![]() ![]() Moses tells the Israelites not to worship the sun, moon, the stars, and all the heavenly host like the other nations do. It’s here that Moses mentions that, while Israel has their own God, the other nations have theirs. In the book of Deuteronomy, the prophet Moses instructs the people of Israel on how to conduct themselves in the land that their God promised their ancestor Abraham. But later, at the very end of the Torah, we learn how the ancient Israelites believed the other nations got their gods. The book of Genesis shows how Israel’s ancestors came to know their God. This is all taking place at the beginning of a group of books known as the Torah or Pentateuch: the first five books of the Bible. Abraham becomes the father of Isaac, who becomes the father of Jacob, whose children become the nation of Israel. God tells Abram that his descendants will be given a land, and that through him, all the other nations of the world will be blessed. (These nations are listed in the previous chapter of Genesis.) However, the most important nation in the Old Testament is nowhere to be found … yet.ĭirectly after the Tower of Babel incident, God calls a man named Abram (later named Abraham) from the land of the Chaldeans-the same people group that built the Tower of Babel. With this stroke, some 70 nations of the world are divided. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” (Genesis 11:6–7, emphasis added) “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Either way, God sees no good coming from humanity working toward this end, and says to the heavenly host: It’s possible that they were trying to bring the gods down to earth, or that they wanted to ascend to become like gods themselves (Isaiah 14:4, 13–14). The people of Babel want to make a name for themselves, and begin constructing a tower that reaches into the heavens. NOTE: “Babel” is the actual transliteration of the Hebrew word for “Babylon”-while our English Bibles make a distinction between the tower incident and the Chaldean city, the original Hebrew text does not. So any ancient Israelites hearing this story would know right away that this city is bad news. If you’re familiar with the story of the Old Testament, then you know that Babylon is the world empire who would eventually sack the Temple of Israel’s God in Jerusalem and carry the Hebrews off into captivity. ![]() One particularly violent warrior, Nimrod, founds a kingdom, including a city named Babylon (Genesis 10:8–10). Heiser’s book, The Unseen Realm, is an enlightening resource for exploring this further.)Įarly in the book of Genesis, we find the humans of the world all speaking with one language. (And if you haven’t checked it out yet, Dr. We’re going to get a high-level overview of the Tower of Babel, both its significance and the shadow it casts over the rest of the Old Testament. They saw it as the moment when the nations got their gods, too. If you understand the Tower of Babel, then you gain a huge advantage when reading anything else in the Old Testament.īecause the Bible’s original readers didn’t just see the Tower of Babel as the story of how the nations got their languages. But the Tower of Babel is one of the most vital Bible stories-because the ancient Jews believed that something even bigger was at play than language. ![]() On the surface, it seems like a simple moral story about where the world’s languages come from. This prologue culminates with the united people of earth attempting to build a tower to heaven, only for God to confuse their efforts by distributing different languages across the population. In these chapters we find some of the Bible’s most famous stories, like Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah’s Ark. The first eleven chapters of Genesis form the prologue for the rest of the Bible. ![]()
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