1And all the earth was one language, one set of words. 2And it happened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to each other, “Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard.” And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar. 4And they said, “Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth.” 5And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. 6And the LORD said, “As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, now nothing they plot to do will elude them. 7Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other’s language.” 8And the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it is called Babel, for there the LORD made the language of all the earth babble. And from there the LORD scattered them over all the earth.
10This is the lineage of Shem: Shem was a hundred years old when he begot Arpachshad two years after the Flood. 11And Shem lived after begetting Arpachshad five hundred years and he begot sons and daughters. 12And Arpachshad lived thirty-five years and he begot Shelah. 13And Arpachshad lived after begetting Shelah four hundred and three years and he begot sons and daughters. 14And Shelah lived thirty years and he begot Eber. 15And Shelah lived after begetting Eber four hundred and three years and he begot sons and daughters. 16And Eber lived thirty-four years and he begot Peleg. 17And Eber lived after begetting Peleg four hundred and thirty years and he begot sons and daughters. 18And Peleg lived thirty years and he begot Reu. 19And Peleg lived after begetting Reu two hundred and nine years and he begot sons and daughters. 20And Reu lived thirty-two years and he begot Serug. 21And Reu lived after begetting Serug two hundred and seven years and he begot sons and daughters. 22And Serug lived thirty years and he begot Nahor. 23And Serug lived after begetting Nahor two hundred years and he begot sons and daughters. 24And Nahor lived twenty-nine years and he begot Terah. 25And Nahor lived after begetting Terah one hundred and nineteen years and he begot sons and daughters. 26And Terah lived seventy years and he begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran. 27And this is the lineage of Terah: Terah begot Abram, Nahor, and Haran, and Haran begot Lot. 28And Haran died in the lifetime of Terah his father in the land of his birth, Ur of the Chaldees. 29And Abram and Nahor took themselves wives. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah. 30And Sarai was barren, she had no child. 31And Terah took Abram his son and Lot son of Haran, his grandson, and Sarai his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Abram, and he set out with them from Ur of the Chaldees toward the land of Canaan, and they came to Haran and settled there. 32And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years, and Terah died in Haran.
CHAPTER 11 NOTES
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1–9. The story of the Tower of Babel transforms the Mesopotamian ziggurat, built with bricks (in contrast to Canaanite stone structures) and one of the wonders of ancient technology, into a monotheistic fable. Although there is a long exegetical tradition that imagines the building of the Tower as an attempt to scale the heights of heaven, the text does not really suggest that. “Its top in the heavens” is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers, and to make or leave a “name” for oneself by erecting a lasting monument is a recurrent notion in ancient Hebrew culture. The polemic thrust of the story is against urbanism and the overweening confidence of humanity in the feats of technology. This polemic, in turn, is lined up with the stories of the tree of life and the Nephilim in which humankind is seen aspiring to transcend the limits of its creaturely condition. As in those earlier moments, one glimpses here the vestiges of a mythological background in which God addresses an unspecified celestial entourage in the first-person plural as He considers how to respond to man’s presumption.
2. a valley in the land of Shinar. The Hebrew for “valley” might also mean “plain,” as was recognized as long ago as Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century. That would fit the Mesopotamian setting better.
3. Come, let us. As many commentators have noted, the story exhibits an intricate antithetical symmetry that embodies the idea of “man proposes, God disposes.” The builders say, “Come, let us bake bricks,” God says, “Come, let us go down”; they are concerned “lest we be scattered,” and God responds by scattering them. The story is an extreme example of the stylistic predisposition of biblical narrative to exploit interechoing words and to work with a deliberately restricted vocabulary. The word “language” occurs five times in this brief text as does the phrase “all the earth” (and the “land” of Shinar is the same Hebrew word as that for earth). The prose turns language itself into a game of mirrors.
bake bricks and burn them hard. A literal rendering of the Hebrew would be something like “brick bricks and burn for a burning.” This fusion of words reflects the striking tendency of the story as a whole to make words flow into each other. “Bitumen,” ḥeimar, becomes ḥomer, “mortar.” The reiterated “there,” sham, is the first syllable of shamayim, “heavens,” as well as an odd echo of shem, “name.” Meaning in language, as the biblical writer realized long before the influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is made possible through differences between terms in the linguistic system. Here difference is subverted in the very style of the story, with the blurring of lexical boundaries culminating in God’s confounding of tongues. The Hebrew balal, to “mix” or “confuse,” represented in this translation by “baffle” and “babble,” is a polemic pun on the Akkadian “Babel,” which might actually mean “gate of the god.” As for the phonetic kinship of “babble” and balal, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (1966) notes that a word like “babble” occurs in a wide spectrum of languages from Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit to Norwegian, and prudently concludes, “of echoic origin; probably not of continuous derivation but recoined from common experience.”
10–26. There are ten generations from Shem to Abraham (as the universal history begins to focus down to a national history) as there are ten from Adam to Noah. In another formal symmetry, the ten antediluvian generations end with a father who begets three sons, just as this series of ten will end with Terah begetting Abram, Nahor, and Haran. This genealogy, which constitutes the bridge from the Flood to the beginning of the Patriarchal Tales, uses formulas identical with those of the antediluvian genealogy in chapter 5, omitting the summarizing indication of life span and the report of death of each begetter. Longevity now is cut in half, and then halved again in the latter part of the list, as we approach Abram. From this point, men will have merely the extraordinary life spans of modern Caucasian mountain dwellers and not legendary life spans. The narrative in this way is preparing to enter recognizable human time and family life. There is one hidden number-game here, as the Israeli Bible scholar Moshe Weinfeld has observed: the number of years from the birth of Shem’s son to Abram’s migration to Canaan is exactly a solar 365.
27–32. This is a second genealogical document, using different language, and zeroing in on Abram’s immediate family and its migrations.
31. he set out with them. Two small changes in the vocalization of the two Hebrew words here yield “he took them out with him.” This is the reading of the Septuagint and the Samaritan Version.
Haran. In the Hebrew there is no confusion with the name of Abram’s deceased brother, because the latter begins with an aspirated heh, the former with a fricative ḥet.