Genesis Deeper ㊳ A Name for Ourselves · Why Did the People of Babel Build a Tower? (Genesis 11:1~9)
This series takes one Bible passage at a time and looks at it a little more closely. The images are free to use in worship, in class, and on social media.
The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. As they traveled from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.
Genesis 11:1~9 (World English Bible)
1. The Plain of Shinar, People Baking Bricks
The chapter just before this one, Genesis 10, showed Noah’s descendants after the flood spreading out over the whole earth by their families and by their languages. It did this by writing down their names one at a time. Chapter 11 pauses that story for a moment and goes back to a scene from a time when the whole earth still spoke one language. “The whole earth was of one language and of one speech” (11:1).
As people traveled from the east, they found a wide plain called Shinar and settled there (11:2). Shinar is thought to be the plain between two great rivers in what is now southern Iraq. That land is known for having very little stone. So the people shaped bricks out of clay and baked them hard in fire. They stacked those bricks in place of stone, and to hold the bricks together they used tar (a sticky black substance, like asphalt) as mortar (11:3). Now they were ready to put up large, tall buildings.
Then the people say this: “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth” (11:4). They are proposing to build one city and one tall tower. Inside these words are two things they wanted. One was to make a name for themselves. The other was not to be scattered. And so a question comes up. Why did the people of Babel build a tower? What kind of ‘name’ were they trying to make, and why was that a problem?
2. Is It Wrong to Work Together?
When you first read this story, something does not sit right. The people did not fight one another, and they did not hurt anyone. They simply agreed together in one language, baked bricks, and set out to build a city and a tower. Today, a scene like that might be praised as a fine example of people joining forces for a great project.
Yet God stops their work. And the words of verse 6 are even more troubling. “…Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do” (11:6). In other words, from now on nothing they set out to do will be beyond their reach. Read on its own, this can sound as though God was displeased that people were doing too well. Did God dislike it when people pooled their strength?
Before we read it that way, we need to listen first to what the people themselves said as they built. The text records the people’s words before it records God’s judgment, and inside those words is the reason they built the tower. Those words also connect with what God says to Abram (the man later called Abraham) in the very next chapter.
3. Going Deeper · The Name They Tried to Make, the Name God Gives
Here is the answer first. The people of Babel built the tower so that they would not be scattered, and so that they could make a name for themselves with their own hands. Two words from what they said, ‘make’ and ‘name,’ come back in the very next chapter, this time from God’s own mouth. In Hebrew, the language the Old Testament was first written in, the ‘make’ in ‘let’s make a name’ (11:4) is the same word God uses when he speaks to Abram, and the World English Bible uses ‘make’ there too: ‘I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great…’ (12:2). The name people tried to make for themselves, God gives to one man as a gift.
First, let us read 11:4 a little more closely. The English ‘let’s make a name for ourselves’ follows the Hebrew closely, which says ‘let us make for ourselves a name.’ Here ‘make’ is asah (עָשָׂה), a very common verb, and ‘name’ is shem (שֵׁם). By baking bricks and building a tower, the people meant to make a name for themselves by their own strength.
Now let us move one chapter ahead, to chapter 12, where God calls Abram.
“I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You will be a blessing.” (12:2)
In the World English Bible the link is easy to see. In 11:4 the people say, ‘let’s make a name,’ and in 12:2 God says, ‘I will make of you a great nation.’ In Hebrew both are the same verb, asah, ‘make.’ The ‘name’ in ‘your name’ is also the same word, shem. One small caution: English uses ‘make’ a few more times nearby, but those are different Hebrew words. The ‘make’ in ‘make your name great’ (12:2) is a Hebrew verb that means ‘make great.’ And ‘let’s make bricks’ (11:3) is literally ‘let us brick bricks.’
In chapter 11, the people said that ‘we’ would make a name ‘for ourselves.’ In chapter 12, God says that ‘I’ will make Abram into a great nation and make his name great. The same two words appear again in two chapters that sit side by side, but the speaker has changed from people to God.
The two names also head in different directions. The people of Babel wanted to make a name so that they would not be scattered. It was a name made for themselves, held together in one place. The name God gives Abram leads on to ‘You will be a blessing.’ In the very next verse, that blessing spreads out toward the whole earth: ‘…All the families of the earth will be blessed through you’ (12:3).
So the problem at Babel was not that people joined their strength together. The problem was the purpose they announced with their own mouths. They tried to make for themselves a name God had not given, and to protect themselves with that name. And after God blocks that road, he opens a new one, the road of receiving a name as a gift, through one man.
4. Word Study · Shem · Havah · Balal
Here are three Hebrew words from today’s passage.
① name · shem (שֵׁם). It means ‘name.’ The name of Noah’s son Shem is the very same word in Hebrew. Right after the Babel story, starting at 11:10, the text lists Shem’s descendants one generation after another until it reaches Abram. After the story of people who tried to make a name for themselves, the text follows the family of Shem, whose name means ‘name.’ That family line leads down to Abram, the man to whom God will promise a name.
In 11:1~9 there is one more word that looks almost exactly like this one, and it appears more often than shem: sham (שָׁם), which means ‘there.’ Hebrew writes only the consonants as letters and adds the vowels as small dots and lines. These two words have exactly the same consonant letters; only the vowel marks are different. Sham appears once each in verses 2, 7, and 8, and twice in verse 9, five times in all. The World English Bible has ‘there’ in each of these places, so you can count all five in English as well. They are ‘lived there,’ ‘there confuse,’ ‘from there,’ ‘there Yahweh confused,’ and ‘From there.’ (Yahweh is God’s own name in the Hebrew text.) The people stayed ‘there’ and tried to make a ‘name,’ and it was right ‘there’ that God mixed up their speech and from ‘there’ that he scattered them. The place (sham) they held on to in order to make a name (shem) became the place where their scattering began.
② come · havah (הָבָה). It is a word used to call others to do something together, like ‘Come, let’s…’ It appears three times in chapter 11, and the World English Bible translates it as ‘Come’ each time. Verse 3, ‘Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly,’ and verse 4, ‘Come, let’s build ourselves a city,’ are the people’s words. Verse 7, ‘Come, let’s go down,’ is God speaking. After the people call to one another twice with ‘Come, let’s…,’ God answers once with ‘Come, let’s go down.’ With the same calling word, the text sets the people’s plan and God’s response face to face.
③ mix · balal (בָּלַל). This is the word behind ‘confuse’ in verse 7 and ‘confused’ in verse 9, and it means to ‘mix’ different things together. Verse 9 says, ‘Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth…’ Heard in Hebrew, ‘Babel’ and ‘balal’ sound alike. The people wanted to make a name for themselves with that city, but the text leaves the city with a name that calls to mind ‘mix’ (balal). The ‘name’ in verse 9 is also the word shem. Instead of the name they tried to make for themselves, the city was left with a name that reminds us of what happened there.
5. One More Thing · The Scattering They Tried to Avoid
The other reason the people built the tower was ‘lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth’ (11:4). Yet the text records twice that the very thing they tried to avoid happened. ‘So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth…’ (11:8). ‘…From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth’ (11:9). The ‘scattered’ of verse 4 and the ‘scattered’ of verses 8 and 9 are the same verb in Hebrew. The World English Bible also uses the same English word in all three places. The story ends in verse 9 with that scattering.
Seen only this way, the scattering reads as a punishment from God. But spreading out was not, in itself, only a punishment. After the flood, God said to Noah and his sons, “Be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth” (9:1). To ‘replenish’ the earth here means to fill it. People spreading out to live across the whole earth was, from the beginning, the direction of the blessing God had given. Chapter 10 also ends with words about Noah’s descendants spreading out: ‘…The nations divided from these in the earth after the flood’ (10:32). The people of Babel went against that direction and tried to gather and stay in one place, and God sent them back out over the whole earth.
The text quietly notes one more thing. The people wanted the top of the tower to reach ‘to the sky.’ But verse 5 does not say the tower reached the sky. Instead it says, ‘Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower…’ (11:5). While people were trying to climb up, God came down to see the city and the tower they were building. In chapter 11, the people spoke first with ‘Come, let’s…,’ but in the next chapter it is God who speaks first, to Abram (12:1). A name is not something people earn by building. It is promised in the words God spoke to Abram.
6. For Us Today
This passage leaves us with one message. The people of Babel tried to protect themselves by making a name for themselves, but God is the one who gives a name as a gift.
What the people of Babel wanted was not strange. They wanted not to be forgotten, not to be scattered, and to live safely together. But they tried to get these things through a name made ‘by us, for ourselves,’ and the text records that this road was blocked.
We, too, spend our lives trying to make a name for ourselves. We stay late at work to be noticed, and we choose and choose again among the photos on our phones so that we look good in other people’s eyes. Sometimes we try to build our family’s name on a child’s report card or the size of our house. Then we grow anxious that what we have built might fall apart, and somewhere in our hearts comes the thought, ‘If I lose this, I am nothing.’
The people of Babel in this passage also baked bricks and built a tower for ‘a name for ourselves.’ But in the very next chapter, the text shows God promising a name to one man. Not a single line says he built anything to earn it. What the text records about Abram is not a tower. God called him, and he set out as God had told him (12:1, 4). And God said that this name would not stop at lifting Abram up. It would flow on to others: ‘You will be a blessing.’
This does not mean that every effort to make a name is wrong. Doing your work faithfully and earning a good reputation are valuable things. But when that name becomes a wall you hide behind for protection, every day grows heavy with the work of guarding that wall. At times like that, there is something worth remembering. What you have built is not the final word on who you are.
At the end of the day, before you count up what you built today, it might be good to write down one short line: ‘My name is not decided only by what I have built.’ When God promised Abram a name, he also gave him the words ‘You will be a blessing.’ If your hand, which has been gripping what you built, loosens a little, you may find room to offer one small kindness to the person beside you.
“God, you called Abram and made his name great. When we try to pile up a name for ourselves and hide inside it, stop us. Help us remember that our name is not something we built, but the name you have called us by. Let today be a day of being a small blessing to the people beside us. Amen.”
🕊 How to Use This in Ministry
Opening Question
Ask, “If you could make everyone know who you are, what would you want to do?” and listen to a few of the children’s answers. Then say, “Today in the Bible we meet people who built a very tall tower to make a name for themselves. Let’s find out together what happened to them,” and move into the passage.
Activity
Give each group paper cups or blocks, and have them build the tallest tower they can in two minutes. When they are done, read 11:4 together and write on the board the two reasons the people built the tower (‘let’s make a name for ourselves,’ ‘lest we be scattered’). Next, read 12:2 and write beside them what God said to Abram (‘make your name great,’ ‘You will be a blessing’), so the two lines can be compared side by side. Finally, show the picture ‘They stopped building the city’ from today’s images and ask, “What finally happened to the tower the people were building? And what happened to the people who did not want to be scattered?”
Application
Give each child a small card and have them write their own name on the front. On the back, have them write the name of one person they will be a blessing to this week, along with one small thing they will do for that person (for example, sharing toys with a younger brother or sister, or saying hello to a friend first). Sum up by saying, “The people of Babel tried to make a name for themselves, but God spoke to Abram first. He promised to make Abram’s name great, and said that through that name Abram would be a blessing to others.” At the next gathering, share together whether they did what they wrote on their cards.
🖼️ Today’s Four Images · Press and hold or right-click to save
Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower |
they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there |
Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly |
They stopped building the city |
📄 Image license CC0 (public domain) · Free to use, modify, and redistribute without attribution.
🤖 These images were created with AI (Grok).
📖 Genesis Deeper ㉒ Calling on the Name · the story of people who began to call not on their own name, but on the name of Yahweh
Origin Bible · Mission Zedero
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✍️ This article was written with the help of AI and reviewed by a person.
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