This is part three of The Strange Parts, a series on the passages of Scripture that only make sense with a supernatural worldview. Last time we sat in the courtroom of Psalm 82. This time we find out how the accused got their jobs.
We teach Babel to children, which may be why we stopped noticing how strange it is. A tower, a proud king, some confused languages, a moral about pride. That is the flannelgraph version. But Genesis 10 and 11 are doing something much bigger, and the rest of the Old Testament depends on it.
“And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’”
Genesis 11:4 NKJV
Notice what the builders actually want. A tower whose top is in the heavens, and a name. In the ancient Near East that kind of tower was a ziggurat, and a ziggurat was not a skyscraper built for office space. It was religious architecture, a man-made mountain meant to connect earth to heaven, a stairway the gods could come down. Babel is not the story of people trying to reach up and burgle heaven. It is the story of people trying to summon heaven down on their own terms, to domesticate the divine, to build a religion where they hold the deed.
And Jehovah comes down, but not the way they wanted.
The Judgment Nobody Preaches
We know the languages were confused and the people scattered. But Deuteronomy tells us what else happened at that scattering, and this is the verse the flannelgraph left out.
“And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, you feel driven to worship them and serve them, which the LORD your God has given to all the peoples under the whole heaven as a heritage. But the LORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be His people, an inheritance, as you are this day.”
Deuteronomy 4:19-20 NKJV
Read it carefully. The host of heaven was given to all the peoples as a heritage. Given by whom? By Jehovah. This is Deuteronomy 32:8-9 from the other side of the ledger. When the nations were divided at Babel, they were placed under the sons of God, allotted to lesser spiritual beings, while Jehovah took no nation at all. He walked away from the whole table, and then He made a new family from scratch.
That is why the very next chapter of Genesis matters so much. Genesis 11 ends with the nations scattered under their new managements. Genesis 12 opens with Jehovah calling one childless man out of that same Mesopotamian world. The placement is not an accident. It is the whole point.
“I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Genesis 12:3 NKJV
All the families of the earth. The same families Jehovah just disinherited. He gives them up in chapter 11 and promises to win them back in chapter 12. The call of Abram is not a fresh start after an embarrassing episode. It is a counteroffensive.
Jehovah gives the nations up in Genesis 11 and promises to win them all back in Genesis 12. The Bible is the story of Him keeping that promise.
Seventy Nations, and a Number to Remember
Genesis 10, the Table of Nations, lists the descendants of Noah’s sons after the flood, and the traditional count comes to seventy nations. Seventy becomes the Bible’s shorthand for the whole Gentile world. File that number away, because Jesus is going to use it. When He sends out His disciples ahead of Him in Luke 10, He sends seventy, and when they come back rejoicing He tells them He watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven. A man sending seventy messengers into the world and talking about spiritual powers falling is a man making a claim about Babel. The disinherited nations are being summoned home.
| Word | Original | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| migdal | מִגְדָּל | H4026 | Tower. At Babel, a ziggurat, a man-made mountain joining earth to heaven |
| shem | שֵׁם | H8034 | Name, reputation, renown. What the builders wanted to make for themselves |
| goyim | גּוֹיִם | H1471 | Nations, the Gentile peoples divided at Babel |
| nachalah | נַחֲלָה | H5159 | Inheritance. The nations became the heritage of lesser beings. Israel became Jehovah’s |
The Shape of the Whole Old Testament
Once you see Babel this way, the Old Testament stops being a loose anthology and becomes a war story. Why is Israel commanded so fiercely to have no other gods? Because the other gods are not nothing. They are the rebellious wardens of the nations, and Israel is the one people on earth who belongs to Jehovah directly. Why do the prophets keep dragging the gods of the nations into court? Because the courtroom is real. Why does every pagan empire that swallows Israel, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, get its gods humiliated along the way? Because the fight was never really about armies.
And why does Israel exist at all? For the sake of the seventy. The family of Abram was never an end in itself. It was the beachhead, the one plot of ground on earth Jehovah kept, so that through it every disinherited family could be blessed and brought home.
There is a word for people who live as that beachhead now, and Peter uses it. A royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people. If you are in Christ, you are standing in Abram’s calling. The nations around you are not territory to be feared. They are inheritance to be reclaimed, and the claim has already been filed.
Discussion Questions
- What did the builders of Babel actually want, and where do you see the same impulse in modern religion?
- Read Deuteronomy 4:19-20 and 32:8-9 together. What happened to the nations at Babel, and what happened to Israel instead?
- Why does it matter that Genesis 12 follows immediately after Genesis 11?
- How does the number seventy tie Genesis 10 to Luke 10? What is Jesus claiming by sending out seventy?
- If the church stands in Abram’s calling, how should that change the way you see the people around you who are far from God?
Going Deeper
Read Genesis 10-12 in one sitting and watch the hinge between chapters 11 and 12. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm covers the disinheritance of the nations under the heading of cosmic geography. For the reversal, read Luke 10:1-20 and Acts 2:5-13 side by side and start a list of every nation Luke names. We will come back to that list at the end of the series.
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