What Does Genesis 11:9 Mean?

That is why it was called Babel: because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. And from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. The name Babel is explained with a Hebrew wordplay: the Akkadian name Bab-il meant "gate of God," a claim of grandeur, but the Hebrew word balal means "to confuse." The builders named their project the gate of God; the narrator says it was the place of confusion. The gap between what humanity claims it is building and what it actually produces is captured in the etymology.

The name Babel/Babylon will carry this double meaning throughout the rest of the Bible. In the New Testament, Babylon becomes the symbol of the great city organized around its own glory and against the purposes of God, the adversary of the New Jerusalem. Every empire that has called itself the gate of heaven has eventually revealed itself to be another Babel: impressive in its construction, undone by the confusion within, and ultimately scattered by the judgment of the one whose city it claimed to be.

The scattering from Babel is also the occasion for the Table of Nations. Genesis 10 and 11 work together to establish both the variety of the world's peoples and the event that produced it. The nations that God scattered are the nations of Genesis 10. The confusion of tongues is the genealogical event behind the diversity of languages. And the next section of Genesis will immediately begin narrowing from all those scattered nations to one man, Abram, called out of the scattering to be the beginning of a blessing for all of them.