Chapter 11
An Attempt at Unity.[a] 1 The whole world had only one language, everyone using the same words. 2 Migrating from the east, men came upon a plain in the land of Shinar where they settled.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them in a fire.” These bricks were what they used instead of stone, and bitumen in place of cement.[b] 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build a city and a tower so high that it touches the heavens.[c] We shall make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all throughout the earth.”
5 But the Lord came down and saw the city and the tower that these men were building. 6 The Lord said, “Behold, they are a single people and they have only one language. This is only the beginning of what they will do. Now nothing that they think up will be impossible for them. 7 Let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other when they speak.”
8 The Lord scattered them over the whole earth[d] and they ceased building their city. 9 This is why it is called Babel,[e] for there the Lord confused everyone’s language. It was also from there that the Lord scattered people over the whole earth.
10 Genealogy of Abraham.[f] The descendants of Shem are as follow:
Shem was one hundred years old when he had Arpachshad two years after the flood. 11 Shem, after he had Arpachshad, lived another five hundred years and had other sons and daughters.
12 Arpachshad was thirty-five years old when he had Shelah. 13 Arpachshad, after he had Shelah, lived another four hundred and three years and had other sons and daughters.
14 Shelah was thirty years old when he had Eber. 15 Shelah, after he had Eber, lived another four hundred and three years and had other sons and daughters.
16 Eber was thirty-four years old when he had Peleg. 17 Eber, after he had Peleg, lived another four hundred and thirty years and had other sons and daughters.
18 Peleg was thirty years old when he had Reu. 19 Peleg, after he had Reu, lived another two hundred and nine years and had other sons and daughters.
20 Reu was thirty-two years old when he had Serug. 21 Reu, after he had Serug, lived another two hundred and seven years and had other sons and daughters.
22 Serug was thirty years old when he had Nahor. 23 Serug, after he had Nahor, lived another two hundred years and had other sons and daughters.
24 Nahor was twenty-nine years old when he had Terah. 25 Nahor, after he had Terah, lived one hundred and nineteen years and had other sons and daughters.
26 Terah was seventy years old when he had Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
27 These are the descendants of Terah.
Terah had Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran had Lot. 28 Haran then died in the presence of his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans.[g] 29 Abram and Nahor both married. The wife of Abram was Sarai, and the wife of Nahor was Milcah who was a daughter of Haran (the father of Milcah and Iscah). 30 Sarai was barren and did not have any children.
31 Then Terah took Abram, his son, and Lot, the son of Haran, and Sarai, his daughter-in-law and the wife of Abram his son, and he left Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. They went as far as Haran where they settled.[h]
32 Terah lived to be two hundred and five years old. Terah died in Haran.
Footnotes
- Genesis 11:1 After having presented in the list of peoples what might be called the mission field of the People of God, the biblical narrative dwells on a fundamental aspect of this field, one that is always alive in the various human groups, namely, the insistent need for unity. The passage, from the Yahwist source, makes use of an ancient popular story that seems to copy in an ironic way Mesopotamian texts on the dedication of its well-known temple towers.
The story concerns a migrating people who come down from the mountains into a vast plain and feel the need of establishing a city center with a skyscraper tower that will guarantee the maintenance of their unity. Make a name for ourselves means to establish a power that will foster their cohesion and their own political identity. But, as happens in human undertakings, a moment comes in which intentions diverge, so that the unity of the people is broken, as if they were speaking different languages. The tradition sees in this occurrence an explicit manifestation of God, the author of human nature. The direction events take always depends on God. - Genesis 11:3 Bricks . . . instead of stone, and bitumen in place of cement: stone and cement were used as building materials in Canaan. Stone was scarce in Mesopotamia, however, so bricks and bitumen were used (as indicated by archaeological excavations).
- Genesis 11:4 Tower so high that it touches the heavens: this is a direct reference to the most important temple tower (ziggurat) found in Babylon, which goes by the name of “the house that lifts high its head.” Scholars regard the ziggurats of Babylonia as the earliest skyscrapers.
- Genesis 11:8 Scattered them over the whole earth: God countered their prideful rebellion at its very origin. They had chosen to settle, but he forced them to scatter. This account relates how it was that the families of the earth were separated, “each clan in the nations with their own language” (Gen 10:5) and were “divided up to become all the nations on the earth after the flood” (Gen 10:32).
- Genesis 11:9 Babel (i.e., Babylonia), according to a popular etymology, meant “gate of god” or “gate of the gods.” The sacred writer, having told of the failure of the human undertaking (and the failure also of the gods who wanted to be worshiped on the Mesopotamian towers), asks us to read the name “Babel” as a reminder of that failure: he suggests a connection with the root bll, “to confuse,” from which the form balbel and then, by contraction, babel, would supposedly be derived.
- Genesis 11:10 These verses are from the Priestly tradition, a continuation of the genealogy begun in chapter 5, except for verses 28-30, which are Yahwist. Beginning perhaps with Arpachshad, named as son of Shem, the list of names here is a real genealogy, a document of the family of Abraham; only the numbers continue to be symbolic and conventional, without any strictly historical value. Abraham comes from a seminomadic family or clan that has settled in the city of Ur, at that time on the shores of the Persian Gulf and already rich and powerful, especially in the 21st and 20th centuries B.C.
Abraham and his family travel up the valley of the Euphrates and settle in upper Mesopotamia. The period of these events may be around 1850 B.C. - Genesis 11:28 Ur of the Chaldeans: Ur was an ancient city of the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia as well as a populous and prosperous one. In this case, the phrase is an anachronism, because the Chaldeans were not known to history until some thousand years after Abraham.
- Genesis 11:31 Abraham traveled along the Euphrates to Haran, a trading town in northern Mesopotamia or Syria. This was the best route from which to reach Canaan and bypass the great desert with its people and animals (see Gen 12:4; Acts 7:2-4).