Babel and the Nations

After the Flood, Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, become the ancestors of the nations. Genesis 10 names them one by one, spreading out across the known world: Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, Elam, the coastlands, and beyond.

Genesis 11 tells how it happened. The whole earth has one language. People settle on a plain in the land of Shinar and say, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name." They make bricks, bake them hard, and use bitumen for mortar.

The LORD comes down to see the city. He confuses their language so they cannot understand one another, and He scatters them across the face of the earth. They stop building. The city is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth.

Then the camera narrows. Genesis traces the line of Shem down to a man named Terah, who lives in Ur of the Chaldeans with his son Abram. Humanity tried to make a name for itself and failed. In the very next chapter, God will promise Abram: "I will make thy name great… and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."

Towers that reached for heaven

Shinar is the biblical name for southern Mesopotamia, the land of Babylon. Its cities built enormous stepped temple towers called ziggurats, designed as artificial mountains where heaven and earth met. One of the best preserved stands at Ur, the city Genesis links with Abraham.

Babylon's own ziggurat was called Etemenanki, "the house of the foundation of heaven and earth." Ancient sources describe it as about 90 meters (300 feet) tall. Nebuchadnezzar II boasted of raising its top to the heavens, language strikingly close to Genesis 11.

Even the building materials match. Genesis notes they used baked brick instead of stone and bitumen instead of mortar. That is exactly how Mesopotamian builders worked in a land with little stone, and the detail would have stood out to readers in stone-rich Canaan.

The Table of Nations

Genesis 10 lists about seventy peoples descended from Noah's sons. Many names correspond to real ancient peoples and places known from inscriptions: Mizraim (Egypt), Cush, Canaan, Asshur (Assyria), Elam, Javan (the Greeks of Ionia). It is an ancient map of the known world, organized as a family tree.

An intriguing Sumerian parallel

A Sumerian poem known as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta contains a passage often called the "Spell of Nudimmud." It describes a time when all people spoke one language, and a god who changed the speech in their mouths. Scholars debate its exact meaning, but it shows that Mesopotamians also told of a time before language was divided.