Babel, Scattering and the Road to Abram

“Language” is literally “lip”, safah, and “speech” is “words”, the same words: one tongue and one vocabulary. Zephaniah 3:9 turns the image round when God promises to give the peoples “a pure language”, a clean lip, so that all call on the name of the LORD.

“From the east” may equally mean “eastward”. Either way the direction is loaded in Genesis: Adam is sent out east of Eden, Cain settles east of Eden, and Lot will journey east when he chooses the plain in 13:11. Shinar is the Babylonian plain named in 10:10.

The Hebrew rings with sound play: nilbenah levenim, “let us brick bricks”, and nisrefah lisrefah, “burn them to a burning”. Slime and mortar are chemar and chomer. Southern Mesopotamia had little stone, so fired brick and bitumen are exactly right. “Throughly” is the 1611 spelling of thoroughly.

“Whose top may reach unto heaven” is literally “its head in the heavens”, the language of Babylon’s own temple towers; the ziggurat of Babylon was called Etemenanki, “house of the foundation of heaven and earth”. “Lest we be scattered” sets itself against the command of 9:1 to fill the earth.

“The children of men” is bene ha’adam, sons of Adam, the man made from the ground. Whatever they build, the verse names them by their origin in dust. “Builded” describes work under way: God comes to see a city and a tower still going up.

“Began” is hechel once more, the verb of 4:26, 6:1 and 9:20: the beginnings of chapters 4 to 11 are each a mixed thing. “Nothing will be restrained from them” uses the verb Job uses of God in 42:2, “no thought can be withholden from thee”.

The plural is the “us” of 1:26 and 3:22. “Confound” is balal, to mix or mingle, the word Leviticus 2:4–5 uses for flour mingled with oil. God does not destroy anything; he mixes the one lip into many.

Genesis says nothing about the tower falling. The Book of Jubilees (10:26) adds a great wind that overthrew it, but the verse itself only says that they stopped building the city. The project is abandoned, not demolished.

In Babylon’s own language the name was Bab-ili, “gate of God”. Genesis hears it through the Hebrew balal, to confuse, and turns the city’s boast into a pun: not the gate of God but the place of the babble. “Scatter” comes a third time, the builders’ fear fulfilled word for word.

The fifth toledot heading. The Mishnah (Avot 5:2) counted ten generations from Adam to Noah and ten more from Noah to Abraham, and the two lists are built to match. “Two years after the flood” fixes Shem’s birth at Noah’s five hundred and second year.

Shem lives six hundred years. On the Hebrew figures he dies in year 2158 from Adam, thirty five years after Abraham’s death: the son of Noah who came out of the ark outlives the man called out of Ur.

The age at fatherhood falls at a stroke from a hundred to thirty five, lower than anyone in chapter 5, where the youngest father was sixty five. The Greek text makes it a hundred and thirty five and is consistently longer throughout this list.

Chapter 5 gave each man three numbers and ended “and he died”. This list gives only two and never says it; the reader has to add Arphaxad’s four hundred and thirty eight years unaided. The Samaritan Pentateuch supplies the totals and the deaths.

Salah is Shelach, a word for a spear or javelin, the same word inside the name Methuselah, “man of the javelin”, if that reading of 5:21 is right. The names in this line are short and plain after the long theophoric names of chapter 5.

Four hundred and three years after his son’s birth, the same figure given for Arphaxad in verse 13. The list does not comment on the repetition, and the totals still differ, four hundred and thirty three against four hundred and thirty eight.

From here on every father is around thirty when his son is born, close to the ordinary span of human generations. The ages are coming down to the scale on which Abraham’s family will be measured.

Eber lives four hundred and sixty four years and, on these numbers, outlives Abraham by sixty four. Jewish tradition built on the overlap: the Targum and Genesis Rabbah speak of the house of study of Shem and Eber, where Jacob learned.

In 10:25 Peleg’s days were the days of the earth’s division. Here he receives nothing but the formula: thirty years and a son. The chapter that tells of the division gives its namesake no part in it.

Peleg’s whole life is two hundred and thirty nine years, barely half his father Eber’s. On the Hebrew figures he died in year 1996 from Adam, ten years before Noah: Noah outlived his own great-great-great-grandson.

Reu, Re’u, is probably short for a name like Reuel, “friend of God”, a name Moses’ father-in-law bears in Exodus 2:18. Luke 3:35 gives the Greek form, Ragau.

Two hundred and seven after Serug’s birth makes Reu’s total two hundred and thirty nine, exactly the span of his father Peleg. Two lives in a row of the same length, and then the numbers go on falling.

Serug matches Sarugi, a town near Haran known from Assyrian records. Several names in this line are also places in that region, Nahor and perhaps Terah among them, which suggests the family was remembered through the towns where it lived.

Serug’s after-span is a round two hundred. The Book of Jubilees, chapter 11, sets the spread of idol-making in Serug’s generation, a tradition that grows out of Joshua 24:2, where Terah and his fathers “served other gods”.

Twenty nine is the youngest age at fatherhood in either genealogy. Nahor is also the name of a town near Haran, Nakhur in the Mari letters, and Abraham’s servant finds Rebekah at “the city of Nahor” in 24:10. Abram’s brother will carry his grandfather’s name.

A hundred and forty eight years is the shortest life in either list, half his father’s. On the Hebrew figures Nahor dies in year 1997 from Adam, nine years before Noah, his ancestor eight generations back.

Terah is often linked with yareach, the moon, and both Ur and Haran were centres of the moon god Sin. Joshua 24:2 says plainly that Terah “served other gods”. Abram is named first, though the arithmetic of 11:32 and 12:4 suggests he may not have been the eldest.

The sixth toledot heading is Terah’s, and it governs everything to 25:11. Genesis has no heading called the generations of Abraham: the whole of his life is told as part of his father’s account. Lot is introduced here, already defined as Haran’s son.

“Before his father” is literally “in the face of Terah his father”, in his lifetime and perhaps in his presence. It is the first time in Scripture a son dies before his father. “Nativity” is moledet, the word God will use in 12:1: “from thy kindred”. The Chaldeans are a later people, so the phrase names Ur as later readers knew it.

Sarai means princess and Milcah means queen. Nahor marries his brother’s daughter. The Talmud (Megillah 14a) identified the unexplained Iscah with Sarai, which would make Sarai Haran’s daughter too; but in 20:12 Abraham calls her his father’s daughter by another mother.

“Barren”, aqarah, will be said of Rebekah (25:21) and of Rachel (29:31): all three mothers of the line begin unable to bear. The word for “child” here, valad, is a form found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.

Terah takes; Abram is taken. Nahor is not mentioned, yet his family is later found near Haran (24:10). The city is spelled with a heavier h, Charan, than the name of Abram’s dead brother, so the two are not the same word in Hebrew, however alike they look in English.

On the Hebrew numbers, if Abram was born when Terah was seventy and left at seventy five, Terah lived sixty more years in Haran. The Samaritan Pentateuch gives him a hundred and forty five, and Stephen in Acts 7:4 says Abram left “when his father was dead”.