Lesson 12 Events Around the Tower of Babel
A. Overall Lesson Objective
•To assess God’s view of the situation as it developed, His actions, and what the people did.
B. Learning Competencies
•In the migration east from where the ark landed, the people decided not to disperse as God had commanded but to make a name for themselves in a plain, build a city, and a tower with ‘its top in the heavens’.
•God visits, assesses the state of the people with their intent, identifies that it is only the beginning of what they will do that could be contrary to God’s command and intent.
•God says, “Let us go down and confound their language” so they cannot understand each other’s speech, forcing them to halt their project and disperse across the face of the earth.
•God does, as the Great Overseer, deal with unified evil intent. In this case, His action strongly encouraged obedience to the commands He had given Noah and his family after leaving the ark.
C. Lesson
Context
It is easy to forget the overall context of human history, but God provides the Word so we have a historically accurate report of His creation, oversight, and intervention into human affairs from the beginning. His assessments of the dramatic rise in evil, His actions to destroy all living things by flood, His mercy to keep representative kinds safe in the ark along with the family of Noah, His witness of the ark’s passengers disembarking, and His promises and commands to Noah are all recorded for us. Part of the context for the events at the Tower of Babel is the recognition that the sin inside of man, which led to the Fall of Man as recorded in Genesis, is still present. Now the population expands rapidly as recorded in Genesis 10-11. While the evil in the days of Noah’s earlier life is not duplicated, the trend of mankind to disobey or disregard God takes root quickly. So, the Tower of Babel event, though brief, marks a significant action by God to further discourage the widespread rise of evil and encourage the obedience to His command for mankind to populate the earth. Before reading the notes and answering the questions that follow, read Genesis 11:1-9 again.
Notes for Genesis 11:1-9
God knows what is in the hearts of people. Another example is spoken by Jesus in John 2:23-25. The biblical creation view includes God’s clear understanding of mankind: we need salvation; something inside us is terribly wrong. In Genesis 11:1-9 we have another event described by God that shows the same thing.
🦕 CT? Describe the project that man undertakes that is described in the verses. (This was the assignment for the class.)
🦕 CT? Answer the following questions from this portion of Scripture:
1.Who had a single language with the same words?
2.What was the motivation of those building the tower?
3.What does God say that He saw when He examined the project?
4.What did He do?
5.What was God’s intention?
The event points to the Master Creator’s capability to make universal changes in creation when He deems it necessary. Why does He continue to contend with people’s evil intent? The question is worth some thought. The answer can be found in many places, but a well-known answer is the first words of this verse: John 3:16. Because God is eternal and not bound by time, He was also looking forward (in our sense) to us – people who would eventually be born and choose God.
God’s action in this scene acted as an instant encouragement to disperse. The inability to understand each other probably caused confusion and hostility. The world would now be populated in accordance with God’s command with divided languages as the added impetus. Unified effort to do evil at Babel was halted.
The languages were probably assigned by God along extended family lines, and groups that had a common language would have been more likely to stay together. So, the dispersal was also along language lines. More of the effects will be discussed in Chapter 22. [Research note: towering change]
Note: In Genesis 10:25, which is within the portion of scripture where the generations of Noah are listed, the event of Babel is indirectly mentioned as the period in which the earth (the earth’s peoples) were divided. The division was language. The eventual disappearance of land bridges when the Ice Age retreated served to accent the division because migrating people used the land bridges but could not easily return after the Ice Age was fully over.
D. Assignment
Read Hebrews 1:1-3 and John 1:1-3,10. Describe in your own words how they are similar.
E. Learning Activity
Using commonly available historical references, find instances on each major continent, as assigned by the teacher, where the initial meeting of different people groups was hampered or affected by different languages. Describe the difficulties. Make an assessment about the effects of a multi-language world on human affairs. (The teacher may assign teams for this activity.)
F. Concluding Assessment
God’s view of the situation at the Tower of Babel demanded action to discourage the wrongful intent of people, who would both elevate themselves as being like God and circumvent God’s command to disperse.
Note: The lessons on Genesis for this curriculum stop at this point. Genesis continues with the life of Abraham and the succeeding generations of the ‘chosen people’ (the Jews) until the time of Christ. In physical respects, the largest effects of the Genesis Flood are nearly over and the dispersion of peoples over the face of earth is well underway. While the catastrophic period of the Flood is over and the incident at the Tower of Babel affects the dispersion of peoples, other biblical references are clear: the Flood was meant to be remembered. Indeed, to understand history on earth as we see it today is to understand what happened. This is referenced directly in 2 Peter 3:5-6, although there are many other general references to the events and characters in the first chapters of Genesis.