Tower of Babel (Modified Talk Notes)

According to some counts, more than 6,800 languages exist, and they each have their own unique grammatical features. However, for at least 17 centuries, people spoke just one language. So what happened? And is it possible for any language to unite humankind?

Read Genesis 11:1-4

The popular cause to be advanced by the tower and city construction was, not the exaltation of God’s name, but that the builders might “make a celebrated name” for themselves. The ziggurat towers uncovered not only in the ruins of ancient Babylon but elsewhere in Mesopotamia would seem to confirm the essentially religious nature of the original tower, whatever its form or style.

Whereas the Hebrew name given the city, Babel, means “Confusion,” the Sumerian name (Ka-dingir-ra) and the Akkadian name (Bab-ilu) both mean “Gate of God.” Thus the remaining inhabitants of the city altered the form of its name to avoid the original condemnatory sense, but the new or substitute form still identified the city with religion.

The Genesis account describes the uniting of some part of the post-Flood human family in a project that opposed God’s will as stated to Noah and his sons. (Ge 9:1) Instead of spreading out and ‘filling the earth,’ they decided to centralize human society, concentrating their residence on a site in what became known as the Plains of Shinar in Mesopotamia. Evidently this was also to become a religious center, with a religious tower.​

Notice Jehovah God's response to this presumptuous project:

Read Gen. 11:6-9

The confusion of their language would also hinder or slow down future progress in a wrong direction, a God-defying direction, since it would limit mankind’s ability to combine its intellectual and physical powers in ambitious schemes and also make it difficult to draw upon the accumulated knowledge of the different language groups formed​—knowledge, not from God, but gained through human experience and research. (Compare Ec 7:29; De 32:5.) So, while the confusion of Babel introduced a major divisive factor into human society, the confusion of human speech actually benefited human society by slowing down the attainment of dangerous and hurtful goals. (Ge 11:5-9; compare Isa 8:9, 10.) One only has to consider certain developments in our own times, resulting from accumulated secular knowledge and man’s misuse thereof, to realize that what God foresaw long ago would develop if the effort at Babel were allowed to go unhindered.

Discuss picture, and Zeph. 3:9; Rom. 12:2.