, “That Miss Tyler can be mean,” you can say, “Yeah, I know, but she’s working on it and feels really bad about it when it happens.” Or if another person says, “Miss Tyler is wrong about such and such,” you can say, “Yeah, sometimes when she is teaching me, she tells me that she found out she was wrong and teaches me something different instead. She says we are all wrong about something. I don’t listen to her because I think that everything she says is right. I listen to her because grown-ups force me to.” Or how about, “Miss Tyler did this really awful thing once,” and you can say, “That’s why Miss Tyler tells us to follow Jesus and not just do whatever she has done. Only Jesus can be totally trusted.”

That’s why God gave us all these stories about how the people He chose did awful things—so that we wouldn’t think that we could follow those people instead of Jesus. Some people do terrible things when they are scared, and others when they want something that doesn’t belong to them. Sometimes people do something they think is right because their culture (which is the world and people around them) tells them it is right because they don’t know God well enough yet to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t like that. Sometimes, we will see things in the Bible that we wouldn’t ever think were okay today, and we’ll be like, “What the heck were they thinking???” But to them, it was a normal part of life. God isn’t going to fix everything right away; He had to be patient, and He is still being patient. Look how long it took Him to get us to stop making people work as slaves! Jesus told His disciples that some of the commandments that Moses gave the children of Israel in the desert would be because the people’s hearts were hard. So they were still allowed to do some evil things, but Jesus always told people to be perfect, like God is perfect. If you wouldn’t want God to do something to you, like enslave you, then don’t do it to anyone else. Jesus showed us that loving others is about serving them and understanding that we aren’t better than anyone else. He did that by showing us that even the greatest person who ever lived, who could work miracles and raise the dead and who was one with God at Creation, would die just so that He could fight Satan and sin and death and all his demons and win once and for all.

Satan looked at Jesus and probably thought to himself, “I need to stop Him, or everyone in the world will follow Him, and they won’t listen to me and do things my way anymore. If everyone listens to Him, there will be no more murder, stealing, hunger, cruelty, or hatred. There will be no more war or torture. Kids will be able to play anywhere they want with no one watching to make sure they are safe. I won’t have anyone who wants to do things my way once they all start living like He wants. I need to get rid of Him, but I need to do it in a way that is so terrible, embarrassing, and shameful that no one will even want to admit they ever knew Him. People will either be ashamed that they thought He was the Messiah, or will believe that He is a criminal, or will be too scared to even admit they know Him because they won’t want to be killed too.” Satan didn’t know that he was being tricked into having to come face-to-face with Jesus, the all-powerful Son of God. When Jesus died, He went to Satan’s turf (where Satan was strongest and most powerful) and beat the heck out of him, and now (even though he still causes trouble) Satan is dying. He isn’t giving up trying to trick us the way he did with Adam and Eve, trying to tell us not to obey God because we can decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. If Jesus followed God, with all the miracles He did and after creating the earth and everything in it, it has to be the only smart choice. Obeying God was why, when Jesus was murdered, Satan couldn’t fight against Him. Jesus didn’t have any reason to be ashamed, and He wasn’t guilty. Satan had never had to deal with anyone truly good and perfect before. But, by the time he figured out his mistake, it was too late.

That’s why we must have Jesus as our very real King and why we need to understand the importance of living in His Kingdom the way He wants us to. The more we do things His way, the bigger and better His Kingdom grows, but when we do things Satan’s way, we are just keeping that dude alive because he gets to hurt people through us. I mean, he isn’t doing it—we are doing it. When we are mean or bullies, if we steal, or spread lies or embarrassing things about other people, if we don’t keep our promises to help people do what is good, and when we don’t treat people like God loves them just as much as He loves us, then we are part of Satan’s Kingdom. That’s how Satan’s Kingdom works, and that kind of terrible behavior is called the Mark of the Beast. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that God has a Mark of His kingdom, and John tells us that Satan has one too. It isn’t anything a person can see, but it is about who we are following, and a person can pretend to be following God but really be doing terrible things when no one is looking. God sees us always and loves us always, so we can trust Him to live like He wants right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will learn how to trust Jesus not just as your Savior but as your King too.  

Parents–Genesis 16 has some very sensitive themes in it so on Friday I will be uploading a special teaching on my grownup channel covering the material if you want to teach the material that I can’t teach.

Abram has a lot of ups and downs in his walk with God and this week we will be talking about one of the downs. Famine strikes the land of Canaan and Abram takes Sarai and their household down to Egypt where there is plenty of food. There’s a big problem though—Sarai is a very beautiful woman and Abram asks her to promise him something that puts her in a lot of danger.

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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 Christian Standard Bible).

There was a famine in the land, so Abram went down to Egypt to stay there for a while because the famine in the land was severe. (Gen 12:10)

So, if you remember from before my break, Abram, Sarai and Lot and all their people and critters had moved to the Land of Canaan when God told Abram to leave his family and go. God told Abram that He would do amazing things for him—that Abram would become a great nation, and have a great name, and that He would bless Abram and totally be on his side. Wow, those are incredible promises! And when he got to the Land, God gave him a second promise that Abram’s children would inherit the land—which was kind of an oopsie because he brought his nephew Lot along just in case. You see, they were very old and had no children and they probably brought Lot along to be their son, to care for them when they got old. Now, he’s with them and life has gotten a bit awkward—but it is going to get a lot more awkward really quick because the worst thing that could possibly happen to people in the ancient world was going to happen. That terrible thing is called famine and this week we’re going to talk about what that means and why their solution was to go to another country.

In the ancient world, they didn’t have food processing plants or trucks to drive the food far away from where they made it, and so they depended on five things to keep them alive. The first thing they needed was good soil for growing things—if the soil was bad then they would be in real trouble because the plants that we eat are much harder to grow than weeds, which will pretty much grow anywhere. And if you think about it, that’s super strange. Veggies don’t grow in the wild, but weeds do! Vegetables have to get grown on purpose. Weeds don’t need much water but the veggies we need to survive need a whole lot of water. So, the second thing they needed was either to be close to a river or rain. Rivers were usually quite far away and so most people depended on rain to grow the food they needed. No rain means no food and no food means famine. That’s what famine is, when there is something wrong with the land and the rain and crops won’t grow—no veggies, no wheat and barley for bread, no fruit, no nothing. When there is a famine, it means that people starve—they die of hunger. And in the ancient world, they really could only eat what they grew themselves or traded other people to get. But even rain and soil aren’t enough because they also needed a good amount of sunlight but not too much. Too much sun, if the air is dry and windy, will make the plants wither and die. And they also needed people to work the fields and plant and harvest. It would be very difficult for one person to do it all alone and that’s why it was so important to have kids. But there is one more thing that everyone knew was the most important thing of all—they needed help from the gods.

And so, every people group in the ancient world had gods and goddesses who they thought were responsible for the sun and the rain and for crops and for food animals having lots of babies. In the land of Canaan, for example, Abram would have known people who worshiped Ba’al Hadad (the Bible just calls him Ba’al). They thought Ba’al was responsible for sending rain and so he was very important. The Philistines worshiped a god named Dagon, who was an agricultural god—that means that he was responsible for making the wheat and barley grow. In Egypt, they counted on Amun Ra to make sure that the sun came up in the morning and went down at night. They thought he was hauling the sun across the sky in his boat. Have you ever seen an obelisk? Like the Washington Monument? The Egyptians built them so that Ra could rest there at noon time. If you stood in a certain spot, like at a temple, it looked like he was taking a nap up there. Like a siesta! The Babylonians worshiped Tammuz, the shepherd god who made sure all the critters had lots of babies. And the ancient Mesopotamians worshiped Inanna, who they thought kept their food storehouses full. Every group in the ancient world had versions of these gods and goddesses because they really couldn’t imagine that one god could handle everything. That’s something that Yahweh, our God, had a lot of trouble getting them to believe. It’s why the ancient Israelites kept worshiping Ba’al and Asherah and many others—because they were afraid of famine, or starvation, and wanted to make sure that all their bases were covered. So, they worshiped the Lord but they also worshiped the gods and goddesses that the original people in the land said were responsible for a good harvest! And it made the Lord super angry and jealous but He kept loving them anyway—He is just amazing.

But I will say one thing about Abram—we never see him worshiping anyone but the Lord. Not ever. he’s going to make a lot of mistakes and sometimes he won’t trust God like he should, but he never goes to any other god for help. So, remember, we don’t have to be perfect in order to follow God and to be loyal to Him. But we can’t let anyone else get in the way and that’s what happens when we worship other gods trying to get what only God can give us, right? Okay then. Back to Abram and the famine. What do you do when there is no food growing and there are no supermarkets? When even your animals have nothing to eat—and you have a lot of animals and a lot of people with you. Remember that Abram and Sarai and Lot not only had a lot of critters, but they were traveling with a lot of slaves. Of course, slavery is awful and praise God it is illegal now but in those days Abram would have seen it as his absolute responsibility to make sure that they could all eat as members of his household. Yes, they were slaves and so they didn’t have a lot of rights but this wasn’t like slavery in America, okay? They were usually cared for and valuable to the entire group and they all worked together to survive. They weren’t treated as well as free people but they were still part of the family who all depended on each other. They were Abram’s responsibility, and so when the food stopped growing, for whatever reason, Abram had to think very carefully about what to do.

Now, here is the really weird thing—the last time we were talking about Abram, he was traveling from the north of Canaan all the way to the south and he built altars to God in the north, in Shechem, and then traveled south to Bethel, where he built another altar and called on the Lord. So, Abram worshiped God at those places and honored Him by building altars as landmarks. So far, so good. But then, something odd happens and he travels to the very south of Canaan, to the Negev, which is called a desert but I don’t want you to think of endless sand dunes because it isn’t that kind of desert. The Negev has sand, yes, but also a lot of rocks and canyons, as well as craters and valleys with very steep rock walls. For some reason, the Bible doesn’t say that Abram built an altar here—even though there were a ton of rocks he could have used. And in the very next verse, we find out there is a famine in the land! I wonder why we don’t hear about Abram calling on the Lord here because this seems like a very good time—when you are in a desert and there is absolutely no food to be had. It seems like this would have been a good time for Abram to ask God what he was supposed to do—and maybe he did and it just doesn’t mention it but Abram leaves the land of Canaan, that God promised to give to his descendants, and heads south to Egypt, where he has never been before! Was that okay with God? Is that what God wanted them to do? And why would Abram want to go there in the first place?

The last question is an easy one to answer because Egypt was known as one of the breadbaskets of the ancient world. Because of the Nile river, Egypt almost never suffered from famine and because of that, they were the most powerful nation in the entire world during the lifetime of Abram. The Babylonians? The Assyrians? The Canaanites? Pfft! They were all just nothing compared to Egypt. Have you seen pictures of the Pyramids? And the Temples they built? They could build things and we still have no idea how they did it. And they had really impressive medicine and doctors. They could even remove cataracts from people’s eyes! Eye surgery! Are you even kidding me?? They also knew how to preserve dead bodies for just about forever. And their art is still some of the most beautiful in all the world. Egypt was where people went when they had nowhere else to go and wanted to survive—but they had to be pretty desperate because Egypt’s armies were the most powerful in the world and they made slaves out of people whom they conquered in war. And they got tribute from all the countries around them as a bribe not to go out and kill them. So, they would have been swimming in gold and sugarcane and all kinds of jewels because Africa has a lot of jewels, beautiful cloth, and remember that later they made papyrus which everyone wanted. Egypt was rich and they didn’t get that way by being nice. Still, I suppose that if you think you are going to starve, you might figure you have nothing to lose by going there. Ang going back to Egypt for help will happen many times in the Bible.

Abram and Sarai aren’t the only people in the Bible who would run to Egypt when things got tough. Jacob and his sons would go there to survive the seven-year famine, but that would be because God sent them there. However, they didn’t go back to Canaan once the famine was over and they ended up being enslaved and treated very badly. God had to rescue them, and once He got them free, He told them a lot of times not to go to Egypt for help ever again. But they did ask Egypt for help, and paid them for help whenever times got tough and they weren’t willing to trust God. King Solomon, he really messed up and married the daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt. And that was a terrible thing to do because he ended up marrying a lot of other foreign women too and he built them temples for the gods they worshiped! Can you believe it? We have to be really careful whom we go to for help and we have to make sure that we always talk to God when we are in trouble and to trust Him. Now, maybe God would have told them to go to Egypt anyway—it says that there wasn’t just a famine but a severe famine! But when God sends us into a situation, He prepares the way for us, and things tend to go a whole lot better. When we go somewhere without talking to Him about it, then we tend to get into trouble. Like Abram, he’s about to get into a whole lot of trouble. But remember, Abram doesn’t totally trust God yet and he doesn’t totally believe all these promises either.

God has promised Abram that he would become a great nation, and have a great name, and that he would bless him and totally be on his side. And then, as if that wasn’t all enough, He promised Abram a child. For God to keep those promises, He obviously has to keep Abram alive. If Abram dies, that’s the end of that and God will look really bad in the eyes of not only Abram’s household of Sarai, Lot and all the people with them, but also everyone back home in Haran. God will look like the kind of god who can’t protect anyone and who is powerless and breaks his promises. God’s reputation would totally be destroyed, and everyone would be laughing at Abram and the crazy god he thought he was hearing from. People already, I guarantee you, thought he was bonkers to leave his family and their land behind in Haran and to go someplace he had never been before where there is no one to protect him. People didn’t do that. And they also didn’t go off worshiping any gods that their families hadn’t been worshiping for like, forever, and we know from Joshua that Abram’s father was an idol worshiper! His family probably tried to do everything to talk him out of it and figured that he had lost his mind and was maybe even dead already. But even though Abram trusted God enough to go, he still had a long way to go before he trusted God about everything. Egypt was a scary place and he knew it, far worse than the Land of Canaan.

And so, Abram makes a terrible mistake in the very next verse: “When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife, Sarai, “Look, I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ They will kill me but let you live. Please say you’re my sister so it will go well for me because of you, and my life will be spared on your account.” (Gen 12:11-13)

Oh no, this is very bad. Abram doesn’t just not trust God to protect him (and I think that is because Abram didn’t ask God before deciding to bail on living in Canaan), but is actually willing to put his wife in danger because he is so freaked out. And we have to look at this in a balanced way. Yes, Abram is asking Sarai to tell a lie that could get her into huge trouble, but we also have to remember that they have been married for a long time and Abram hasn’t gotten rid of her or divorced her or taken another wife (which was allowed back in those days) even though she couldn’t have babies. So, I don’t want you thinking he is totally awful but he is clearly worried about what will happen to him in Egypt, and if anything happens to him, he knows that the Egyptians will just take everyone and everything he has. In Abram’s world, where he was the patriarch, the head man, who is responsible for everything and everyone, he knows that everyone else’s life depends on him. Everyone would see him as the most important person in the tribe and would see his life as more important than anyone else’s and Abram would see things that way as well. That’s just how everyone thought in those days.

What was the big threat? Wasn’t Sarai like sixty-five years old? Why was Abram worried about other men wanting to marry her so badly that they would be willing to kill him to get her? Well, we have to remember that different cultures think that all sorts of different things are beautiful. Maybe her eyes were a very strange color, or her hair, or maybe her face was shaped in a way that made her look particularly exotic and interesting to other men. Or maybe she really did look very young, we just don’t know. But Abram, one way or another, knew that the Egyptian men would be very interested in her and maybe even interested enough to kill everyone to get her. So, he asked her to tell the Egyptians that she was his sister—that way, worse comes to worse, if they did take her then everyone else would live and the Egyptians would treat them well.

As her brother, if any man wanted to marry Sarai, they would have to pay him a bride price to get her. Now, this will seem really strange but in those days, men bought their wives from her family—from her father or brother or uncle depending on who was alive in her family. How much they would pay for a wife depended on a lot of things. Everyone wanted a wife who was beautiful, from a good family, and who was an honorable woman. They didn’t care about falling in love or anything, and they weren’t going on dates, and they might not even know her, but the two families would make a business deal and the father of the groom (or the groom himself) would give money to the bride’s family and the family of the bride would give her money just in case her husband threw her out later (which happened a lot). And she would then go to live with his family. She might never even see her family again and now she belonged to the new family. His mother could boss her around as much as she wanted and she would just have to put up with it until she was the oldest woman in the house and she could be the boss. Her job was to obey her mother-in-law, or whoever the oldest woman in the family was, and her husband, and to have a lot of babies. That was her place in the family and until she had a baby boy, she was in danger of being tossed out on the street. Scary, eh? These people needed Jesus really bad. Goodness, right now Sarai needs Jesus really bad.

So, when Abram said, “it will go well for me because of you”, what he is saying is that someone will pay him a lot of money and stuff so that they can have her as a wife. So, not only will he live and not be murdered, but he will also get a lot of stuff in exchange for her. I suppose he thinks that he is making the best of a very bad situation, but it is getting harder to feel sorry for him, right? We always have to remember that this was an entirely different kind of world than we can possibly imagine. Men were important, and women weren’t. Free men were important, and slave men weren’t. You can just imagine how unimportant they would think a slave woman was. Ugh, we’ll see all about that when we talk about poor Hagar later. But we shouldn’t be shocked because there is a reason that God is taking one man and one woman and will be making a brand-new people group who will begin to do things differently. Right now, Abram has been told he will be a dad but God hasn’t even told anyone that Sarai will be a mom.

Maybe Abram thinks that he will be getting a new wife if Sarai gets taken by an Egyptian. There are just so many things we don’t know and what we do know about the people of those times is pretty horrible. We can see why God needs to change things. But you know what? Before God can change the world, He has to change Abram first. It would be unfair of us to expect Abram to be entirely different than all the other men in the world. As it is, it was amazing that he left his family at all to go who the heck knows where! That He doesn’t entirely trust God right now isn’t weird, it’s actually normal. And we all start out like that. God has to teach us to trust Him one day at a time and one year at a time and it is a long process. We always think we trust God until He asks us to do something new and strange and then we are like, “Um, what? No—that’s crazy, I so cannot do that!” But God knows this about us because He created us and He sees what is in our minds and our hearts so He knows what He has to do to get us to trust Him. I remember when He told me I would have a hundred kids and I flipped out. I mean, totally flipped out. And I wanted to stop believing in Him right then and there but instead, I told Him that I could only do that if He completely changed me. And then once He decided He had changed me enough, He gave me kids to teach! I was really relieved. I mean, maybe once day I will actually have a hundred kids to take care of in my own house but I also know that He will change me so that I can handle that. He never yelled at me for not being ready—He knew I wasn’t ready! We can’t really surprise Him like that.

Abram’s world is very violent. You could kill someone and totally get away with it if there wasn’t anyone who was going to try to stop you. Kings could kill anyone they wanted, for any reason, any way they wanted. People thought that the gods had given them the authority, or you might call it permission or power, to do whatever they wanted to the people they ruled over. Here in Egypt, the most powerful nation in the entire world, Abram’s only hope was God—and God didn’t need Abram to lie, or to be willing to sell his wife to a stranger in order to keep His promises. God could keep Abram alive even if he was thrown into a pit of hungry wild animals dressed in a beef steak toga. It’s normal for us to be scared, and to assume the worst possible things, and it is even more normal for us to believe we are alone. But we are never alone as long as God is with us. And God specifically told Abram that He would bless anyone who blessed Abram and would curse anyone who cursed Abram. That was God’s way of saying, “Hey, Abram, I’ve got your back and you don’t have to worry about the details. Just do what I tell you to do and trust me.”

I don’t know about you, but that would be pretty cool if God ever told me that! But as far as we know, God didn’t say anything at all to Sarai, Abram’s wife. What do you think all this has been like for her? With her husband hearing voices and following a strange god into a place where they had never been before and then this god told Abram that he was going to be a dad but didn’t say anything about her being a mom and now it would really look like he was trying to get rid of her, right? Let’s look at what Abram said from Sarai’s perspective, from her point of view, “Look, I know how drop dead gorgeous you are. The Egyptians aren’t blind and when they get a look at you, they’re going to look at me, as your husband, and they are going to say, ‘We can’t just take this guy’s wife, we’re going to have to kill him and make her a widow and then one of us can have her free and clear.’ And that’s just what they do, they’ll murder me where I stand and they will take you and you will end up the wife of the most powerful Egyptian who sees you. So please, I am going to tell them that you are just my sister, and when I do that they are going to be super nice to me and it’s going to be good for me and for the entire household and, look, they are going to take you one way or another so this way you can take one for the team and everyone will be better off.” Oh boy…

I love you, and I am praying for you, and just yikes. Trusting God is better for us and for the people around us!

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.

Why was God so concerned about the Tower of Babel? So what if they can accomplish whatever they want to do? Why is God standing in their way? And why does God stand in our way sometimes when we want to get things done?

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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.

The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. ² As people migrated from the east,^[a] 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.

So, every week we just keep adding to this story, right? We’ve studied verses 1-4 and now we are going to tackle 5-6. Are you beginning to see how much there is to this story when we know about the context? I hope you are also understanding how much we don’t know even when we think we know things that aren’t really there at all. Remember, there is nothing wrong with all the “what if” stories out there as long as people know they are just guesses (and some guesses are better than others) and that they aren’t used to hurt people. And we’ve already talked about how some people took Nimrod and also Ham, and made up stories about them to hurt other people. So, we have to be careful about what we think we know because people do some rotten things with Bible stories in order to do what they want or get people to hate one another.

But this week we are going to start out with a joke that’s right there in the Bible because the people who gathered in the valley of Shinar decided to build a tower that was so big that its top would reach the sky. It was going to be so big that they would be famous and probably rich too. And do you remember the name of the ziggurat tower that Nebuchadnezzar built thousands of years later? It was called Entemenanki, the foundation of heaven and earth because it was seven levels tall and reached up higher than any other ziggurat, all the way up to where they believed the sky stopped and the heavens began. It was really huge. But how about the tower here in Shinar? How big do you think it was? Huge? Like a New York City skyscraper or maybe the Dubai tower? Well, not so much. Here’s where the joke comes in—they wanted to build a huge tower but it is so teeny tiny that God actually had to come down to look at the city and the tower because it was too puny for Him to get a good look at it from heaven. Of course, it isn’t saying that God actually has to come down to earth to look at things but this is called irony. Irony is when you say something in such a way that it means the opposite, like if you do something nice for someone and they don’t say thank you, so you say to them, “Gee, don’t get so excited about thanking me.” It can also mean that something happens that shouldn’t happen, like a fire department burning down or the police station getting robbed or maybe your English teacher makes a ton of spelling mistakes and doesn’t notice. They are things that, when you think about them, they are kinda funny in a weird way.

And while we are on the subject, there is this song by Alanis Morisette called “Ironic” but nothing she says in the song is actually ironic, like she says, “it’s like a traffic jam when you’re already late” for work or whatever and that isn’t ironic at all, that’s just a total bummer, a drag, really unfortunate or unlucky but it isn’t ironic. It would be ironic if she got up, had an easy time getting ready, every traffic light was green, no one was in front of her at the coffee shop, and she got to work only to find that they were closed for a holiday and she has to go back home and it was ironic that on the one day she had no trouble going to work, there is no work!!! So, if you ever hear the song and she’s saying all these things are ironic, listen closely and when she says, “Isn’t it ironic?” you can say, “No, not really but it is ironic that you wrote a song about irony that has nothing ironic in it.” And maybe that was her diabolical plan all along! But, I digress…we aren’t here to talk about that.

So, the irony of the story is that they built a big tower that was so small that even God couldn’t see it from Heaven. And you might be tempted to say that it means the Bible is lying about God or saying that He needs to be right next to something in order to see it but then we would be missing the point because it is supposed to be funny and we are supposed to laugh at the clever joke. And there are a lot of things like this in the Bible if we look carefully—they aren’t necessarily meant to teach us something about God but, in this case, something about the tower that wasn’t really so amazing in God’s eyes as they thought it would be. Compared to Him and the universe He created, nothing we do is really very impressive. I mean, can you make a ladybug or even a blade of grass? Nope, the only things we can make are made from things that already exist. We can bake a cake but we can’t make wheat out of nothing, or get milk without a mamma animal, or get eggs without a chicken. So, what’s more impressive—the cake you made or the chicken that God made out of nothing? Definitely the chicken!

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the Tower of Babel—and the Bible actually doesn’t even call it that but that’s okay too. ⁵ Then the Lord came down to look over the city and the tower that the humanswere 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.” So, wait a minute, we had this joke about how small the tower was but somehow God is taking what they are doing very seriously and in the next verse He’s going to come up with a plan to stop them. What on earth is the big deal about this puny tower? And why does it matter that they can all speak the same language? Doesn’t being able to accomplish anything they want seem like a good thing? Well, the strange thing is that nowhere in this story does God talk about why that is a bad thing or how it would be a problem. He could have said, “Oh no, they are building this tower so that they can worship other gods,” or “Do they honestly think they can get me to show up just because they build a ziggurat so they can serve me when I don’t need anything from them?” How about, “This is really bad because they are building a military tower and that means they are going to be violent and start killing each other!” Nope, none of that—all we see is that God is concerned about what the consequences will be if everyone is able to work together and do what they want. I mean, before the flood, maybe they had the same language too. Maybe they could also accomplish whatever they wanted to. And maybe that was the problem and maybe the things they accomplished led to a lot of evil. We just don’t know. But we could talk about some “what if’s” and maybe by doing that we can learn more about God and His plans for us.

If they could accomplish anything they want to, then they would just do everything their own way and back in Genesis 9, God said that all of our thoughts are evil from the time we were born. And there is another way to read what the verse says. We can read it that nothing they would ever want to do in the future would be impossible for them, or something worse. Maybe it is saying that what they are planning to do right then wouldn’t be impossible. What did they have in mind? We don’t know. But whatever the reason was, it was serious enough that God wanted to stop them. Was it to protect them? Was it like when adults separate kids who are up to no good when they are together? Was it maybe because they would be able to do too much too fast before they could really deal with the consequences? Let’s talk about that one because isn’t that what Adam and Eve did in the Garden? They wanted to be like God, knowing good and evil, but they wanted it right now and they weren’t willing to ask God for it or to wait. God created humans in His image, so Adam and Eve were both His image-bearers, there to show the world what God is like and how He would rule if He was there and so we know that He wanted them to be like Him but that takes a lot of time, more than a lifetime, really—although maybe they could have done it if they had been in the Garden for 900 years instead of dying at that age out in the wilderness where they had to work super hard at staying alive instead of learning to become like God. You know, technology is really a very good thing but what if all of a sudden you have too much technology and you aren’t ready or mature enough or experienced enough to use it?

What if you gave a knife to a little baby? Nothing good would happen, of course. The baby would either cut themselves or whoever tried to take the knife away or a pet or whatever. If you got lucky then the baby would drop the knife before anything happened. And so, we don’t give sharp things to babies but teenagers can have them, right? Cars are good but someone with a license shouldn’t drive one. Things that we aren’t ready for can get us into really big trouble and God knows that, so He will often put roadblocks in front of us so that we have to take the long way around before we can get to something. And I know that can be very frustrating. I think of Adam and Eve, outside the Garden, and now they have all this knowledge and awareness but they aren’t able to really deal with it, and that can be a big problem. We need to have knowledge, information—you know, we need to know stuff, but when we know it too soon or in the wrong order it can really make us confused and get us into trouble. I think that Adam and Eve were not only ashamed, but really confused and in the Garden, because life was so easy, it might have gotten them into a whole lot of trouble and maybe they wouldn’t even be satisfied with keeping and working the Garden of God. When God moved them out of the Garden, where life was easy, and into the outside world where everything was a wilderness where they had to work very hard all day every day to just survive, they didn’t have the time to get into nearly as much trouble with everything they knew.  They had to make or find a place to live. They had to find and grow food. Getting into trouble is most often something that happens to people who have way too much time on their hands, and when they had kids, they had even less time for thinking deep thoughts. They probably worked hard all day and then fell right to sleep at night because they were so tired.

And what about the Tower of Babel? What might have happened if everyone was gathered all in one place and able to speak the same language? When you have people all in one place and someone invents something, someone else is going to see it and think of a better way to make it or will think up some improvements and before too long, people can do some really amazing things. That’s why companies put all of their scientists and researchers all together in one place so that they can work together and when one person accomplishes something, someone else can make a suggestion to make it even better, or if one engineer is struggling to make something work, another one might be able to figure out what to do. Now, right now we have companies in so many different countries and they don’t want other companies to know how to make their products or to do what they do and so they are very secretive about it. Back then, there was no way to keep a secret from anyone and especially not if you were all gathered into one place and you all spoke the same language. Whatever they decided to do, they could eventually figure out how to do. And God had to do something drastic before that happened.

Have you ever really wanted to do something, but it seemed like everything and everyone was getting in your way? Have you ever seen a grownup really angry about being stuck in a traffic jam when they want to get somewhere? I bet David was really irritated about having to hide in caves because King Saul was trying to kill him! And Joseph had those dreams—but then he got sold into slavery and then on top of that he was put in jail! Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth all wanted children but all they got for a long time was disappointment. The Bible is full of stories of people who were promised this or that but had to wait so long that they lost hope. But delays and waiting can be a really wonderful thing. An adult might be angry about traffic but maybe because they were stuck, they didn’t get in a car accident! Or maybe they weren’t at the intersection when the child chased after their ball because they were held up in traffic instead. David had a lot of growing up to do, and while he was on the run from King Saul, he was learning how to be a leader by first leading a small group of men and then larger groups. And David was also learning how to talk to the kings of other kingdoms. Joseph was kind of a spoiled brat who would tattle on his brothers, but not all of his brothers, only the brothers who he would have seen himself as better than. So, Joseph felt he could pick on them. But when they turned around and sold him to the Midianites and Joseph was taken from his family to Egypt, he had to work very hard but just when everything seemed to be going as good as possible for a slave, he was accused of something he didn’t do and got stuck in jail for a long time. And when someone could have gotten him out, they forgot about him and left him there. But by the time he got out, he was a grownup and had learned to be humble instead of prideful. He had become the kind of man that God could use to save people from starving, including his own family.

And, of course, we know about Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth! None of them could have babies. Sarah waited until she was ninety years old! Rebekah couldn’t have a baby for forty years after she was married. Rachel had to watch her sister have a whole ton of babies before she could have one. Hannah was so desperate for a baby that she told God that he could have her first born for Temple work if only she could have a baby and not be sad anymore. Elizabeth was extremely old as well. But the thing is that most of the women in the Bible who have babies are never even named! We have no idea who David’s mother was, or Noah’s mother or hardly any mothers at all. But we all know the names of the children of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth—can you name them? Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel the prophet, and John the Baptist! Wow. Maybe the other women having all the kids didn’t have to wait for them, but they sure didn’t have babies who were that important to the Bible story! Did they know that while they were waiting? No way! Sarah was so desperate for a child that she gave her own servant to her husband so that they could have a baby to give to Sarah. Rachel told her husband Jacob that she would die if she couldn’t have a baby when her sister had so many. Hannah was ashamed by Peninnah, who had a ton of kids. And there is no way that they could understand just how important it was for them to have the right kid at the exact right time but God knew. And even though they were sad for so long, when God gave them children and those children turned out to be important people in God’s story, they knew it was worth it.

And maybe it has happened to you too and you were so angry and frustrated and then, all of a sudden, you got what you wanted and you realized that it was a really good thing that you didn’t get it right away like you wanted to. And adults often aren’t any more patient than kids. On social media and actually throughout my life I have seen Christians who were shouting about how the Devil is holding them back just because they can’t get something done that they want to do. But my experience is that its very often God holding me back from doing something, even though I want to do it and I think it is a good thing to do, because even though it isn’t sinful or wrong or a bad idea, it isn’t what He wants me to do right now, or yet, or ever. I don’t even know how many times that has happened. But later on, I am really glad that God did stop me in my tracks because, oh my goodness, it would have been a total disaster. But maybe a few years later, when I know more and maybe some things I thought I knew were actually wrong, and I am more patient and wiser than I was, it goes really well because God made it so that I jumped out onto the crosswalk when there was no traffic instead of jumping out in front of a bus like I would have if I had done what I wanted when I wanted.

And what if, when I couldn’t do what I wanted, I had blamed the Devil for getting in my way? Well, I’d be calling God the Devil and that is never a good thing. One time, the Scribes who came down from Jerusalem saw Jesus’s miracles and said that he got his power from the Devil. Uh oh. Jesus got His power from God, not the Devil, so these Scribes were totally insulting God! They thought they were just insulting Jesus but they were wrong and so we all have to be very careful about what we say the Devil is doing—if we assume that every time something doesn’t go our way, that it’s the Devil, then we are making the Devil more important than God. More than that, we are assuming that we are way more important to the Devil than we actually are. There’s just one of him and he is not as powerful as God, no way, and he can only be in one place at a time. And if he is going to focus on one person, I can guarantee you it isn’t you or me but I will tell you that God is very focused on you. Just like He was focused on those people who wanted to build that tower for whatever reason they thought it was so important. And because God was focused on them, next week we will see that He stopped them. He stopped them from making a terrible mistake or from getting on the wrong track or getting in over their heads. God’s going to do something that is going to lead Him to choose one man and one woman for a very important job—making a Messiah who would someday save the world and will someday come back as the King over all the world.

So why does God stand in the way of the things we want to do? Sometimes it is because He loves us and is protecting us from what will happen to us if we do what we want. Sometimes it is because he wants to teach us to be patient and trust Him. Sometimes it’s because He wants to protect other people from what we might do if we get our way. Sometimes there is something much better just around the corner, something that we can’t see, and He wants something better for us instead of whatever it was we were going to settle for. Sometimes we aren’t ready for what we want to do. Sometimes we think God wants us to do one thing when He really wants us to do another or maybe He wants us to do something, but not the way we want to do it. There are probably millions of reasons why God might stop us or stand in our way—oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about Balaam, a very odd fellow.

We won’t get to Balaam until we hit the book of Numbers and by that time I will probably be teaching your children! Balaam really wanted to do something wrong because some people were willing to pay him good money to do it. They wanted him to curse the children of Israel out in the wilderness. And he really wanted to go but God said no and so he didn’t go. I know, it’s really weird that a guy who wasn’t an Israelite could talk with God, but anyway…they asked him several times and finally God relented and said, “Okay, you can go but only if they come for you and even then, you have to say exactly what I tell you to say.” And Balaam is like saying to himself, “Dude, they are obviously going to come again so I will just ride out and meet them. Show me da money!” So, he gets onto his donkey and is riding out to them and all of a sudden his donkey just flat out stops and no matter how much he whips his poor donkey, she won’t budge and she ends up crushing his foot against a wall. And he beat her even more and she started talking to him, which for some odd reason didn’t phase him at all. I mean, me? I would run away screeching, “DEMONIC DONKEY!!!!!”

But anyway, she starts asking him why he is beating her and he actually answers—I know, right? She says, “Why are you hitting me?” And he says, “You made me look like a fool.” Dude, talking to a donkey makes you look like a fool, m’kay? But then he sees why she was so scared—a big honkin’ angel blocking the way because he went without waiting for them to come for him. And if they had run into the angel’s sword, it would be bye-bye Balaam. God even prevents disobedient people from messing everything up sometimes! He’s so awesome.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful time this week talking about God with the people who love you.

What was the Tower of Babel and why was it built? Although everyone thinks that they know, we aren’t entirely sure because it doesn’t tell us—and you know when that happens we get a lot of “what if” stories and if you listened to the teaching on all the Nimrod myths, you know quite a few of them. This week we aren’t talking about legends but instead about archaeology—and the very cool thing about how the Bible says the Tower was built!

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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 comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 11)

The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make oven-fired bricks.” (They used brick for stone and asphalt for mortar.) 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.”

We’ve already talked about the first two verses—we did that last week. Now we’re going to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the Tower of Babel that all these nameless people who wanted to make a name for themselves but ended up being totally unknown wanted to build so that it would have it’s top in the heavens. But we can’t just talk about the “tower” because they also wanted to build a city and the Bible even talks about how they were going to build it. And lemme tell you, this description of how they would build was amazingly accurate—very different from how they built things in the Land of Israel, where they had more rocks than you could throw a stone at…hey wait a minute…never mind…or in Egypt, where they used mud, baked bricks, and stone. But in Shinar? No rocks! If they wanted something to last, then they had to use their noggins.

So, what was an ancient city in Shinar like? Well, first of all, people didn’t really live there. Back during those times, the cities were where you would find the public buildings and spaces like marketplaces and temples, and if you wanted someone to decide who was right and who was wrong, you would take your problems or your court cases to the judges and elders who sat at the gates of the city. And when I say gates, I don’t want you to think of the movies with the portcullis (the metal grate that can go up and down) or big doors. It wasn’t a gate like you would have in a fence. A gate was actually a building in the wall of a city that opened inside and outside of the city. You would find people like tax collectors, judges, and scribes, educated people who could read and write and they made up contracts for people, like for when they sold something or got married. If you want to see something totally cool, when I post the transcript on Monday, I will put up a link so that you can see what the Ishtar Gate in Babylon looked like. It was very beautiful. Of course, it wasn’t built until thousands of years after the Tower of Babel was built—in fact, Nebuchadnezzar built it about six hundred years before Jesus. It was one of the wonders of the ancient world along with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which he also built, and his ziggurat.

So, cities weren’t places people lived originally, they were places that people went to do business and serve the gods at their temples. People were almost entirely farmers or shepherds and artisans. Artisans are people who make things like baskets and clay pots or who do metalwork like a blacksmith. Cities were also places where people hid when enemy raiders came to steal their food and animals and take over their land. If a city had walls, it was hard to get in and hurt the people. There are stories in the ancient world of enemy armies being stuck outside of a city, unable to get in, for over a year! If there was enough food inside a city, the people could survive until the raiders ran out of patience and left, but they could also starve to death. It’s great to have your enemies locked out but it isn’t good to be locked in! And so, all these people who came and settled in the land of Shinar (which I told you last week was in what we now call Sumer or in the south of the modern country of Iraq) decided that there were enough of them that they should build a city where they could do business and settle arguments and even be safe from enemies.

Now, some people think that cities are all terrible places because Cain built a city and Sodom and Gomorrah were cities, and Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh too! But, Jerusalem was also a city, the place God chose to place His Name. And at the end of Revelation, we will be in the New Jerusalem which will be so much bigger than any city we have right now. It will be hundreds of miles in every direction. Even from a plane you couldn’t see it all. You’d have to be in space. Cities are good when they are places where all kinds of people can come together and worship God, and get what they need from one another, and help one another. That’s God’s kind of city—clean, beautiful, and safe. Imagine being able to leave your house for five days and your mom not worrying where you are? Definitely don’t try that now in any city or any town either. Just don’t do it at all, okay? So, cities aren’t good or bad, it’s what happens inside them that is good or bad. And people out in the country can be just as awful or wonderful as the people in the cities, I know that personally. Little dudes, we all need Jesus.

So, we don’t really have many questions about what it meant to build cities because we can look at archaeological digs and find out all about that because they have uncovered a lot of ancient cities and sometimes, we can even know what the different buildings were used for. What we have a lot of questions about is that Tower and what it looked like and what it was for. And people who study the Bible and the ancient world have a couple of different ideas. One idea is that it was a watchtower, which would have been for military use. A watchtower was attached to a wall, or another building, and guards could stand watch at the top and alert the people if it looked like a group of people was going to attack. But the watchmen at the top of the tower had to be very careful because if they saw a tumbleweed coming and woke everyone up then they would lose their job pretty quick or maybe even their life. People who believe it was a watchtower often think that Nimrod was there when it was all built and this was part of the defenses for his first city. And that is a very interesting “what if” that a lot of smart people agree with.

Another idea, which is much more popular with Bible scholars, is that the Tower of Babel was a ziggurat. We’ve talked about ziggurats before, and they are found all over the world because it is just one type of pyramid. If you have seen the Egyptian pyramids, you know that they figured out how to make the sides flat but most everywhere else and especially in Babylon, they have different levels and steps up the side. We find them in Iraq, Iran, China, Cambodia, Mexico, and Indonesia and who knows—maybe some of your ancestors built one! That would be pretty cool. Now, the pyramids in Egypt were tombs for their Pharaohs, their kings, because they thought their kings were actually gods and so these tombs were monuments where they would place their bodies after they died. But the pyramids in Mesopotamia, where Babylon was, were different. Ziggurat is a word that means “raised platform” which is exactly what it was. Think of a stack of boxes where the one on the bottom was really big and the next one was smaller and the next one even smaller, all the way to the top. Some Ziggurats had two levels and some actually had seven. There were stairs from the bottom to the top and you might think those stairs were for people but they weren’t. Although priests and kings would use the stairs, they were built so that the city God could come down to the city to bless everyone! Yes, their gods had to use the stairs to come down from wherever it was that they spent their time. Remember, I have told you that these guys weren’t like our God, they were more like humans with powers and really important jobs like making it rain or making sure that the sun comes up every morning.

Now along with every ziggurat was a temple or a shrine to the city god but no one is entirely sure if it was at the top or at the bottom because the ones that have been found are mostly in pretty bad condition so we can’t know for sure. Maybe sometimes they were at the top and at other times they were at the bottom. But the purpose of the ziggurat was to make a place where heaven and earth overlap. Where the world of the gods and the world of humans would meet and the gods could come down and bless the humans. And the humans could feed and care for the gods, because humans were their slaves. Now, when you look at all the artwork from a long time ago about what they thought the Tower of Babel looked like, you can see that they didn’t know anything about archaeology or the ancient world. They made their towers quite modern looking, with rounded sides and spiral staircases but they didn’t have that kind of technology and besides that, a tower like that wouldn’t be very sturdy, it would break down very easily. Ziggurats were built so tough that some of them are still around today.

They weren’t built of stone, of course, because they didn’t have any, but like the Bible says, the people made baked mud bricks and mud was something they had a lot of! But you might look at a picture of a ziggurat and think that it was hollow inside, like a house, with rooms but that isn’t the case. If it was hollow inside, then it would collapse. There were small rooms, very small rooms, inside for the priests to work in but the ziggurats were built with bricks on the outside and around the rooms and between the brick walls was a whole lot of dirt which made the whole thing very strong. Now, some people think they built the Tower of Babel so that they could worship a false god but we don’t see anyone doing that yet in the Bible. I don’t think that happened until they had different languages and different nations and forgot God. I think they were trying to get God to come back to them, since their ancestors had been thrown out of the Garden. Remember, the Bible doesn’t tell us for sure and it is okay to have different ideas. A few weeks ago, we talked about the Nimrod legends and how some people thought that they were building the Tower of Babel so that if God flooded the earth again that they could run up to the top of the tower and be okay. Others believed that they wanted to use the tower so they could attack heaven, which would have definitely ended up with them getting their puny human butts kicked. And then even later on, some people decided that the Tower was built for idol worship and that Nimrod wanted to burn Abraham to a crisp for not worshipping there (but it was almost impossible for them to have lived at the same time).

But after the flood, no one would know where the entrance was to the Garden in Eden, where they knew the presence of God was. And remember that in Ezekiel 28:13-14, we find out that the Garden was on a mountain. (graphic) So the people in Shinar, I think they believed from Noah’s stories that if they could just get high enough, that they could find God again and get Him to come down and bless them. A ziggurat was a man-made mountain, they even looked like mountains. And we see that they wanted to build a “tower” with its top in the sky, which brings me to something super cool. There was this ginormous ziggurat named Entemenanki, and it means “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth.” Guess who built it? That’s right, Nebuchanezzar—and it was also considered a wonder of the world until Alexander the Great trashed it. So, this was waaay after the Tower of Babel but what they called it and what they said about it at the time has taught us a lot about why they built them and how they felt about them and what they believed about how building one would bring the blessing of the god or goddess it was dedicated to. Nebuchadnezzar called his ziggurat the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth because he believed that at the top of the ziggurat was where the god Marduk could pass from the heavens down onto the ziggurat and could then walk down the stairs to bless the king and the city. And guess what he made it with? Baked bricks and asphalt—or tar, you know the stuff they make our roads with? Exactly like the Bible tells us about the Tower of Babel. Baked bricks with asphalt in between them would make the building waterproof, which was very important.

So, I think that’s what the people at Shinar were doing too—I think they wanted God back. I think they wanted to make another mountain of God where they could be with Him. I think they wanted to gather as one people and build a mountain so tall that God could come down to be with them again. I don’t think they felt very blessed anymore. People want to be protected, and blessed, and they want to know that their god hears them and is paying attention to them. It’s a lonely life without a connection to God. It can be scary too, especially back then. Was it wrong for them to want this? It is certainly not wrong to want to be near to God, right? But…that’s not exactly what they were trying to do because a ziggurat was built in order to get a god to show up in a certain place so that they could be taken care of—fed, bathed, dressed, anointed with oil, and put to bed at night. Well, that’s what their idol was for anyway, they took care of their god by taking care of the idol that represented the god. Not sure exactly why they thought that would work but they sure did. But God had sent humans away from the Garden, and He could have called them back if He wanted them to come. But He didn’t. They were trying to take for themselves what God had taken away. And that never works. They didn’t ask God what He wanted from them, or what they could do to bring Him closer, they just decided to take matters into their own hands and build that mountain and that city around it and while they were at it, people from all over would be amazed and would come to their city so that they could be near God too, and spend money there and the builders would all be rich and famous. And that is exactly what happened when cities built ziggurats and temples.

Later, when Israel came to the holy Land, God did have the people build Him a Temple on top of a mountain, Mount Zion which was also called Mount Moriah. God gave David the plans to build the Temple, in writing, from the Holy Spirit I Chron 28:11 “Then David gave his son Solomon the plans for the portico of the temple and its buildings, treasuries, upstairs rooms, inner rooms, and a room for the mercy seat. The plans contained everything he had in mind for the courts of the Lord’s house, all the surrounding chambers, the treasuries of God’s house, and the treasuries for what is dedicated…David concluded, “By the Lord’s hand on me, he enabled me to understand everything in writing, all the details of the plan.” Dang guys, the Holy Spirit gave David the plans for building the Temple, in writing, and all the details. And God’s Temple on Mt Zion was made entirely of HUMONGOUS stones and cedar beams, and some of it was even covered in pure gold! And there were carvings and moldings of trees and flowers because they designed it to be like the Garden in Eden on the Mountain of God! Because that was where God said that they could meet with Him always. And people would gather everyday to make sacrifices, to celebrate a feast with Him, or to give God a whole animal. Three times a year, all the people would come to God’s Temple on Mt Zion to celebrate and two of those times were for an entire week on Passover and Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles. It was the most beautiful building in the world and when they opened it up for the first time and prayed, the Presence of God came down to the Holy of Holies in the Temple (no stairs required) and all the priests had to leave the Temple because there was no way they could be in there with God’s presence being so strong.

Right before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and the Temple, God left the Temple and never came back to Mount Zion. You see, the Mountain of God became a horrible place where Israelites worshiped the sun and the moon and so many false gods, and they carved pictures of creepy crawly things into the walls and the Temple became such a filthy place that God decided to leave the Temple and the City and they weren’t blessed anymore—they were just buildings and no longer protected by the Lord. They forced Him to leave even though He loved them. And they almost all had to leave the Holy Land and were moved to the Babylonian Empire, where the Tower of Babel had been built thousands of years before. It was there that they saw what a land without God was really like, where the gods were cruel and didn’t care for humans at all but only used them to get what they needed or wanted. While they were in Babylon, they learned that God had been a very great and wonderful God to them.

In Babylon, they learned to hate idol worship and false gods. It was like when the Israelites in the wilderness were complaining about the wonderful free manna that God was giving them to eat in the desert and they were wanting to head back to Egypt for the free (and it’s never free when you are enslaved, you are working for it) fish and onions and leeks and garlic, so God gave them nothing but quail until they would rather die than eat any more of it! And the quail weren’t very happy about the arrangement either! They were exiled, thrown out of, the Promised Land because they were being very cruel and sinful and worshiping other gods. Well, the Babylonians were way better at being cruel to vulnerable people than the Israelites and so when they were in Babylon, they got their fill of what life was like without God there to protect them and bless them and show them what is right and what is wrong. They never knew how good they had it before, but they sure figured it out! And so, God brought them back to Mount Zion and Jerusalem and the Promised Land but when they built the new Temple that God told them to build, He never showed up to put His Presence in it. The Spirit of God was never in that Temple as it had been in Solomon’s Temple. And that was a big problem.

When Jesus came, something amazing happened. When His mother and father went to the Temple to give an offering to God after Jesus was born, there were people who had been praying and waiting for Him for a long time, Anna and Simeon. They realized that the Presence of God was in the Temple again, in this tiny little baby boy and they were very happy. When Jesus was twelve years old and His family came for the Passover, they accidentally left him behind because the group they were in with all their relatives and their other children was so big. When they came back, they found Him in the Temple talking with the great sages who really knew the Bible, and He was shocking them with how much He knew and how clever and wise He was. They didn’t know the Presence of God was there in the Temple again, they were just amazed.

When Jesus was thirty years old, He was baptized in the wilderness by His cousin John, and when He came up out of the water, God made sure that the people there knew something amazing was happening. John was very well respected and honored by all the people of Israel and they were all going to him to be baptized because they wanted the Messiah to come and end their troubles with the cruel Romans. Things were pretty bad. But when Jesus came out of the water, John said that he saw the Spirit of God resting on Jesus like a dove, and that a voice told him that Jesus was God’s one unique beloved son. Temples were places where the spirit of a god was supposed to live inside an idol. But when they built the Tabernacle and the first Temple, God’s spirit lived inside it without any idol at all. When He told them to build another Temple after the first one was destroyed, the Spirit of God was never there at all. Until Jesus came and brought the Spirit with Him, and the Spirit was in Him in the way it used to be in the Temple of God. That made Jesus God’s new and perfect Temple, the place where God lived on earth and was worshiped perfectly. But then Jesus was crucified so that sin and death could be destroyed because it was the first time that they had ever done battle with God Himself. Because sin and death had no authority, no power, over Jesus because he had never done anything wrong and because His Father was God who had also never sinned, they lost the battle.

And so, when Jesus was raised from the dead, His Body became the new Temple and when we believe Him and call Him our King and do what He says, we become part of Him and we start becoming new and better people. We become part of God’s new Temple that’s made up of every believer in the world. That’s what the Apostle Paul told us. That’s why the new Temple that they made was destroyed forty years after Jesus died and why there has never been another one. There are things that need to happen that God hasn’t allowed to happen because Jesus is the ultimate Temple of God and there will never be one greater than He is. I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.

Part two of the Tower of Babel Series! What did it mean that the people had one language and one vocabulary? Didn’t the last chapter tell us that there were like seventy languages? This week we are going to talk about the different possibilities and we are going to discuss what an “international language is”—plus, we are going to talk about the festival of Shavuot/Pentecost where all those confused languages went into reverse so that all people could hear the Greatest Story Ever Told!

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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 comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will be in Genesis 11 and Acts 2) Today’s broadcast is about the one language at the Tower of Babel and the miracle of Pentecost!

We are starting Genesis chapter 11 today and so that means some really exciting stuff! The Tower of Babel is a really complicated and controversial story—complicated because there are a lot of context tidbits that are hard to notice and controversial because there are so many theories and I will be sharing some of them with you. Sometimes that shocks and surprises people because when we only hear one story, we just assume that we know for sure what happened but in the Bible, there aren’t usually very many details about some of the most famous stories of all. Storytellers fill in the blanks with guesses—you know, our “what if” stories, and after a while, when we read the Bible we have those in mind and we forget that they are guesses. That would be a huge problem if the Bible was a book about, “Famous quotes from Noah” when he only says one thing in his entire story, or “Gardening tips from Adam and Eve” when nothing at all is said about that, or “The Life and Times of Nimrod” when we don’t know much of anything, or “The Shocking True Life Reason Why the People Built the Tower of Babel.” But this is a book about God and how He relates to us. This is God’s story and not Noah’s or Nimrod’s or anyone else’s. They are just side characters, extras, in God’s story. And God is the one we need to know about. Everything else is just interesting and helps us understand God and His rescue plan better.

The story of the Tower of Babel begins with two mini-mysteries and an idiom that will be important throughout the entire Bible—and not only the Bible but the beliefs of every ancient culture! Gen 11:1-2 says, “The whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” First of all, what does the idiom, “the whole earth” mean? Because it is an idiom, that means it doesn’t mean exactly what it says it means. Obviously, the planet earth doesn’t talk so the whole earth can’t mean the planet. But it also doesn’t usually mean all the people on earth either. Sometimes it does but phrases like “all the world” or “the whole world” only mean a small part of the world. In Luke 2, we see that Caesar Augustus commanded that all the world be registered (so they could be taxed) but all that means is the Roman Empire. Caesar had no authority over all of Europe, Asia, or Africa, just small parts. But they called their lands “all the world” anyway. So what does it mean, that the whole earth had the same language and vocabulary? Well, there are a few possibilities. The first is that this all took place before Genesis 10 and the Table of Nations, before Nimrod, and before all the generations split off with all their lands, clans, nations, and languages. That is possibly what Moses was telling them. Maybe this is the whole group of Noah’s descendants as they are traveling away from the mountains of Ararat, where it would do no good to try and plant a vineyard or raise critters, and perhaps they found this wonderful oasis in a valley in Sumer (remember, what the Bible calls Shinar, we call Sumer) in the cradle of civilization where we can find so much proof of ancient people exactly where the Bible says they were. And if that is the case, it is no surprise that the people all still had the same language and vocabulary.

The second possibility is that this happened hundreds of years after Noah, maybe during the life of Nimrod and maybe he was even there. Remember that he isn’t mentioned as being there at all and in fact, no one is ever named in the story except for God. We left Nimrod back at the beginning of chapter 10. By this time, maybe the people were different enough that they did have their own languages already. Remember that when ancient people wrote their genealogies, their family trees, they didn’t mention every single person—just the famous ones. So, we don’t know exactly how long after Noah lived that Nimrod would have been born. We just know that somewhere in between Noah and Nimrod were Ham and Cush. We do know that Ham was the actual son of Noah, but as for Cush and Nimrod, it isn’t totally clear—but that’s okay. Not everyone has to do things the way we do them now, right? So maybe this was hundreds and hundreds of years after Noah and there are already a whole lot of languages and people groups out there that descended from them. If that was the case, then the one language that the people all had might have been what we call an international language. An international language is a language that people from all different places speak when they want to communicate with one another. Do you know what the international languages are in the world today? The languages that businessmen learn so that they can do business with people all over the world so, they can communicate with one another and not just be totally confused or always needing translators? The most common business languages are English and Mandarin Chinese. Spanish and Arabic are also becoming very important. If a person could speak English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic fluently then they could make a ton of money working for businesses. And although it may sound funny that if a person from India and Germany wanted to do business together, that they might talk to one another in English, that’s just one of the easiest ways to do it. So, maybe a lot of time had gone by and people already had many languages but they still had the language that Noah spoke in common, and they used that to communicate with one another even if their cultures and languages had become very different.

So, that’s one mystery that we have because of Genesis 10, which is very strange. If Genesis 10 happened before Genesis 11, then they already had a bunch of languages plus another one that they could all use to understand each other when they got together. If Genesis 11 happened before Genesis 10, then they all had the same language because nobody had split up yet. And you know what? It doesn’t totally matter—it’s just interesting! I like these things because they remind me to read what is actually there and to think about it and not just assume that the movies and books have it right. The Bible is the most amazing book ever but it doesn’t tell us everything or answer all of our questions because it is here to help us understand God and not every little thing that happened in history or science or whatever. God wants us to have a relationship with Him, not Shem, Ham, or Japheth! They are very dead and we know almost nothing about them and it just doesn’t matter.

So, you probably already know what is going to happen in this story. The people (and it doesn’t say how many—might be all or just a few groups) are going to get together to build a tower and when they get together, they understand one another. God is going to see what they are doing and He is going to get very concerned about it, and He is going to make it so that they don’t understand each other anymore. So, either they all had the same language and God made a bunch of brand-new languages that were totally different from one another, or they already had a bunch of different languages and God made them forget the one language they maybe got from Noah that they all still understood. One way or another, by the end of the story they will have absolutely no way to talk with one another anymore. Dude, that would be so frustrating! It’s hard enough to get anything done and to cooperate even when we do speak the same language but when we don’t? Ugh, forget about it! Let’s just go home and play tiddly winks instead.

So, that’s the first mystery, and the second is a real puzzle. You see, sometimes the original Hebrew words can mean different things depending on how they are used, and sometimes we just do not know how to translate them. In this case, the Bible says, “As people migrated from the east…” in the Christian Standard Bible but other versions say, “As people migrated to the east…” so which one is right? The truth is that we don’t know. Some people think it should say that they were going east because whenever people get into trouble in the Bible they are usually heading east. East is away from Jerusalem and Israel, but they don’t exist yet in the story. Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden and had to go to the east. Cain ran away from home and from God and went east. When the Israelites and the Jews were conquered thousands of years later, they are forced to go to the east. So, maybe the people who were traveling were going toward the east. But it could also be saying that they were coming from the east. The truth is that we just don’t know for sure. It’s another mystery but I wanted you to know why different Bibles say different things.

You know that the Bible was originally in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, right? Three languages that none of us can speak! And so, for me to be able to understand the Bible there are two choices—I either have to learn three ancient languages or someone who understands all of those languages needs to translate them into English for me otherwise I can just stare at the book all day and it will look like a book of spy codes and I will never understand anything at all! Thank God that He gave us people who are really smart about languages and who love God and want to translate the Bible so that we can understand what God wants us to know. But here’s the deal, it is really hard to translate from one language to another no matter how smart you are. For example—we’ve already talked about some words in ancient Hebrew that are only used once in the Bible and nowhere else in the whole world. What do those words mean?? We don’t know!! Translators have to look at all the other words and the story that is being told and they have to make a guess at what it meant. Sometimes, through archaeology, we can find clues to what the word might have meant but other times, we just have no idea. That makes it a really hard job! Other times, we don’t understand a situation in the Bible at all. There are actually a few laws in Exodus and Deuteronomy that no one understands, and even the ancient Rabbis would admit that they were just guessing because it is a complete mystery. And again, sometimes we dig up an ancient law code from one of Israel’s neighbors and we go, “OH! So that’s what they are talking about.”

One of the biggest problems in translating anything from one language to another is that some languages have words that can’t be translated accurately to another language and some that can’t be translated at all. One of my favorite words in the whole world is Ubuntu, and there is no word in English for it. It’s a South African word that describes how people should live together in love, harmony and generosity. Ubuntu is the kind of word that Jesus would have created—because it is certainly what He told us to do. But there is no word in English that means that so if I had to translate something from South African to English, it would take a paragraph to explain it every time the word came up! English needs a word that means Ubuntu—every language needs Ubuntu!

One more problem in translating from one language to another is that languages do not have the same sounds and so a lot of times people who speak one language can’t pronounce names in another. Like when the Hebrew parts of the Bible were translated into Greek—well, Greek didn’t have the “y” sound or the “sh” sound. Plus, men’s names had to end with an “s” sound and women’s names had to end with an “a” sound, but a lot of men’s names in Hebrew ended with vowel sounds so they had to be changed when it all got translated. The man we call Joshua now, his name was Yehoshua, and in Greek, they had to make it Iesouos because they couldn’t say “y” or “sh” and so the Jewish translators did the best they could to mimic those Hebrew sounds with other letters. And it isn’t like the translators could just make up new letter symbols for those sounds because no one would know what they even meant and they didn’t know how to make those sounds with their mouths. Imagine if I made a weird symbol and said it made a new sound. Unless I was there to tell you that sound, you would have no idea what it was. It wasn’t like they could go on YouTube and find out how to pronounce that new letter I made up. Not having one common language can be really confusing and tricky.

And sometimes words have more than one meaning! English is like THE WORST LANGUAGE EVER for that. Wound and wound are spelled exactly the same but they mean entirely different things depending on what the rest of the sentence says. You can even use them both in the same sentence, like “The doctor wound her bandages around the wound.” How about, “The wind began to blow and so I started to wind my watch.” Wind and wind are also spelled exactly the same way. If someone handed you a slip of paper with just the spelling of one of those words on it and asked you how it is pronounced or what it meant, you would either have to say you don’t know or would have to give them more than one way. What a mess! And so, we have words in Hebrew that can mean a lot of different things so we don’t totally know if those people were traveling east or traveling from the east but you know what? It doesn’t matter because all these people are dead and all that really matters is that they ended up in Shinar and they were all able to understand each other. There won’t be a test on this, I promise.

But when you are doing something complicated like building a city and a tower whose top is all the way in the sky, you need to be able to talk to one another about it or people are going to get hurt, and they will argue, and mistakes will be made. All of a sudden, this really cool project becomes one big hassle and you don’t even know if you can trust anyone else because you have no idea what they are talking about. And when they give you a weird look, you can’t ask them why. You can’t ask them anything and they can’t answer and how would you even come up with a way of talking with people who speak so many different languages. A lot of people would want everyone to start talking to them in their own language instead of learning everyone else’s. Everyone thinks their language is best, right? All of a sudden, all they wanted to accomplish together is not worth the effort.

What would the world be like if we did have one language that we all could speak? I think we would trust each other a lot more. We would definitely be more able to understand what other people are thinking, wanting, and needing. We could also accomplish amazing things, right? Would it be better than the way things are now? Do countries that have the same language get along with each other better than countries that don’t? Yes, pretty much. And yet, God is going to see people who can all talk with each other and understand and cooperate together and He is going to make it so they can’t. Why is what they are doing such a problem? Well, that’s a story for another day because something amazing happened thousands of years later after Jesus rose from the dead and after He left earth to sit at the right Hand of His Father. And it all has to do with the Bible holiday that we are celebrating this weekend—a holiday called Shavuot in Hebrew and Pentecost in Greek. Pentecost means “fiftieth”. It happens fifty days after the Feast of First Fruits, the day on the Bible calendar when Jesus was resurrected with a brand new, perfect body that doesn’t get old or sick anymore and can’t die. That’s the kind of body we will get too because we trust Him and believe that God did that because He was innocent and perfect.

Anyway, ten days after Jesus left, His disciples (men and women) were gathered all in the same place somewhere in the city of Jerusalem, and there were also Jews and god-fearing Gentiles from all over the world (remember, that means all the world that they knew about) staying in town too. These were people who had come to celebrate and worship God from all over the place and they spoke many different languages. There would have been worshipers from Europe (Rome, Greece, Spain), from Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya), and from Asia (Syria, Armenia, Pontus, and the Parthian Empire). The people who gathered in Jerusalem for the festivals would have sounded very much like those builders in that valley in Shinar once their language was confused—except they wouldn’t be panicked because this was normal for them! And all the followers of Jesus, who were all Jews who spoke the same language, had stayed the entire fifty days there in town because before He left, Jesus told them to wait and to be there on that very day because they were going to be filled with the Holy Spirit! They must have been so excited! Let’s read what happened from the book of Acts 2:

When the day of Pentecost had arrived, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like that of a violent rushing wind came from heaven, and it filled the whole house where they were staying. They saw tongues like flames of fire that separated and rested on each one of them. Then they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were Jews staying in Jerusalem, devout people from every nation under heaven. When this sound occurred, a crowd came together and was confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. They were astounded and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each of us can hear them in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites; those who live in Mesopotamia, in Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts), Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the magnificent acts of God in our own tongues.”

Wow, that must have been amazing! Just imagine all those people who speak so many different languages and they hear this huge, loud sound and they look around to see what is going on and they were all probably thinking of what had happened at Mt Sinai when God spoke to the people with a voice that sounded like thunder and they would have been anxious to follow that sound to wherever it was coming from because it was a festival day and they would certainly be expecting something amazing! And then they would have all found the followers of Jesus all saying the exact same thing in the language of absolutely everyone who showed up! In a few weeks, we will learn the story of how God made it impossible for the different groups of people to talk to each other and they all knew this story by heart—and they were seeing that God was undoing that at last, but only in the people who were preaching about Jesus and the Gospel of the Kingdom! And they could see that these weren’t educated men and women—they were from Galilee and would have been fishermen and farmers. They could speak languages that no Galilean would have even heard before, perfectly! They weren’t having to translate God’s message, they were speaking it in languages they had never heard as if they were born speaking it.

Why would God do that? Well, the people at the Tower of Babel wanted to build something for themselves that would make their name great and God put an end to that nonsense so they lost the ability to talk to each other. But when God wanted to build something to make His Name great—a Temple made out of people from every nation, tribe, and language on earth, a multicolored Temple—He made a miracle so that everyone could understand and go back to their homes and teach this wonderful message of God in their own countries so that everyone who loves God and Jesus could be one people, just like they were at Babel.

 I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.

The people who built the Tower of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves, God gave a name to Abraham and Jacob, and God warns us about the importance of His own Name. But what does “Name” mean and how did Jesus talk about the Name of the Lord in the prayer He taught us?

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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 comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 11 and the Gospel of John)

Before we start Genesis 11, I want to talk to you about the prayer that Jesus taught us because it is very important to understand the difference between God’s Name and our names. You see, the people in Shinar are going to try to build a tower to make a name for themselves but Jesus said that it is God’s Name that is important and not our own. So, we are going to talk about what it means to have a name or to make a name for ourselves and how it is different from God giving us a name, and the importance of treating God’s Name with a lot of care.

During Jesus’s life and before, in the Temple, there were three hours of prayer—morning, noon, and night. That’s why Daniel opened the windows of his house, the ones on the western side that faced Jerusalem, and prayed three times a day. In the Bible, these times are called the third hour, sixth hour, and ninth hour. But, you might point out, they didn’t have clocks and so how did they even know when to pray? Well, this is where it gets kind of complicated, so I am going to tell you but don’t worry about understanding. There will not be a test, a pop quiz, or even an essay. It will either make sense or it won’t and if it doesn’t, don’t sweat it. It isn’t like this will be useful in real life. So, you have probably noticed by now that the daylight hours are longer in the summer and very short in the winter. Well, they still divided the day and night into twelve sections each and called them hours no matter how long they lasted and that made for every hour of the night being long in the winter and short in summer, and during the summer the day hours were long and the night hours were short. Where I live, right now it is the middle of spring and so there is a lot more daylight than there was three months ago. The sun rose this morning at 6 am and it will set at around 9 pm That means there will be fifteen hours of sunlight and only nine hours of darkness, but that didn’t matter to them. Noon happened whenever the sun was highest in the sky because they didn’t have a clock to tell them it was 12:00 like we do now. Now, at my house today, that wouldn’t happen until 1:30 in the afternoon! So, for them, that would be noon—not 12:00.

So, let’s say that I have the Temple in my backyard, okay? The priests would wake up before the sun came up and by the end of the first hour, which today would take eighty-five minutes or an hour and twenty-five minutes, they would be getting the altar ready and doing all the morning busy work. The second hour would start almost at 7:30 and would last another eighty-five minutes, putting the start of the third hour at 8:50 in the morning. This was the time when they would open up the gates of the Temple to visitors, and they would offer the first lamb of the day, called the morning Tamid offering. And there was a long prayer service called the Shacharit. Three “hours” later, at 1:25 (which is actually 4 ½ hours later by our clocks), they would bring out the afternoon lamb and they would have their noontime prayers—even though it wasn’t at what we would call noon! That was called the sixth hour. At the ninth hour, 5:45 by our reckoning, they would sacrifice the second Tamid lamb and another prayer service, the Minchat, would begin. In the winter, the hours could be as short as forty-seven minutes long! And so, wherever they were in the world, and Daniel was far away in Babylon, they could look at where the sun was in the sky and pray during those times as though they were praying in the Temple. Aren’t you glad we have clocks now???

Now, why did I even bring this up? Honestly, I sat here after writing it and couldn’t remember. But now I remember. We are talking about the Lord’s Prayer and I bet you can say it along with me! “Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” And some early Bibles include, “For yours is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever, Amen.” And that might seem odd to you that some Bibles have this verse and others don’t, but back when the Tyndale and the KJV and some other early Bibles were translated, they only had a very few sources to go on. But as the years went by, scholars found more and more copies of the Bible that were made much earlier and those Bibles didn’t always have verses, which means that they were added later—sometimes by accident and other times because a scribe thought it would make things clearer. But usually, when we see an extra verse, it is just from another place in the Bible—like this one, which we can find in Daniel, the Psalms, and Chronicles. So, it’s okay because that ending part is still in three other places in the Bible! Copying a huge book like the Bible, by hand, (with a quill even!) was a really hard job and it was easy to make mistakes or add something in.

The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is what I want to talk about today because it says, “may your name be honored as holy” or other translations say, “Hallowed by thy Name,” or “May your Name be sanctified” but it all means the exact same thing. God’s Name is very important and by His Name, I don’t mean how you pronounce it—when the Bible was written, a person’s Name was their reputation, how people thought about them. If you were amazing then you had a good Name and if you were a skunk then you had a bad name and we still use that expression today—someone might be angry that another person is lying about them and say, “They are trying to destroy my good name,” or, how about when someone says, “They are giving you a bad name!” That means that someone is making you look bad and that’s just another good example of an idiom. It doesn’t mean your parents gave you a bad name, like Suppiluliama or Duppi-Teshuv, and those are real Hittite and Amorite names, okay? Whatever your name is, you don’t have it that bad!

But God’s Name, and in the Bible, it is only written as four letters, Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey in Hebrew, with no vowels! And it was probably pronounced Yahweh but no one can entirely prove it so you do what your parents do and not what Miss Tyler does, okay? And people in the Old Testament times said it but by the time of Jesus they weren’t saying it anymore and that’s a long and complicated story so don’t worry about it. But we can make someone’s name holy without actually pronouncing it—and we can give them a bad name without pronouncing it too. It’s all about being image-bearers, and we’ve talked about that before on the radio show and Volume 4 of Context for Kids is about that. God put men and women on earth to bear His image, to be His representatives, to rule and subdue the earth as He would if He were here. He made us to care for the planet and the animals and one another and to be like Him. Not to look like Him, of course, because the Bible says that God is spirit, and so even though we call Him a “he” it isn’t like He has a man’s body. Jesus does, but not the Father. Sometimes we forget about that but that’s a big part of the reason why He said there would be no idols of Him, because making Him look like a person or especially an animal, would be insulting. He isn’t like us but we are supposed to be like Him.

We are supposed to be reflections of Him, like a clean flat mirror and not a dirty funhouse mirror. But when we are cruel, hateful, unforgiving, violent, untrustworthy, and out of control, we make God look really bad when we say we are Christians. People look at us and think, “If that is what God is like then count me out!” because we are giving Him a bad name. When I was your guys’ age, I knew someone who said they were a Christian and they were just so mean, such a bully. They would laugh at me if they thought I was wrong about something, they had a mean opinion on just about everything, and they made me think that God was just like that too—that He was laughing at me when I am wrong, and was criticizing everything I did and that He didn’t think I could do anything right. I didn’t want anything to do with their God because I was scared of Him. I wasn’t scared of what He would do to me if I sinned, I was scared that He hated me no matter what I did. That person, who said they were bearing God’s image, gave God a bad name. When they were praying, “may your name be honored as holy,” and then left church and started being really mean, they were not living as the kind of person who was making God’s name be honored as holy. People were talking bad about God because of how that person behaved.

I am sure you have probably met all sorts of people in your life who give someone else a bad name—maybe their parents, or maybe an organization they belong to—just imagine if instead of helping me across the street, a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout tripped me and pushed me into traffic! People would start running away when they saw those blue or green uniforms! It’s very important that we remember that the things we do aren’t just about ourselves. When we behave like followers of Jesus should, it makes everyone around us see Him better. When we behave badly, it makes everyone around us look bad too. And I use funny examples to get you to think and laugh, but how we behave is very important to everyone. It isn’t just our problem.

Now, you probably have heard about the third commandment—do not take the Name of the Lord your God in vain and usually, people will tell you that means using God as a swear word. Don’t get me wrong, that definitely counts but it is a lot more than that. Because a name is more than just a pronunciation; it is someone’s reputation (how people think about them), so anything we do to make God look bad is taking His Name in vain. It means giving Him a bad name, dragging His Name through the mud, making Him a laughingstock, however you want to put it. Everything we do is supposed to make God look good. Now, we don’t always succeed but there is a difference between someone having a bad day and being a goober head, and someone who is making God look terrible.

The best example I can think of is very terrible and sad, but there is a church here in America that makes God look really bad to a lot of people. When a soldier dies, they go to the funeral with terrible signs that say horrible things that upset the family. Not because of anything the soldier did wrong but because they hate other people. When there is a shooting, they take signs and go to where people are hurting and say that God sent the shooters to hurt people. When 9/11 happened and all those people died, they said that God was laughing. But we know from the Bible that God doesn’t laugh when people are hurting, God is with the people who are hurting. We are told to cry with the people who are crying, not to make things worse for them! That church is taking God’s Name in vain—they are causing hurting people to hate God although, fortunately, most people don’t believe that church represents God at all. They just had a hateful leader who didn’t understand that just because he hates people, doesn’t mean that God does. That’s an easy mistake to make. But God wants us all to be saved and He isn’t laughing when innocent people get hurt or when people die without knowing Jesus. Anyone who wants to honor God’s Name, as in Jesus’s prayer, had better make sure that what they are saying about Him is true!

But God isn’t the only one with a name, right? As we will see in chapter 11, the people who gathered on the plain of Shinar wanted to make a name for themselves too. They wanted to look good. They wanted to be famous and admired and respected. Like, “Wow, look at them, they are so awesome!” And I think most people want those things although I would sure hate to be famous. But we all want people to think good things about us, right? Here’s what 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.” So, they thought that by building a city, and a tower as well, tall enough that everyone could see it, that they would never be forgotten. You see, they had some interesting ideas in the ancient world. It was very important to them to never be forgotten because they believed that they needed to be taken care of after they died. That’s called Ancestor worship. It doesn’t mean that people are bowing down and singing songs to their dead relatives as though they are gods now, it means that people felt as though their dead ancestors needed their help in the land of the dead, Sheol. They thought they would need food, drink, and all sorts of things in order to be comfortable. But if no one remembered you, you were in trouble. And so they needed to have children to take care of them after they died, win a battle against an enemy, or build impressive buildings so that they would never be forgotten. People in the ancient world were terrified of dying and not having anyone to bury them or care for them. So, by doing impressive things, they thought they would be remembered forever. Problem is, we have no idea who these people are because not one single, solitary name is mentioned. Not even Nimrod—he was way back at the beginning of chapter ten and we are in chapter eleven now and evidently, everyone has been forgotten. Bummer.

And the Bible does that a lot—there are little jokes all over the place if you know what to look for. All these people wanted a name so that they would never be forgotten and they were all forgotten. They wanted to build a huge tower that reached to the sky but it is so small that God has to come down just to get a look at it. They wanted that city and tower so they wouldn’t be scattered over the face of the earth and they got scattered! I mean, that’s what happens when we go out trying to make a name for ourselves, right? We try so hard and with very few exceptions, it isn’t long before no one knows who the heck we even are and, in most cases, no one ever knows anyway except the people who love us. I suppose it is better to just have a good name with the people who do know us, right? And if God wants us to be famous then we will be famous but being famous never lasts forever. Probably a lot of the movie stars I grew up watching, if I told you their names you wouldn’t know them, or politicians. Do you know who Paine Wingate is? No? Well, he was very famous once, he was one of the very first Senators here in the United States. He was a member of the Continental Congress. And you’ve almost certainly never heard of him. It’s what he did that we remember even if we don’t know who he was. Like the people who tried to build that tower and city, we remember what they did but only because the Bible tells us. We don’t know who the heck they even were.

But when God wants to give you a name, boy howdy that is sure different. When we come to the story of Abraham, God tells Abraham that He is going to give him a few things and one of those things is a great name. And yes, God did change his name from Abram to Abraham but that isn’t what God was talking about. Abraham has got to be like the most famous man who ever lived, apart from Jesus and maybe Moses. And in fact, if you count up all the Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the world, they make up 57%, over half, of the population of the world and they all know the Name of Abraham! Not only that but they all love him! Now THAT is a great name for sure, so God totally kept His promises and then some.

Let’s talk about another kind of Name—I bet when you pray, sometimes you end it with “in Jesus’s Name, Amen.” But have you ever wondered what that actually means? Some people think that means that we have to say Jesus’s Name in order for our prayers to be heard but that isn’t quite right. You see, Jesus is the reason why our prayers are heard, whether we mention His Name or not. Name can be what you are called, and it can also be your reputation, but the third thing it is about is authority. What does authority mean? If your parents go out to the movies and leave you at home with the babysitter, then your parents are giving your babysitter permission to be in charge of you, to protect you, and you need to listen to them like you would listen to your parents while they are gone. Of course, if they tell you to do something bad, then you don’t do that and you tell your parents when you get home. When He was here on earth, God gave Jesus the authority to preach the Gospel, do battle with Satan and his demons, work miracles, cure the sick, and heal people who couldn’t see, hear, walk, or talk. He did that for Jesus because Jesus was His only unique Son. The Bible tells us that we are all the sons of God when we believe Jesus and obey Him, no matter if we are girls or boys, doesn’t matter because we are all the same in God’s eyes—but we aren’t the same as Jesus. Jesus is special. He is the one and only Son who came down from Heaven to be with us. And when He came, He chose some special people to be with Him. And He made them some promises about His Name.

John 14:12-14 “Truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do. And he will do even greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” Wow, what on earth would they do that Jesus didn’t do? What could be better than all of that? Well, the world needed to know what Jesus said and did and how He died and came back to life in a perfect body—and Jesus couldn’t do that because He had to go back to His Father! Because they saw everything, they had to go tell everyone about everything that He said and did! And because they were the first to go out to do that, first in Jerusalem and then heading out into the world, God blessed them with amazing miracles so that people would know that they were telling the truth because frankly, it all sounded like crazy-talk to them. Now, it all sounds familiar to us but the idea of believing in a guy who did all that and let Himself be killed in the most embarrassing way possible and now He’s alive again? They needed those miracles to show that they were telling the truth and even today, when the story of Jesus goes out to new places, there are often amazing miracles. Especially in Africa, oh my goodness. They have people being raised from the dead and cured of horrible things over there. And they are growing fast over there!

John 15:16 “You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.” He’s speaking again to His disciples, the ones who will go out to the world. Jesus is telling them that their job is to “produce fruit” and that means that they have to honor God’s Name through their behavior, by being loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, trustworthy, gentle, and self-controlled but also to be fruitful by making new believers. Do you remember when I taught you that there are two ways to be fruitful and multiply? One is by having kids but the most important way is by bringing new people to Jesus.  I mean, there are plenty of people now and we are all over the earth but what every person needs is to know God and Jesus.

John 16:23-27 “In that day you will not ask me anything. Truly I tell you, anything you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. Until now you have asked for nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete. “I have spoken these things to you in figures of speech. A time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but I will tell you plainly about the Father. On that day you will ask in my name, and I am not telling you that I will ask the Father on your behalf. For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” Wow, when Jesus told them that God would hear what they ask for, that was really big. They wouldn’t have to ask Jesus to ask God for anything anymore—because God would know them and listen to them because they loved Jesus. Everything we ask God, is automatically in Jesus’s Name because Jesus is the reason that God listens to us and when we ask for something to help us make new disciples, that makes Him very happy.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.

Before we get into Chapter 11, the Tower of Babel and the journey of Abraham, we need to talk about ancient Mesopotamia—what it was like, what people’s lives were like, and the things that Abraham would have grown up with. A lot of people think of that area of the world and assume it is all desert, but it was more like a garden paradise! How were their lives the same as ours? How were they different? What did they look like and how did they dress? What did they eat and how did they live? Knowing this is important to understanding the stories of Abraham, Sarah, and Lot.

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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, today we are going to talk about Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent so that you kids understand where the Tower of Babel was and where Abram came from and traveled and so I am going to jabber on a bit to give you parents some time to pull up a map on the internet or a globe or in a book if you are listening to this on the radio. Okay kids, now that the grownups are gone, let’s talk about my plans to conquer the whole world using a pair of chopsticks, a roll of duct tape, and a small transistor radio…)

The Bible is a book about God. And the main people talked about are the Children of Israel and later, the Jewish people in the time of Jesus. And most of the Bible stories take place in the Land of Israel. But so far, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the Land of Israel or the Jewish people. Not even a little bit. Not even a tiny hint. I mean, we’re about to start chapter 11, right? What gives? A long time ago I read a book by James Michener called Centennial and it was about the State of Colorado and all these people who had lived there from the original Native Americans up to modern times. But there was a problem because I hated the first chapter—the first chapter was about the dinosaurs who lived there. For me, that was super boring. I wanted to get to the good stuff and the author wanted me to know about how the rivers were formed and the plains and all that. And yeah, it was important to the story but I was way more interested in hearing about Lame Beaver, the brave Arapaho warrior and leader, and Pasquinel the French Trapper and his partner Alexander McKeag, the young Scottsman whose life he saved. That’s what I wanted. I like the action. I want to get to the main characters. But no, the dinosaurs.

In the same way, God wanted to tell a story that starts with the first eleven chapters of Genesis—where we see characters who seem very important—like Adam and Eve and Noah and Nimrod and a flood and a tower—but who aren’t really mentioned or treated as though they are important in the rest of the Bible because the story isn’t about them. They are part of God’s story but not so much a part of ours. Sure, because Adam and Eve blew it, we now have sin and death to deal with but God promised no more floods and although the Tower of Babel will be very important in the chapter we are about to read, it never gets mentioned ever again in the Bible. We are dazzled by these dramatic stories because they are very entertaining and are great material for games of “what if” however, the Bible is much more concerned with God’s plan to rescue all the world and that plan will begin at the end of chapter 11 with the unexpected choice of the son of an idol worshiper living in a place called Ur of the Chaldeans. And we won’t really know much of anything about his early life before his father decided to move to the land of Canaan. But God is like that, right? God gives us a future and not a past. When God calls us and we answer Him and we go with Him, it doesn’t matter what or who we were before—which is why Abraham’s life before God spoke to Him isn’t really important. You know, in a lot of ways, our lives don’t really become real until we begin to know God.

But we do know something important about Abraham—he came from a place called Mesopotamia, and that’s where all the action has taken place so far. Because Mesopotamia is very important to the Bible and to the story of the Tower of Babel, we are going to take a week off and talk about it. It’s okay if you are not a huge geography fan but geography is very important to Bible study. Without it, it’s hard to picture what is happening and when and why. And there are a lot of what’s, when’s and why’s about the Bible that we will understand a lot better when we know about places like Mesopotamia, Egypt and Israel. And if you have a globe or if you have the internet up, you can look up this area of the world and when I post the transcript I will have a map for you to look at.

If you know where Israel is, and that will become very important once we get introduced to Abraham and the Canaanites, and you head east, you will probably die from heat and thirst in the desert. So, let’s not do that. But if you head north, and follow the green stuff and stay out of the desert, as you go north and east you would travel through ancient Lebanon and Syria until you came to the mighty Euphrates river, and then you would follow that river south and east until you traveled all the way to what we now call the Persian Gulf. And from above, that would look like a big green boomerang surrounded by deserts and mountains. But it was a wonderful place to live in the ancient world because there was lots of water, and the soil was great and so there were important cities all along that river and also along the Tigris River. Together, those two rivers made the entire land almost a paradise and when the Bible talks about the Garden in Eden, it says that two of the rivers that flowed out of the Garden were the Tigris and Euphrates (Gen 2:14)!

So when Moses was telling the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, he was telling them that God’s Garden was like the greenest place on earth they could imagine, with a ton of food and water. They had food and water in Egypt, of course, at the other end of the Fertile Crescent, but they were also slaves. The riverbanks of the Tigris and Euphrates would have been lined with date palm groves and canals would have brought water inland to water other crops. No wonder archaeologists agree with the Bible that Mesopotamia was the “cradle” of civilization. That means that it was a good place for people to gather to live and work together as a society and not just every person for themself! This was probably where Cain built his first city and where Noah and his family headed when they got out of the ark and where Noah planted his vineyard because that takes a lot of water. This is also where Nimrod built his kingdom and the cities mentioned in Genesis 10, as they are all near those two rivers. It would have been a very good place to live.

Now, today that land is divided up and called Iraq and Syria but in those days it was divided into three areas named Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria. Sumer is also called Shinar in the Bible. Shinar is where we will find the city of Babylon later in the Bible, and Babylon was the great capital city of the Babylonian Empire. They were the ones who destroyed the walls, city, and Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BC. They carted away all the silver and gold and bronze and just everything. But where we are now in our Bible studies, that’s two thousand years away! Long after Abraham, Moses, and David. To the north of Sumer was Akkad and Akkad was very important in ancient times because it was the center of the very first empire in the world, the Akkadian Empire. The Sumerians to the south and the Akkadians had a common language that we call Akkadian. Archaeologists have found many tablets and seals written in Akkadian. They had amazing art and stories and technology like the canals that brought the water from the Tigris and Euphrates to farms that weren’t right on the rivers. North of that was Assyria. The Assyrians were some really scary dudes. If they came and took over your country, they wouldn’t let you stay there—they would take you away to the other countries they had taken over and they would put other people on your land. They didn’t want you feeling like you could fight them and get your land back because first, you would have to fight them wherever they put you, and then you would have to go back home—if you even knew how to get there—and fight the people who were living in your house and growing food in your fields! The Babylonians did that later as well, but the Assyrians did it first. It was actually a better idea than just killing everyone because it made your empire bigger and stronger. When they took over Northern Israel, they took folks away to the east and they just never came back! The people who remained and were brought there became the Samaritans.

We know a lot about their empires and cultures, the Assyrians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, because of archaeology. They built beautiful palaces with carved walls with scenes of kings killing lions and destroying their enemies, and tombs for their dead kings, and temples and ziggurats. We talked about ziggurats way back in Genesis 1, and they are going to be very important when we talk about the Tower of Babel and Jacob’s Ladder. We know the names of their kings, and we have the cuneiform tablets they wrote about their gods and goddess and myths, and their business contracts, and the letters that kings sent to one another. We know what they looked like because they made carvings of themselves. And some of their art even talks about people mentioned in the Bible, like King Jehu! Can you even imagine how excited archaeologists were when they found someone from the Bible in the writings of another civilization? I think my head would have probably exploded.

But if someone wanted to travel from Ur in Sumer (where Abraham came from) to Egypt, from one end of the fertile crescent to the other (and Abraham actually did this), they would start in Ur, and travel along the Euphrates river as it flowed north and west, through Uruk and Babylon—but they would avoid Ninevah, which was a dangerous place because that was on the Tigris to the north. They would stop for supplies in Mari, where archaeologists found 15,000 cuneiform tablets carved with their language! Mari was an amazing city with two sets of huge walls that were designed to keep out the floodwaters. It was destroyed by the Babylonians after Abraham died but it must have been beautiful. And they would keep going until the river went straight north, but they would go west to Aleppo, one of the oldest cities on earth! Did you know that people have lived there for thousands and thousands of years now? It was probably founded by the Amorites–one of the Canaanite tribes that descended from Ham’s grandson Canaan. And we will see a lot of those guys because they were a very powerful kingdom during the time of Abraham. Some of the ancient buildings that Abraham might have passed have been uncovered, including the Temple of Ba’al Hadad, the storm god of the Amorites. He shows up in the Bible too!

Did you think that Abraham just walked through the desert from Babylon to Israel? Nope! There were trees and farms and big cities! He had to look out for bandits and lions on the roads. Aleppo was a huge trade center between the lands of the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and the Egyptians. It would have been big and loud and you could probably find merchants selling just about anything you would need. Silk and spices and all sorts of wonderful, amazing things. Leaving there, you would travel south to Damascus, another one of the oldest cities on earth and mentioned quite a bit in the Bible. That’s where Saul was heading to arrest the early Christians when Jesus appeared to him on the road and spoke to him and blinded him for three whole days. Now, unfortunately, because of wars and the fact that they just kept building and building, archaeologists haven’t been able to really uncover anything from the time of Abraham but we do know it was there, not only from the Bible but also from the Egyptian records.

From Damascus, a traveler might go south through Shechem or Hazor, and travel through the land of the Canaanites and their cities to Beersheba and then down to Egypt and of course, Egypt was very powerful with magnificent cities and Pyramids and the Sphinx and temples and the Nile River. It would have been an amazing trip full of beautiful sites past the wonders of the ancient world. But they would have never really been alone because many travelers were on the roads with them. And you might ask—how long would the trip from one end to the other be? From Ur all the way to Egypt? It’s over a thousand miles! Fortunately, when Abraham did it, he didn’t do it all at once—he’d stay places, sometimes for years. But that’s like walking from San Francisco to Denver! Or from Phoenix to Houston! Maybe a good project for you would be to figure out what is a thousand miles from your house—and then think about traveling on foot and on camels and on donkeys with all your stuff and critters. The critters would really slow you down a lot! And especially if there were baby animals.

What would the people have looked like? Well, like Abraham, they would have brown or very tan-colored skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. We have a lot of examples of what they looked like around the time of Abraham. Men and women wore robes, although they were different lengths at different times, some were knee-length and others went down to the floor. Of course, fabric was expensive because it was handmade and so it is a common thing all through world history for rich and powerful people to have a lot more fabric on their bodies than the poor. Longer robes and longer sleeves usually meant more money. Fancier, dyed fabric definitely meant more money! They would have looked very different from one another based on age, gender, and status. In many cultures, slaves had to dress differently so that you knew they weren’t free people because everyone had the same color skin and you couldn’t tell them apart by that. They were people who were from the countries and communities that were very close by and so they looked the same. Some of them were sold by their own families to pay bills and others were captured in war. Men usually wore beards and long hair, although certain classes had shaved heads and no beards! How you looked told people who you were and what your job was but we can’t tell any of that just by looking at people walking down the street today. You could tell if a woman was married or single by how she dressed and sometimes by what she did with her hair or by covering her hair. Sometimes there were strict laws telling everyone what they were allowed to wear and what they weren’t allowed to wear.

Abraham would have seen the huge ziggurats that were taller than any other buildings in the cities, they would have looked like man-made mountains because that is exactly what they were—with a room on top for the god of the city and stairs leading down to a temple at the bottom. All the buildings would have been made from clay bricks because, unlike in Israel, they didn’t have stone to work with. But just like Israel and Egypt, there would have been many fields full of barley, wheat, einkorn, lentils, chickpeas, garlic, onions, eggplants, cucumbers, lettuce, beans, melons, and turnips being farmed by slaves and small landowners, as well as orchards of date palms, figs, apples, pears, plums, pomegranates, pistachio nuts, apricots, and grapes. YUM! And they also hard herds of cattle, sheep, and goats—only they didn’t eat them very often because they were way too valuable. They were all good for milk (the girl animals anyway), which gave them curds and cheese and butter, and for their wool. Cattle were an important source of leather once they were slaughtered. And they drank a lot of beer and wine made from the barley and grapes, especially in places where the water wasn’t good for drinking, and ate a lot of bread.

Did you know that a rich man in the ancient world didn’t really have money? Nope, he had land and critters instead and when he got more money he would buy more land and critters. Those were the most important. In fact, it was way more respectable to own land and critters than to be a merchant travelling around selling stuff. As Abraham passed by or through the gates of the cities, he would have seen older wealthy men sitting there talking and waiting for people to bring their arguments to be settled. The women were home, often working very hard, while the men were sitting in the shade—if they had money. We actually see that in Proverbs 31 and in Bedouin tribes today, the men sitting around not doing much of anything while the women do the bulk of the work. It’s weird but that’s how it used to work in most places. I think I would get bored just talking to the same people at the city gate all day but that was how they got the respect of the community.

Kids didn’t see their fathers much until the boys came to the age where they could join their fathers out in the world, and so if the father was a blacksmith, the sons would join him working hard in the workshop. Men were generally at home to eat and to sleep, otherwise, they were out with other men either working or talking. Until the children were a certain age, they really were only familiar with their mothers and one another. Girls rarely knew their fathers very well. When they got married, they didn’t usually get to choose their own husband or wife. The fathers would get together and they would make a decision that their kids should get married and that was that. The son would take his wife and live in the same place as his parents and the daughter would go to live with her husband’s family. That was a very hard thing for a young woman because sometimes she was a complete stranger to everyone in the house and even to her husband. And she would have to do everything that her husband’s mother told her to and until she had a baby boy, she could be very easily divorced and thrown back to her father’s house. So, Miss Tyler would be in HUGE trouble because I never ended up being able to have a baby at all. And this is going to be very important as we study the story of Abraham and Sarah.

What about their houses? In the city, they were at least two stories high but had no basements. On the first story, there would be a courtyard out front and sometimes multiple families would share that open area, but inside the house on the first floor were the small animals like chickens and the homeowners would just throw their trash down for the chickens to eat it! What? Yep—the first story of the house was pretty much a stinky barn with small animals. The second and third floors were where the family slept and lived. Cooking could be done outside in the courtyard when it was hot or on the roof of the house where it was cooler. Their houses were made with baked clay bricks held together with gooey asphalt, or with sandstone blocks if they could get them. But there weren’t any toilets or faucets or refrigerators, so they had to be very creative and they had to walk quite a ways to get what they needed.

In the countryside, they would build beehive houses, but there were no bees in them. They were just shaped like old-fashioned beehives. They were made of reeds tied together and covered with mud and some people there still live in them to this day! And think of the music Abraham would have heard as he traveled! People would sing, of course, but they would also play drums, lutes, harps, pipes, lyres, and horns. Ancient Mesopotamia had good food, beautiful scenery, gorgeous buildings that reached to the sky, music, and art. And it was busy! Men working hard to make a living as farmers, potters, builders and many other things; women at home grinding their own flour and making everything from scratch in clay ovens that were sometimes shared with other families, making their own fibers from wool and flax and making all the clothing for their families. Teenage sons learning how to work with their fathers and finding that the world of men was very different than life at home with their mom and brothers and sisters. Girls learning from a very early age to do everything their mothers can do and caring for younger brothers and sisters so that when they got married and left home forever, they would be prepared.

No way was Abraham’s journey through a barren desert with nothing interesting to look at, he was traveling through the heart of civilization. And the people he saw and met were in some ways a lot like us—in that they looked like us because we are all humans from the same family in the beginning, but the way they lived and the music they enjoyed and how they thought about things were all very different from us today. They believed in many gods and goddesses, even Abraham’s family did, and they didn’t think of their lives in terms of science because they thought everything could be explained by the activities of all those gods. And they weren’t very interested in doing things in new ways because they believed that keeping to the old ways would keep them alive. And they loved traditions. We will be learning a lot more about all this as we study Abraham, Sarah, and Lot because this was where they came from and the only life they ever knew before God told Abraham to go to the Land of Canaan.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

https://artincontext.org/mesopotamian-art/

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/trdm/hd_trdm.htm

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/keywords/mesopotamian-art/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_Asmar_Hoard

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/ancient-mediterranean-ap/ancient-near-east-a/a/introduction-to-the-ancient-near-east

http://www.historyshistories.com/mesopotamia-daily-life-in-sumer.htmlhttps://www.historyonthenet.com/what-did-ancient-mesopotamians-eat

For me, this is the fun stuff. What do a fiery furnace, magic underwear, an army invading heaven, idolatry, and a marriage between people who were born 1500 years apart all have in common? They’re all part of the wild development of Nimrod myths from the time of Jesus until modern times. But the Bible says almost nothing about Nimrod, and history says nothing. So why are there so many stories about him floating around out there? And how many different names can I come up with for magic undies?

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 comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 10)

This is going to be so different! Last week I showed you what the Bible actually says about Nimrod, which isn’t a lot but more than a lot of people pick up because of the references to kings and empires that we find in art from ancient Assyria, where he lived. Nimrod, we found out, was a powerful hunter—which is what they called their kings because one of the jobs of the kings was to hunt lions, who were very dangerous and would attack travelers in packs. We looked at the different cities he was involved with and some that he built, plus the canals and all that. Nimrod would have been a very powerful king to get all that done and, as I Chron 1:10 tells us, he was the first to become a great warrior on earth. So, when we look at all the great empires of history (and by great, I mean big and violent because you don’t get to have an empire without a lot of fighting!), the Bible says that it all began with Nimrod. We’ll read about some of the greatest empires in history as we read the Bible—the Egyptian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, and the Roman Empire. They were all able to conquer (which means to win the land through war) large territories and many different people and rule over them all. Hitler thought he could do it too, and we are so glad it didn’t work!

But this week, we’re going to look at the fictional stories people have written about Nimrod because you will probably hear them, and they cause a lot of problems and people fight about it because they believe the stories are real history and don’t understand that they were made up and why people made those stories up. And honestly, they hurt the way we read the Bible in a lot of ways if we think they are true. (Parents, I am going to link a really great article (starting on page 16) for you by Karel Van der Toorn in the transcript if you want to know my main source but it is very scholarly and so I am going to translate it into what I call “normal people language.” He is the expert. I have a book by him that is about three inches thick on this sort of thing. He’s a total brainiac.)

Okay, now the fun starts. You guys know if you listened last week that Nimrod only shows up three times in the Bible—once in Genesis 10, again in I Chron 1:10 and in Malachi 5:6. And not much gets said—he doesn’t even show up in the Tower of Babel chapter even though a lot of people put him there. And maybe he was but we don’t know for sure. But when the Bible says almost nothing about a person in the Bible, people love to fill in the blanks with creative stories. And it might surprise you all the different opinions people had that they wrote down over the last two thousand years.

The very first named person to write about Nimrod was a man named Philo, and he was alive at the same time as Jesus. He was an important Jewish Philosopher who was living in Alexandria, Egypt. Philosophers are people who like to think very deep thoughts because they are looking for wisdom and truth and Philo tried to find the deep meanings of Scripture by combining it with a more Greek way of thinking. Well, Philo looked at the names of Ham and Cush and Nimrod and decided they were all terrible and that Nimrod must have been the one to build the Tower of Babel because he was a “giant”—someone who was warring against God and all heavenly things. So, Philo believed that the giants of Genesis 6, the Nephilim, were guys who warred against God. Remember all the theories I told you about? This is another one. And Philo said something hateful, evil, and wrong that was going to cause problems later—he said that because Nimrod was the son of Cush, that he should be called “the Ethiopian because pure evil has nothing to do with light, but loves night and darkness,” (Questions and Answers in Genesis 2.81-82). What the heck??? And he had some nasty things to say about hunters too—but then, Philo was getting his dinner from the marketplace because he was from a wealthy family and he had servants to prepare everything for him. Maybe he thought the meat just got there without any animals needing to be killed for it! But this is the first place I have seen the idea of someone being evil because they have black skin in any Jewish writings. The Bible doesn’t say it, and one of Jesus’s earliest followers was an Ethiopian from the court of Queen Candace. But that’s one of the dangers of combining philosophy with the Bible and looking for symbolism in everything. Because of what Ham did, which was just awful and mean, his son Cush was branded as bad and so was Nimrod. But the Bible says nothing about Cush being good or bad, it just gives us his name. Legends and opinions can lead to a lot of trouble when they are used badly. Imagine how ridiculous it is to think that the color of a person’s skin makes them good or bad! We would have to just ignore all of the Bible and all of history to believe that! Philo wrote about the Bible, but that doesn’t mean that what he wrote is all good. Many people write terrible things about the Bible. The Bible is good for teaching us but not everything we grownups do with it is good.

Another person who lived at about the same time as Jesus told a really tall tale about Nimrod and the tribe of Ham wanting the built the Tower of Babel along with the tribes of Shem and Japheth but that Abraham and twelve others refused and were thrown in jail and that Nimrod was so furious with Abraham that he threw him in a fiery furnace but God saved Abraham—and that story sounds a lot like Shadrach, Mischach, and Abednego who were thrown into the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. But it’s about impossible for Abraham and Nimrod to have been alive at the same time and I think something as important as that would get mentioned in the Bible, right?

Josephus was an important historian who was born a few years after Jesus was resurrected, and he had an entirely different story to tell about Nimrod! “The people were provoked to hate God by Nimrod, grandson of Ham the son of Noah, a bold man who was fearless and full of energy. He convinced them that everything they had was not from God but because of their own courage and hard work, and little by little everything became a mess and he was a violent and cruel king over all of them, believing that the only way to keep people from loving God was by making them depend on him instead. He threatened to have his revenge on God if he ever wanted to flood the earth again, and he would build a tower higher than the water could reach and get revenge for what happened to their ancestors.” (Antiquities 1.113-14) Wow, those three stories are all very different, right? You ain’t seen nothing yet! This Nimrod wanted people to follow him instead of God and they were only building to tower so that God couldn’t flood them out again—guess they didn’t believe God’s promise, eh? Not only that, but they wanted the Tower to be tall enough that they could attack Heaven. If that was even possible, the angels would have totally kicked their butts.

The Targums were writings that were very popular in the synagogues around the time of Jesus, instead of being in Hebrew, they were in Aramaic because more people spoke Aramaic than Hebrew after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon.  Even though some of the stories have been strange so far, this one (from Targum Pseudo-Jonathan) is even stranger– “Out of that land [sc.Shinar] Nimrod went forth and ruled in Asshur because he had not wished to associate with the project of the generation of the divisions. And he left those four cities, and the Lord settled him elsewhere instead, and he built other towns, Nineveh, etc.” Okay, so here Nimrod left Babylon because he didn’t want anything to do with building the Tower of Babel! And how about this one from two hundred years later? (Ephraem Syrus, a Christian who lived over three hundred years after Jesus) “Nimrod was a strong giant before the Lord because he obeyed God’s will he waged war on the peoples in order to spread them out to the areas that God had given them. Therefore, if someone wants to bless a leader or king, he says: ‘May you become like Nimrod, a strong giant before the Lord, triumphant in the wars of the Lord.'” Okay, come on now, is Nimrod a good guy or a bad guy??? Obviously, these guys are picking up on the idea that the Bible doesn’t tell us one way or the other! And (Ishodad of Merv) someone who lived eight hundred years after Jesus said that if you wanted to bless a leader, you would say, “may you become like Nimrod, a brave hunter before the Lord,” and the reason he said that was because they believed that Nimrod had tried everything to get the people to stop building the Tower of Babel and tried to drive them away from the city because he hated the Tower just like God did. I don’t know about you but all this is making me dizzy!

Remember how that Targum said Nimrod was a good guy? Well, later on the author changed his mind! He wrote, “And when Nimrod threw Abram into the fiery furnace because he would not worship his idol, but the fire wasn’t burning him up, Haran [Abraham’s brother] wasn’t sure what he wanted to support, and so he said: “If Nimrod wins, I will be on his side, but if Abram wins, I will be on his side.” Gee, thanks bro—but here we have a story where Nimrod is throwing Abram in the fire for refusing to bow down before his big chocolate bunny. Okay, it wasn’t a huge chocolate bunny. And another Targum (Neofiti on Gen 10:9) says that Nimrod was “a hero in sin before the Lord.” And this, “He was very mighty as a hunter and mighty in sin before the Lord. He would trap men by what they would say and he would say to them: Stop listening to Shem and his God and listen to the laws of Nimrod instead!” How about this one (Targum Qoh 4:13)— “It is better to be like Abraham, a young man who was a prophet of God and who knew God when he was just three years old, who would not worship an idol, than to be like the wicked Nimrod, who was an old and foolish king. And because Abraham would not worship an idol, Nimrod threw him into the burning furnace, and the God rescued him from the fire by a miracle. Even after this, Nimrod didn’t learn his lesson not to worship those idols! Abraham went out from the family of idolaters and reigned over the land of Canaan, and during Abraham’s reign Nimrod lost everything.” Now, as we will go through the story of Abraham, we will also see that he was never a king and there is nothing in there even hinting that he ever met Nimrod.

Now we’re going to talk about a huge series of books called the Talmud and they were written about six hundred years after Jesus and they are filled with all sorts of opinions from different Rabbis who had a lot of trouble agreeing with each other! But the really cool thing is that they didn’t have a problem posting all of these disagreements. But, by this point, they were all agreeing on one thing—Nimrod was one bad dude. Isn’t it interesting what a difference five hundred years can make in changing legends? By that point, they were all pretty much sticking to the story that Nimrod had tried to burn Abraham alive in the furnace because Abraham wouldn’t bow down to Nimrod’s idols. And as you will notice when we talk about the Tower of Babel, there isn’t anything said about idols or furnaces or anything! Five hundred years earlier than the stories in the Talmud, people were still seeing that there were a whole lot of question marks about Nimrod and about the Tower of Babel and so they had different ideas about what had happened, which is fine. You know we all like “what if” stories. But there aren’t a bunch of what if stories anymore because there is pretty much only one story that everyone is agreeing on. Now we see stories of God rebuking King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon for being wicked just like Nimrod “who convinced the whole world to rebel against God.” (b.Pes.94b) And the archangel Gabriel was given permission to rescue Rack, Shack, and Benny from the fiery furnace in the future because he asked to be able to save Abraham from the fires of Nimrod but God wanted to do it Himself! (b. Pes. 118a)

But now we are going to get to the funny stories about the magic underwear. And although that seems like a crazy thing to be talking about in stories about the Bible, you need to know about Aggadah. You know about the “what if” stories that might have happened. But Aggadah is different. Aggadah is filled with legends and folklore and sayings and moral stories that were designed to teach people moral lessons. A lot of them are just wild, but then every culture has these kinds of stories. People know they aren’t true but they were very useful for teaching people the difference between right and wrong or making people understand confusing commandments by coming up with stories to explain why they might have been given to us. Have you heard the story of the boy who cried wolf? Did it really happen? Nope. Is the story true anyway? Yes! If you lie over and over again, sometime when it is important, people won’t believe you. The story may be over the top and silly, but it is a good story. Of course, not all stories are good or useful, right? The magic underwear stories aren’t really very useful either, but they started to show up in stories about five hundred years after Jesus.

There are two versions of this story, in one, Nimrod wanted to kill Esau—who was the grandson of Abraham and I don’t even believe that Nimrod was still alive when Abraham was around, much less his grandson who was like 140 years younger. But anyway, the story goes that Esau was an amazing hunter because he had Adam’s magic underwear that attracted all the animals to him. And, of course, Adam had magic underwear because it was the stuff God made for him. So, you know, Adam put on his mystical tightie whities and all the critters came a’runnin. Esau inherited them, and so he could catch anything he wanted. And Nimrod was super jealous because he was a hunter too just not as good as magic undies boy. (Gen. Rab. 37.2-3 and 63.13) But in another story three hundred years later, we see the opposite! Nimrod stole Adam’s magic undies from Ham, who had stolen them from his father Noah, who had brought them along on the ark. And when Esau saw that Nimrod was such an awesome hunter because of the panties of power, he got jealous and killed Nimrod. (e.g. Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 24). And in Sefer HaYasher, which has been republished as the Book of Jasher but was written at least a thousand years after Jesus, it took just about every story ever written about Nimrod and combined them into one big story—and it also added even more! It said he was a good guy who served God and God loved him and have him all that success and made him king but then he turned evil and enslaved everyone and he tried to kill baby Abraham and all sorts of nonsense. But then so much of that book disagrees with the Bible, like saying that Shem’s son Asshur built all those cities instead of Nimrod. Do you see how legends start out small and get more and more elaborate and complicated and crazy??

And then, people started saying that Nimrod was the man whom the Persians called Zoroaster. And mostly what we know about Zoroaster comes from the Greeks who wrote about him. He lived sometime between 1500 and 500 years before Jesus, which is way after Nimrod and Abraham were both dead and gone. He is supposed to have invented magic and astrology, which is when you think that the stars and planets can tell you the future, like the silly horoscopes in the newspaper.  And because fire was very important to Zoroaster, people began to combine the legends about Nimrod with Zoroaster and fire worship and all that jazz. Stories never get smaller, they get bigger!

But then came the strangest story of them all. In 1853, almost two hundred years ago, and before almost all of the important archeological discoveries that I have been teaching you about, a minister named Alexander Hislop who hated Catholics, started preaching some very terrible lies about Nimrod. And some of these might be very upsetting because even though Hislop was a church minister, he was also a terrible racist—he hated people who weren’t white. And so, his stories about Nimrod are worse than anyone who came before him. He was from Scotland, and slavery hadn’t been illegal there for very long, so he told a story about how Nimrod was a big, ugly, deformed black man. Deformed means that his body wasn’t shaped correctly. I have someone I love whose feet are both badly deformed, and there have been people all throughout history whose bodies haven’t looked normal. But does that make them bad? No—it has nothing to do with anything! But Hislop wanted people to hate Nimrod as part of his plan to get people to hate Catholics. And Catholics are Christians who see things differently than some other Christians but that doesn’t make them evil. And no one should hate them. And no one should especially lie about them—because when that happens, it’s the liar who is acting evil. But in those days, there was a lot of hatred between Protestants and Catholics and between people whose skin was different colors–although it was mostly white people hating everyone who wasn’t white. And so Hislop made Nimrod out to be everything that the people of his time thought was hateful or inferior—he said that Nimrod was ugly, and that his body was messed up, and that he was black. And although now we know better, that those things don’t mean anything, that’s how Hislop wanted for people to see Nimrod—like he wasn’t even a human just like everyone else. And besides, ugly is nothing but an opinion! An opinion people should keep all to themselves!

But to make everyone angry, he said that Nimrod, a black man, was married to a beautiful white woman with blue eyes and blonde hair named Semiramis. Now, it was illegal for white people to marry black people and it was especially illegal for a black man to marry a white woman because they thought that was just the worst! Can you even imagine??? Of all the stupid things to think! But the other thing that was ridiculous is that Semiramis was a real person who was at least 1500 years younger than Nimrod. Jesus lived two thousand years ago, so you see how long a time that is. No way they were even alive at the same time but Hislop was making things up as he went along. He didn’t want people to join the Catholic church and so he said that the Catholics came from Nimrod and Semiramis and the Babylonian religion they founded and he knew that most people wouldn’t even suspect him of lying, because he was a church minister, and even if they did, it wasn’t like now when we have the internet and books and all the archaeology showing us what life was really like back then. That’s one of the reasons why I study so hard, so they can’t trick me with this stuff.

Semiramis was really unique in the ancient world, she was a Queen at a time when it was actually illegal for a woman to reign—she ran Assyria after her husband died while her sons were growing up. Long after her death, the Greeks began to write myths about her life because there wasn’t a lot of history. As we see with the Bible, the less history says about someone, the more people think they know about them. So, the Greeks really made her into a huge deal and she was, I mean she was Queen and three of her sons became kings of Assyria before being overthrown. She was responsible for an incredible number of impressive building projects. And how about the son they were supposed to have–Tammuz? He was a shepherd god, not a human. And from all the myths about Tammuz, we know the names of his mother and sister and wife. No Nimrod and no Semiramis. As for the rest of the stories Hislop told about Nimrod, I am not even going to talk about them because they are just all lies.

Believing Hislop’s story about Nimrod marrying Semiramis and her giving birth to Tammuz is the equivalent of this situation–Justinian, Holy Roman Emperor based in Constantinople (6th century AD) married Queen Elizabeth II (current Queen of England), and she gave birth to the god Apollo. That’s the equivalent timeline and claim–two people, separated by 1500 years, living in different places, marrying and having a god for a kid. A god older than his mother. And the really sad thing is that other people took Hislop’s stories and added even more to them, things that aren’t true and could never be true. And because people haven’t studied the ancient world and don’t know the people and how the religion of Babylon worked—they just assume that Hislop’s lies about our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ are true. But as we talked about last week, Nimrod is just a guy whom we know almost nothing about, and a lot of people who have heard the legends believe that they are from the Bible, or from history or archaeology, but they aren’t. And for almost two hundred years now, a lot of people have been hating and lying about Catholics because of it. My scholar friends who teach at Bible colleges and write books and are world-renowned experts—none of them teach this stuff because it just isn’t true.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful week reading the Bible with the people who love you.

For someone who is talked about so much, the Bible sure doesn’t say much about Nimrod! Or does it? This week we are going to look at what the phrases “powerful hunter” and “in the sight of the Lord” mean before having fun next week talking about all the different stories people have made up about Nimrod.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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 comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 10)

So, this week and next week, we’re going to talk about a mysterious Bible figure and some really cool archaeology about lion hunting. I’ve told you all in the past that the less that is written in the Bible about someone, the more people come along and fill in the blanks with some really crazy stuff. This week we are going to talk about what the Bible says about Nimrod, one of the descendants of Ham, what the Bible doesn’t say about him, and whether or not he shows up in world history. Next week we’re going to talk about all the things that different people have made up about Nimrod and all their “what if” stories. The reason we are going to do that is because a lot of people take the “what if” stories seriously and they even fight over it so we are going to see who and where and when those stories come from. Some of them are from the time of Jesus and some are a lot closer to our time—even though they say they are telling the historical truth! Sometimes they were making things up and at other times people mistook “what if” stories for history, and sometimes they just had no archaeology to work with at all because it hadn’t been found yet so they were doing the best they could. So, this will be a fun and crazy two weeks but one of the things that I spent a lot of time studying years ago was ancient Babylonian religion and so when I heard these stories, I knew there was something terribly wrong because their facts didn’t match up with what we know. So, what does the Bible actually say about Nimrod?

Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” His kingdom started with Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-ir, Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and the great city Calah. (Gen 10:8-11) Cush fathered Nimrod, who was the first to become a great warrior on earth. (I Chron 1:10) They will shepherd the land of Assyria with the sword, the land of Nimrod with a drawn blade. So he will rescue us from Assyria when it invades our land, when it marches against our territory. (Micah 5:6)

And that’s all the Bible ever says about Nimrod but if you google his name you will find that there are pages and pages telling us all about him and what he did and there are so many books written about him and who he was but the problem is that they are all make-believe because there isn’t enough about him to write a book about. They won’t have any footnotes linked to anything found in cuneiform tablets (clay tablets that are carved with letters and baked, which makes them last a long time), or any papyri (ancient paper made from reeds), and no ancient historians talk about him either or even about someone who specifically did all the things the Bible talks about under a different name. And that shouldn’t surprise us because humans weren’t writing a lot of those kinds of records back then, way before Abraham, so a lot of information was lost. It doesn’t mean that Nimrod wasn’t real, it just means that all we know about him for sure is in the Bible, and the Bible didn’t think he was important enough to talk much about even though people today talk about him a lot. You see, when we don’t know much of anything about a person, folks really like to make that person into whatever they want! Does that mean that the Bible isn’t telling us anything? Nope—but what it is telling us isn’t obvious to most people who haven’t studied ancient kings and how they are talked about! So, this is actually going to be really cool and fun!

What do we know? We know that Nimrod was a descendant of Cush—maybe his son or grandson or maybe even later than that because in ancient times, they didn’t always give the full family tree. We talked about that last week. They wanted to get to the point! It would be like if someone said, “Queen Elizabeth, who was descended from Queen Victoria…” and it wouldn’t matter that she was her great-great-granddaughter because they would only mention the really famous people they wanted you to be thinking about. But, let’s say that Nimrod was the son of Cush, which he might have been! Totally possible! That would make him the great-grandson of Noah, and the grandson of Ham, and the son of Cush. But wait? All the rest of the family headed toward Africa! Why does Nimrod’s kingdom begin in Babylon when it is 1,641 miles away from Egypt? What the heck? One, it means that maybe it took him a heckuva long time to get there because that’s not where his family seems to have gone. The answer to how and why he got there is a mystery but some other information is right there in the Bible if we know the idioms of the ancient world. Do you remember about idioms from the first episode where we played the idiom game? An idiom is a saying that sounds like it means one thing when it actually means something else—like yesterday I was so embarrassed when I told my friend Pastor Matthew that a friend of mine would be coming to his congregation “with bells on” and Pastor Matthew didn’t know what that meant—because I am old enough to be his mom. So, I felt like a super old lady when I had to explain to him that when someone says they will “be there with bells on” it means that they are super excited about being there.

So what’s our important idiom? We see it twice in Gen 10:8, “Cush fathered Nimrod, who began to be powerful in the land. He was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord. That is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord.” And if it isn’t obvious to you what the idiom is, that’s okay—we don’t use it anymore. We actually have two idioms but the first is “powerful hunter.” And a lot of people think that means he was a giant who went out and hunted for critters to eat but that’s more like what Esau was—and we will come to him later in Genesis.  In the ancient world, that was how kings were described—as mighty hunters. Their palaces were carved and painted with murals of the king hunting lions, because that was the way for kings to show how tough and manly they were. I am going to link a super cool article from the British Museum about it, which talks a lot about how popular this was and especially in Assyria, where the Bible talks about Nimrod having a Kingdom. The art goes back 3000 years before Jesus was born, which lines up pretty good with when Nimrod might have lived. And these kings would also claim that their gods had given them the special ability to kill lions, who were very feared by people and with good reason.

A lot of people think that lions have only been in Africa but that isn’t true. They roamed the roads all through the ancient world—in Israel, in Asia, and in Africa. It was one of the jobs of an ancient king to hunt them and keep the roads safe. I have three quotes that were written on Ashurbanipal’s palace walls, “In the steppe, a widespread place, raging lions, a ferocious mountain breed, attacked me and surrounded the chariot, the vehicle of my royal majesty. By the command of the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar, the great gods…I scattered the pack of those lions.” See that? A powerful hunter kept the roads of his kingdom safe from dangerous lions that would attack travelers and livestock (that’s also something David did in the Bible). And he called it a command from his god Ashur—which is why his name is Ashurbanipal because it means “Ashur is the creator of the heir.” And it is a good thing he thought he had permission from Ishtar because she only had two favorite animals, one was an owl and the other was a lion because she was the goddess of war! Like Ashurbanipal, people often had the names of their gods as part of their own name—they did it in Israel too. Like Jehosaphat, which means that Yahweh (the name of our God) has judged or Yahweh rules. It’s cool when your name is saying something nice about God! All my name means is doorkeeper morning rose-twig.

Here’s another one, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, while carrying out my princely sport, seized a lion that was born in the steppe by its tail and, through the command of the gods… shattered its skull with the mace that was in my hand.” Here he’s saying again that he can kill lions because the gods commanded him and gave him the strength. And one more, “I, Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria, to whom the god Ashur and the goddess Ishtar have granted outstanding strength, set up the fierce bow of the goddess Ishtar — the lady of battle — over the lions that I had killed. I made an offering over them and poured a libation of wine over them.” So, he’s describing all the ways he is killing these lions and, oh, by the way, it’s because the gods and goddesses are totally on his side, like, “Don’t mess with me, dudes, or you are messing with their favorite!” And if you think this guy is totally full of himself and bragging too much, yeah, he is, that’s how they talked about themselves and how other people talked about them too!

And that’s also how people talked about Nimrod, only the god that they seemed to have attributed his success to was the God of the Bible and not some foreign god, as people did with Ashurbanipal. As we will see next week, during the lifetime of Jesus, many thought that Nimrod was a big hero serving God because of how they read these verses. When they said he was a powerful hunter in the sight of the Lord, that’s the same as saying that he was a mighty king serving God. And that’s our second idiom, “in the sight of the Lord.” It shows up quite a bit in the Bible. The first time is when Adam and Eve are hiding from God, they don’t want to be in His presence, in His sight where He can see them (of course, He could see them anyway). The next time is with Cain, when he runs away from the presence, or sight, of God. Neither of them wanted to be in God’s sight but Nimrod isn’t trying to hide at all! Whether it is good or bad, and we don’t know, God sees Nimrod and everyone knows it. And God told Abraham to walk in His presence too, using the same exact Hebrew words. Curioser and curioser, right? So far, we know that Nimrod was a powerful king who was walking in the presence of God. Hmmmm…

And then we have all that talk about his Kingdom, a kingdom that began with Babylon. But does that mean he founded and built Babylon or that he came in with an army and took control of Babylon, because it was already there? As we will see in chapter 11, the people build the tower in the place called Bavel (aka Babylon), but Nimrod is never mentioned at all. So, we don’t actually know if he was before Babylon, and was part of building it, or after Babylon, and took it over—which would have been a lot easier once everyone’s languages got messed up and they scattered all over the place. It’s a mystery that the Bible doesn’t answer. We know from other histories that Babylon has been around since long before Abraham was born, at least 2300 years before Jesus was born. Archaeologists have actually found it and have been digging it up! And we also know where Erech is, also called Uruk, that’s southeast of Babylon. And Akkad is well known, northwest of Babylon. We have no idea what Calneh is, that’s a big mystery, but then there are a lot of places in the Bible that archaeologists haven’t found yet. These were all in the land of Shinar, which we call Sumer. Archaeology tells us that the oldest civilizations on earth are there, places where people lived and worked together and traded and bought and sold, so that sounds about right! Then, it says that Nimrod left those places and went ever further north into Assyria and built the great city of Nineveh, and if you know the story of Jonah, you know about Ninevah! And it was not filled with fish slappers and they didn’t worship fish—Veggie Tales was just being funny so that you would pay attention to the story of Jonah. Calah is called Nimrud now. And you know what? You can search the internet and find a lot of totally cool archaeological stuff like ancient city walls and temples and all that stuff. I will try to remember to link some sites in the transcript for you.  As for the other places, there are many debates because they seem to be words referring to city squares and canals—which makes sense because you totally need canals when you want to have water for your cities and crops!

Who was Nimrod? We just don’t know. Different people have tried to link him to different historical figures like Sargon of Akkad, Hammurabi of Babylon (we will talk about him more when we get to Exodus), or Shulgi of Ur and you can find YouTube videos making it sound like we have it figured out for sure but we don’t know for sure because, so far, no one has uncovered records of anyone doing all those things. And that’s okay. Sometimes things happened so long ago that it’s amazing we know anything at all! But, archaeologists are always finding new places to dig and we just never know when they are going to uncover more. As it is, there are over half a million tablets already found and some claim that there are as many as two million. They all have to be cleaned up and translated—that’s a lot of work. Maybe some of them will solve the mystery or maybe not. Did you know that when they uncovered a library in Ninevah (Jonah again!) they found like 22,000 tablets? Each one was written on and baked so they would be preserved. And there aren’t very many people who are trained to understand and translate them—hey, maybe you could be one of the translators or maybe you will go out in a team to find them. Not me though—I am not good with languages. We are all different, right? We are all smart in different ways. And we need all kinds of people to know how to do all kinds of things.

What we do know about Nimrod is what we’ve talked about already. Nimrod was king over a huge area in a time with no cars or airplanes. He built a huge empire! The area he had control over was not that much smaller than the state of California! Genesis 10 is telling us that he was the first person in the world to be a king over such a large area with so many great cities. We don’t know whether he was part of building Uruk, Akkad, or Babel or not. He might have taken control over it after the people building it scattered for all we know, but the Bible does tell us that when he left there, he actually built Ninevah and that was a really big city! He probably had soldiers who were loyal to him, to control such a big area.

What I can tell you is that Moses’s original audience would have been very impressed with the story of Nimrod. He would have been seen as someone like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon—a guy who kicks butt and takes names, really tough and charismatic (which means that people admired him enough to follow him and do what he wants them to do—like build cities and canals and go to war). Because he was called a mighty hunter, that would have told them that he was hunting down and killing the lions that the people were all scared of and doing a good job as king. Isn’t it funny that we can get all that from just a few verses? For a long time, no one really knew what it meant—not until those archaeologists got to work and found out about kings being called mighty hunters. Someone in one of the Genesis books I have been reading called Nimrod “the ultimate ancient man” because he was what is called an “ideal.” An ideal is someone who just seems to have everything and can do everything. Some people look at movie stars or sports stars or musicians and call them “ideal people.” Kinda like calling them perfect, but no one is perfect. The Bible is saying that this guy is “legendary” in that he was just amazing in all that he accomplished.

But was he good or evil? The Bible says nothing about that. Oh sure, people have theories and there are so many stories about Nimrod that it isn’t even funny (okay, some of them are funny), but if we are going on the Bible as it is written, you can make a case for him being good or him being terrible. Remember how we have talked about all those “what if” stories? That they are a good way to explore what might have happened or maybe what God might have been trying to say to the people who originally heard this story, and maybe they all knew about Nimrod and so they were totally understanding and nodding to themselves as Moses told them about him. You know, it is almost the same thing as when Moses told them all about Enoch in Genesis 5:21-24–

Enoch was 65 years old when he fathered Methuselah. And after he fathered Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and fathered other sons and daughters. So, Enoch’s life lasted 365 years. Enoch walked with God; then he was not there because God took him.

And a thousand years after Moses wrote that down, people started writing legends about Enoch, and Jewish authors even wrote some amazing fiction about him! Jewish authors used to love to write fictional stories about Bible characters during the three hundred years before Jesus was born. And after Jesus was born, even more stories were written. Those stories were called Midrash and Aggadah. They are stories that “fill in the blanks” so that the Rabbis could teach important lessons. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf, which is a great story that teaches us the importance of not telling lies. And boy oh boy the things they came up with—different authors told some very different stories about Nimrod for thousands of years. All because people hate a mystery, or maybe they love mysteries because they get to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. Enoch is mentioned twice in the New Testament as an example of faithfulness—because that is what it means to walk with God—but Enoch never says a word and we have no idea about anything he ever did. We know a lot more about Nimrod than about Enoch for sure, but what most people think they know, or believe they know, actually doesn’t come from the Bible. We just heard someone else tell a story and when we read what the Bible says, in our minds we are thinking about that story and it changes what we think we see there. Nimrod is never talked about again, except to have his name mentioned twice more. Once was in a family tree and the other time it was just calling Assyria the “land of Nimrod” and that’s it.

Was Nimrod at the Tower of Babel or not? We don’t know because he isn’t even mentioned in the same chapter. If he was there, what was he doing? There are a lot of different stories about that and we will talk about some of them next week. Sometimes he was the good guy and sometimes he was the bad guy. Some of the stories are crazy and others are more reasonable, but what they all have in common is that they are guesses. Some guesses are better than others. Some are absolutely impossible—like the one about him marrying a woman who was born over a thousand years after he died and their having a god for a son!

Isn’t it strange? We have this guy who was written about as the ultimate guy in the ancient world, king of the world, and all he gets is a tiny little paragraph and doesn’t even come up again. That’s an important lesson for all of us. The people who seem like a big deal to us are usually not very important in the long run. Sure, he had a huge kingdom and he built canals and cities but we don’t even know who he was anymore. He has been forgotten by everyone except for in the Bible. He has people making up stories about him because we know so little about him. How would you like it if you went from “King of the world” to someone who is so totally unknown that everyone is just making guesses about? I know I hate it when people make up stories about me—even when they are true. And I am not really very important at all. Nimrod was important—he was probably the most important man alive during his life and now he is just a nobody. But think about Jesus—He didn’t lead an army or build cities or canals and he died very young, when he was in His early thirties. Not only did he die but He died as a criminal! He never killed anyone but He sure went to war against Satan and his demons and sickness and made blind people see again and deaf people hear and paralyzed people walk. He didn’t live in a fancy house and He never had servants! The people who had Him killed thought to themselves, “Well, that’s over, everyone will forget him now!” But people have never stopped writing about Him or talking about Him because Jesus was the true “ultimate man.” He wasn’t anything like Nimrod the “mighty hunter.”

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.