Genesis 11

Notes

1. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "of one language" (KJV) / "had one language" (RSV)

   Rulings 39, 2

   שָׂפָה is the lip (Isa 6:5, 7, "a man unclean of lips"; Prov 10:13), the speech that comes from it ("the lip of Canaan," Isa 19:18), and the edge of a thing: the lip of the sea (22:17) and of the river (41:3). It is kept concrete (39), and kept apart from לָשׁוֹן "tongue" (10:5, 20, 31). The word runs through the story five times (vv. 1, 6, 7 twice, 9). Zeph 3:9 answers it: "then I will turn to the peoples a pure lip, that all of them may call on the name of Adonai." Christian readers set Pentecost, where each hears the apostles in his own tongue (Acts 2:4–11), against Babylon; so Gregory of Nazianzus (Oration 41.16).

2. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "and of one speech" (KJV) / "and few words" (RSV)

   Rulings 1, 3, 2

   דְּבָרִים אֲחָדִים is "words, ones," with the plural of אֶחָד "one." With days, the plural is "a few": "a few days" (27:44; 29:20, יָמִים אֲחָדִים), and the RSV reads "few words" from those verses. It can also mean "the same," one set of words for everyone, and so the LXX (φωνὴ μία), the Vulgate (sermonum eorundem) and the KJV take it. Here it stands beside "one lip," and the collocation decides for "one" (3); Genesis Rabbah 38 gathers further readings. "Words that were one" keeps the settled gloss (2) and the plural; "few" is in this note.

3. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 3, 93

   מִקֶּדֶם is "from the east" by its parts, and so the KJV and RSV. With the same verb נָסַע it means "eastward" at 13:11, where Lot moves from Bethel toward the Jordan; at 2:8 the same form is "in the east" (93). So the builders may be coming from the east, going east, or setting out while in the east. Shinar lies east of the land of Israel, which favours the other two; the parts are printed, and the direction is left as the Hebrew leaves it. The east runs as a thread from the garden (2:8; 3:24) through Cain (4:16) to Babylon.

4. Decision↩ Back to the text

   Expected: "Go to" (KJV) / "Come" (RSV)

   Rulings 2, 39

   הָבָה is the imperative of יָהַב "give": "give me my woman" (29:21), "give me sons" (30:1), "give bread" (47:15). Before "let us" it is a rousing call, and it comes three times in the story: the builders' "Up, let us brick bricks" (v. 3) and "Up, let us build" (v. 4), and Adonai's answer, "Up, let us go down" (v. 7). "Come" is the gloss of בּוֹא and cannot serve (guide §3.2). "Up" carries the call, and against the tower its irony too. Exod 1:10 has it in Pharaoh's plan against Israel: "Up, let us deal wisely with it."

5. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 6, 24

   נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים "let us brick bricks" and נִשְׂרְפָה לִשְׂרֵפָה "let us burn for a burning" are cognate pairs, and the next clause pairs sounds: חֵמָר "bitumen" and חֹמֶר "clay." The cognates are kept (6), as "seeding seed" was at 1:11. The sound pair has no English match that keeps both glosses, so it is in this note (24). The narrator explains a way of building foreign to a land of stone: Babylon built in baked brick laid in hot bitumen, as Herodotus saw (1.179). Brick and clay are also the materials of Israel's slavery in Egypt, where the same verb returns: "with clay and with bricks" (Exod 1:14), "to brick the bricks" (Exod 5:7). The verb לָבַן "brick" has a homograph, "be white" (Ps 51:9), the root of the name Laban.

6. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 104, 6

   "Was to them for stone": the לְ of לְאָבֶן gives the use a thing is put to, not a result, so ruling 104's "become" does not apply and "be" stays (the report raises the line between the two). The brick did not become stone; it served for stone. The first לְ (לָהֶם, "to them") is the dative. The KJV has "they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter."

7. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Ruling 39

   "And its head in the skies" is a verbless clause, the tower's aim or its description. "Cities great and fortified in the skies" (Deut 1:28; 9:1) is the spies' phrase for walls beyond reach, and its word for "fortified," בְּצוּרֹת, is the root of v. 6. Jacob's ladder stands on the land "and its head reaching to the skies" (28:12), the same words. The temple tower of Babylon, Etemenanki, "house of the foundation of sky and land," was a stepped tower of baked brick, and Babylonian building inscriptions speak of making its top rival the sky.

8. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 17, 18

   "Let us make for ourselves a name": שֵׁם "name" is also the name Shem (H8035), and the story is set between Shem's sons (10:21–31) and Shem's producings (11:10). The builders seek a name by building; in the next chapter Adonai promises Abram, "I will make great your name" (12:2). The mighty ones of 6:4 were "the men of the name." The pun on Shem cannot be carried in English (17); "name" keeps the home gloss.

9. Reading↩ Back to the text

   Rulings 74, 11

   Adonai "went down" to see what the builders made to reach the skies: the tower whose head was to be in the skies is so far below that he must come down to see it. Rashi, after Genesis Rabbah 38:9, says he had no need to, but came down to teach judges not to condemn before they have seen. The same going down to see comes before Sodom (18:21). "The sons of the human" (בְּנֵי הָאָדָם) is the common noun, the kind (11).

10. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "nothing will be restrained from them" (KJV) / "nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 25, 39

    בָּצַר in the niphal is to be cut off, out of reach. Its participle בָּצוּר is the "fenced" city (Num 13:28; Deut 3:5, KJV "fenced cities"), and the niphal comes again only in Job's confession: "no scheme can be fenced off from you" (Job 42:2, לֹא־יִבָּצֵר מִמְּךָ מְזִמָּה), where the same two roots, בָּצַר and זָמַם, meet. Job says of Adonai what Adonai says here of the builders. "Fenced off" keeps the walled city in the verb; the RSV's "impossible" makes an abstraction of it (39).

11. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "which they have imagined to do" (KJV) / "that they propose to do" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 95

    זָמַם is to plan or purpose, of people (Deut 19:19; Ps 31:14) and of Adonai (Jer 4:28; Lam 2:17; Zech 8:14–15). Its noun מְזִמָּה already has "scheme" as a seed (Prov 8:12; Job 42:2), and one root keeps one English word; the pair is raised in the report. "Scheme" leans toward a bad plan in English, as זָמַם often does (Ps 37:12), but not always.

12. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 46, 1

    "Let us go down," like "let us make a human" (1:26) and "like one of us" (3:22), is a plural in the mouth of Adonai, and the readings divide on doctrinal lines. Genesis Rabbah 8 and Rashi (at 1:26) read the heavenly court, consulted by its king. Philo gives the plural to the powers who serve God, so that punishment should not come from God alone (On the Confusion of Tongues 168–182). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan has Adonai speak to the seventy messengers who stand before him, one for each nation. Augustine weighs the messengers and the Trinity (City of God 16.6), and the Fathers generally read the Trinity. Others read a plural of deliberation. "Let us" holds them all.

13. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "confound" (KJV) / "confuse" (RSV)

    Rulings 2, 3

    בָּלַל is to mix: flour mixed with oil (Lev 2:4–5; 7:10, 12); "Ephraim mixes himself among the peoples" (Hos 7:8). The lip is mixed, not taken away: the speech remains, but its parts no longer go together. The consonants of the builders' "let us brick" (נִלְבְּנָה, v. 3) come back reversed in Adonai's "let us mix" (נָבְלָה), as J. P. Fokkelman showed (Narrative Art in Genesis, 1975): what they made is unmade with the same letters. The name בָּבֶל turns on this verb in v. 9.

14. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 8, 18

    "He called its name Babylon": the verb has no expressed subject. It may be impersonal, "one called," or Adonai, the last named, who then names the place for his own act; "he" keeps both. בָּבֶל is printed "Babylon" here as in every later book (111), where the English Bibles print "Babel" in Gen 10–11 only: the city of the tower is the city of the exile (2 Kgs 25; Ps 137). Its own name, Akkadian Bab-ili, means "gate of the god"; the story hears in it the Hebrew בָּלַל "mix" instead. The city that called itself the gate of the god is named for the mixing of speech.

15. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth" (KJV) / "because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth" (RSV)

    Rulings 24, 23, 2

    בָּבֶל is explained by בָּלַל, Babylon by "mixing." The source marks the sound, so ruling 24 lets an English rendering carry it in place of the home gloss "mix," which is printed at v. 7. English "babble" is not from the name; it imitates the sound of speech that cannot be understood, and English readers have long heard the two together. "Made babble" keeps the name in the verb; "made" is the word added to carry the pun (23). The LXX translates the name as a meaning, "therefore its name was called Confusion (Σύγχυσις), because there the Lord confused (συνέχεεν)," and the KJV's "Babel… confound" makes the same link by sense alone.

16. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 91, 74

    "Two years after the flood": Shem was a hundred years old, Noah was five hundred when his sons were born (5:32), and the flood came in Noah's six hundredth year (7:6), so Shem should be a hundred at the flood, not two years after it. Rashi resolves it by making Japheth the eldest (see the note at 10:21). "A son of a hundred years" is the Hebrew idiom of age, kept as it is; the WPRB has "100 years old."

17. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 91, 74

    The numbers keep the Hebrew order (91): "five and thirty years," "three years and four hundred years." The line of Shem is cut to the pattern of Gen 5 without its last clauses: each father lives and produces, but no total is given and no "and he died" closes his paragraph. The Samaritan Pentateuch supplies both. The LXX adds a hundred years to most of the fathers' ages before they produce, and adds a generation, Cainan, between Arpachshad and Shelah (vv. 12–13; also 10:24), whom Luke's genealogy keeps (Luke 3:36). Ten generations run from Noah to Abram, as ten ran from Adam to Noah (m. Avot 5:2).

18. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 18

    The names are in the names table below. Abram, אַבְרָם, is "the father is exalted"; the name becomes Abraham at 17:5. Terah's three sons are named as Noah's three were (5:32), and the story goes with the first of them.

    See the table

19. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 2

    "The producings of Terah": the story of Abram is headed by his father's name, as the story of Joseph is "the producings of Jacob" (37:2). It is the sixth heading of the book (2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10), and the hiphil "produced" of the heading's verb runs through vv. 10–27.

20. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 39, 46, 18

    "On the face of Terah his father": in his presence, or in his lifetime, before him (Num 3:4: Eleazar and Ithamar served as priests "on the face of Aaron their father"). אוּר is the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, and also the word for fire (Isa 31:9; 44:16; 50:11). The tradition hears both. Nimrod threw Abram into the furnace of the Chaldeans for refusing to worship fire, and Abram came out unharmed; Haran, who waited to see who would win, was thrown in after him and died in his father's presence (Genesis Rabbah 38:13; Rashi; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan). In Jubilees 12:12–14 Haran dies in the fire Abram set to the house of idols. At Neh 9:7, "who brought him out from Ur of the Chaldeans," the Vulgate translates "from the fire of the Chaldeans" (de igne Chaldaeorum). "Chaldeans" is the name of a people of the first millennium, later than Abram's day; the LXX has "the land of the Chaldeans."

21. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 18

    Iscah is named and not heard of again. b. Megillah 14a and b. Sanhedrin 69b identify her with Sarai: יִסְכָּה from סָכָה "look," because she saw by the holy spirit, or because all looked at her beauty (12:14). Rashi adopts it. On that reading Sarai is Haran's daughter and Abram's niece, which does not agree with 20:12, where Abram calls her his father's daughter.

22. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Ruling 25

    וָלָד "offspring" occurs here and as a variant reading at 2 Sam 6:23, where Michal "had no child." It is a form of יֶלֶד "child" (4:23), from יָלַד "bear," and is given its own gloss. The verse puts the barrenness first, before the call and the promise of seed (12:1–3, 7). אַיִן is carried as a clause, "there was none."

23. Decision↩ Back to the text

    Expected: "and they went forth with them" (KJV) / "and they went forth together" (RSV)

    Rulings 40, 74

    The Masoretic text has the plural, "they went out with them": Terah and those he took went out with the rest of the household, or with one another. The Samaritan Pentateuch has "and he brought them out" (וַיּוֹצֵא אֹתָם), and the LXX "and he led them out" (ἐξήγαγεν αὐτούς), making Terah the leader. The RSV's "together" smooths the plural. The Masoretic text is printed with its evidence (40). The journey is Terah's; the call comes at 12:1, and Acts 7:2–4 places it before Harran, in Mesopotamia.

24. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 18, 110

    Two names are "Haran" in the KJV and RSV: Abram's brother הָרָן (vv. 26–31) and the city חָרָן (vv. 31–32; 12:4–5). The city is printed "Harran" (110), so the two stay apart: Harran on the Balikh in upper Mesopotamia, whose name is Akkadian harranu, "road." Harran, like Ur, was a city of the moon god, and Serug, Nahor and Terah are also the names of towns near it.

25. Reading↩ Back to the text

    Rulings 91, 74

    Terah was seventy at Abram's birth (v. 26) and Abram seventy-five when he left Harran (12:4), so on these figures Terah lived sixty years after Abram's going. The Samaritan Pentateuch gives Terah a hundred and forty-five years, so that he dies in the year Abram leaves, and Stephen says that Abram moved "after his father died" (Acts 7:4). Rashi, after Genesis Rabbah 39:7, says that Terah's death is told first so that it should not be said Abram failed to honour his father, and that the guilty are called dead in their lifetime. The Masoretic number is printed, in the Hebrew order (91).