NOTES for Gen 11:1-32
People very often feel sympathy for the heroes of this passage. Here were people trying hard, working, and an unkind God suddenly goes and ruins everything. What, was He begrudging them something?... Yet the question is what the tower is being built for. The Tower of Babel symbolizes a civilization built as a challenge to God. For some reason it seems to me that God's intervention here is very conditional. Most likely, the enterprise was doomed from the beginning because of the builders' mutual misunderstanding. Even if at first they spoke one language, acting solely in order to prove what fine fellows they were, each of them was thinking about himself and not about the others. In such a situation misunderstanding could not fail to arise - and it turned out that everyone was already speaking different languages. This is what any activity outside God is doomed to. Later, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit will heal this wound and make understanding possible even among people who speak different languages.