Genesis11chapter 11

Genesis 11:1-2

Chapter 10 has already divided the nations after their tongues three separate times, so the writer gave the result first and only now goes back to tell how it happened. The plain of Shinar is the same ground where 10:10 says Nimrod's kingdom began, and Babel is named there first. They travel and then they settle, which is the reverse of what Noah's family had been told to do.

Genesis 11:3-4

Brick for stone and slime for morter, so nothing in the tower is what the ground gave them and everything in it is manufactured. Their stated aim, let us make us a name, is answered one chapter later when God tells Abram I will make thy name great, and the thing these men seize is given to the man who leaves. Their other aim, lest we be scattered abroad, is the one thing God had commanded Noah's sons to do in 9:1.

Genesis 11:5-6

the LORD came down to see the city and the tower: The tower's top may reach unto heaven, and God has to come down to see it, which is the passage's own quiet measure of its height. Jacob will be shown a ladder at 28:12 whose top reached to heaven, set up by God rather than built by men, with the LORD standing above it. Verse 6 concedes that the plan would have worked, since nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Genesis 11:7-8

God answers the men's Go to, let us with a Go to, let us of his own, and the writer sets the two councils side by side in the same words. The us here is the us of let us make man in our image at 1:26. What they built the city to prevent is exactly what befalls them, and they are scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:9

The city that set out to make itself a name ends up carrying the name of its own judgment, since Babel comes from a root meaning to confound. Babylon runs from this verse through the prophets and on to Revelation 17 and 18, always as the city that builds itself a name. Matthew Henry and many readers after him set Pentecost against this scene, where men out of every nation under heaven each hear one message in his own tongue.

Genesis 11:10-11

This is the fifth of the eleven times Genesis says these are the generations, and each division narrows the field: the heavens and the earth at 2:4, Adam at 5:1, Noah at 6:9, the sons of Noah at 10:1, and now one line out of Shem. Chuck Missler built his reading of the whole book on that structure. Dating Arphaxad two years after the flood ties the line to the flood rather than to the tower, so the genealogy reaches back behind Babel and starts again.

Genesis 11:12-15

The list keeps the shape of chapter 5 and drops its refrain, since there every man ended with and he died, and here no death is recorded at all. The ages at fatherhood collapse as well, from a hundred and more in Adam's line down to thirty-five for Arphaxad and thirty for Salah. Chapter 10 named Arphaxad among the sons of Shem and then moved on to the nations, and chapter 11 goes back to follow that one branch down.

Genesis 11:16-19

Eber is the name the word Hebrew is drawn from, and Abram is called Abram the Hebrew at 14:13. His son Peleg was named because in his days was the earth divided, which 10:25 states in advance of the scattering this chapter has just narrated. The lifespans halve at Peleg, from his father's four hundred and sixty-four years down to his own two hundred and thirty-nine.

Genesis 11:20-26

The fall in years runs on through Reu at two hundred and thirty-nine, Serug at two hundred and thirty, and Nahor at a hundred and forty-eight. Ten generations reach from Shem to Abram here, matching the ten from Adam to Noah in chapter 5, so the book stands on two tens with a flood between them. Abram is named first of Terah's three sons, and Adam Clarke reads that order as one of dignity rather than birth, which is how Genesis keeps naming the chosen son ahead of the elder.

Genesis 11:27-28

The sixth these are the generations is the narrowest so far, coming down from the nations of chapter 10 to one household in one town. Lot arrives in the same breath as an orphan, and he stays with Abram through the parting of chapter 13, the rescue of chapter 14, and the fire of chapter 19. The list running from verse 10 records no deaths at all, and the first man in it said to die is Haran, who dies before his father in Ur of the Chaldees. Jerome passes on a Hebrew tradition that read Ur as fire and told of Abraham delivered out of it, and he reports it as their story rather than as the text.

Genesis 11:29-30

The wives are named, and then the account halts on one flat sentence, But Sarai was barren; she had no child. That line stands one verse before God promises to make Abram a great nation at 12:2, so the book sets the obstacle in front of the promise before the promise is spoken. She waits twenty-five years for Isaac, and the same waiting falls on Rebekah at 25:21 and on Rachel at 29:31, so every generation of the promised line arrives late and by God's hand.

Genesis 11:31

Terah is the one who takes the family out, and Abram goes here as a son rather than as the man called. They set out to go into the land of Canaan, get as far as Haran, and settle. Stephen says in Acts 7 that God appeared to Abraham in Mesopotamia before he dwelt in Charran, which puts the call back in Ur and makes this move an answer already half given. Joshua tells Israel that Terah served other gods on the other side of the flood, so the household setting out for Canaan is an idolatrous one.

Genesis 11:32

The first man in Genesis to set out for Canaan dies short of it, at the place where he stopped. Abram will end up owning no more of that country than a field and a cave bought for four hundred shekels in chapter 23, and that plot is a grave. Hebrews says of all of them that they died in faith, not having received the promises, and chapter 12 opens by laying the same road on the son as a command.