Genesis 11

Today’s Passage: Genesis 11

You have a map of the nations now, and at the start of this chapter they still share one language. They settle together on the plain of Shinar, bake their bricks, and decide to build a city with a tower reaching up to the heavens, so that they can make a name (שֵׁם) shem, pronounced SHAME. Strong's H8034, name; reputation, character. They want a name of their own so that they will never be scattered, yet God had already told them to fill the earth. Their unity here is not worship at all. It is a project to stay put and be famous. for themselves and never be scattered. Then watch what the LORD does. He comes down, He confuses their speech, and He scatters them abroad after all. And when the noise dies away, a family line runs on quietly through the rest of the chapter, all the way to a man named Abram and a wife named Sarai who has no child.

Keep the names in mind, because Shem’s own name simply means name. The family that does not stoop to bake a tower is the very family the book will keep following, all the way down to Abram.

As you read, hold this: They tried to make a name. God scattered them.

Genesis 11:1-9 (BSB)

1 Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech. 2 And as people journeyed eastward, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” So they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. 4 “Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.” 5 Then the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. 6 And the LORD said, “If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. 7 Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world, and from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.

The city that reached for heaven can no longer even understand itself, so the building stops and the people scatter. The very thing they were afraid of turns out to be mercy in disguise, for a single proud city would have made a far harder world than a map spread wide with many tongues. There is good reason to thank God that He scattered them.

Genesis 11:10-26 (BSB)

The account of Shem runs on much like the list you have already walked through, only now the years grow shorter. The names come one after another, Shem and Arphaxad and Shelah, Eber and Peleg and Reu, Serug and Nahor, and at last Terah, who at seventy becomes the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

26 When Terah was 70 years old, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

Stay with the road you are on. From the man who once walked out of the ark down to Abram, the whole line is already there in your hands.

Genesis 11:27-32 (BSB)

27 This is the account of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran became the father of Lot. 28 During his father Terah’s lifetime, Haran died in his native land, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29 And Abram and Nahor took wives for themselves. Abram’s wife was named Sarai, and Nahor’s wife was named Milcah; she was the daughter of Haran, who was the father of both Milcah and Iscah. 30 But Sarai was barren; she had no children. 31 And Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai the wife of Abram, and they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans for the land of Canaan. But when they arrived in Haran, they settled there. 32 Terah lived 205 years, and he died in Haran.

Here is Ur, and a son dying in his own father’s lifetime, and a barren wife, and a journey begun toward Canaan that stalls and settles in Haran. Sarai has no children. Yet praise God over this quiet, struggling house, for the line has come all this way, even down to a home with no child in it.