What a Nimrod...

Election day. But it's a Thursday, not a Tuesday – 1784, not 2024 – and the Rev. Joseph Huntington is stepping up to the Hartford plate, his sermon at the ready for Gov. Griswold and the assembled legislators. Just yesterday, ratified copies of the treaty were exchanged in Paris. So ended what one had called “a war which will one day shine more illustriously in the historic page than any which has happened since the time of Nimrod and the Giants.”¹ A new nation had been born, and Pastor Joseph's big brother Samuel had played his part – a signer of the Declaration, president of the Continental Congress, and now Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut. No time to dwell on family pride, though; the new state government was waiting on Pastor Joseph to begin.

God, said Pastor Joseph, “saw all his works, and all the works and ways of men, the whole business and result of the world, as clearly before he began to create as he will at the consummation of all things.”² Before light was born, from eternity he'd seen Eve's teeth break the fruit's skin, the ark splishing and splashing in the flood, brick atop brick at Babel. And God has worked, Joseph testified, through these twists and turns of history to sculpt the peoples of the earth in many ways, even through “the event of war foreign or intestine, and many new nations have rose out of blood.”³ Reflecting the sentiments of his day and place, Joseph declared how “we once loved Britain most dearly, but Britain the Tyrant we could not love. Our souls abhorred her measures.... We rose from the dust where we had long been prostrate – our breasts glowed with noble ardor – we invoked the God of our fathers, and we took the field.”⁴ And yet all this had been the mysterious wisdom of God, he said, for “God has often made the lawless ambition and proud spirit of men instrumental in making new kingdoms or dividing ancient ones. As in the case of Nimrod, a proud and lawless man, a man of blood in contempt of heaven, a mighty hunter before the Lord, he soon began a kingdom distinct for himself.”⁵

There's that funny name again: 'Nimrod.' He's mighty mysterious in the Bible, maybe because – as some think – there was a longer Nimrod epic that circulated of which the Bible only kept these highlights.⁶ His story's told now in just this little five-verse “digression of particular political significance.”⁷ Verse 10 is the first appearance of another key word in the Bible: 'kingdom.' Nimrod is “the first person described explicitly as having a kingdom,”⁸ which seems to make him “the first king mentioned in the Scriptures,”⁹ a pretty important position to be in. These few verses we've read cover “the beginnings of kingship and, thus, of political rule in the world.”¹⁰

So roll back the clock to the days of yore in the 'land of Shinar,' to ancient Sumer, where the people said that “when the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Kish,”¹¹ a city a few miles east from a little riverside town called Babylon. But then, so they tell us, “Kish was smitten with weapons; its kingdom was brought to Uruk.”¹² Uruk had been “a hotbed of technological invention” long before 3000 BC, by which time they'd begun waging war.¹³ A sign of the turbulent early 2000s, they built a massive defensive wall, a feat credited to Uruk's larger-than-life ruler Gilgamesh, heir of kings Enmerkar and Lugalbanda. Among his notable successors was Lugalzagesi, who came in and raised Uruk to dominance by conquering Kish and many other cities of Sumer; his records claim the god Enlil “put all the lands at his feet and, from east to west, made them subject to him. … Enlil permitted him no rival; under him the lands rested contentedly, the people made merry.”¹⁴

Enter a man known to history as Sargon, 'True King' – we still haven't settled whether it's a name he was born with or adopted.¹⁵ He was a social outsider, not a Sumerian by blood or culture.¹⁶ Later stories told how his mom, a priestess illegally pregnant, made a basket and put her baby boy in it and floated him down the river, Moses style (cf. Exodus 2:3).¹⁷ These legends say that, after driving far down the Euphrates, a gardener fished him out of the water and adopted him, raising him to become cupbearer to King Ur-Zababa of Kish.¹⁸ Whatever the story, over 4300 years ago, Sargon took over the city of Kish while renoving another town further north, Agade, into “the first purpose-built capital” in the world.¹⁹ He marched his army south and, to hear him tell it, he “was victorious over Uruk in battle, conquered the city, captured Lugalzagesi king of Uruk in battle, and led him off to the gate of the god Enlil in a neck stock.”²⁰ In the process, Sargon says he “conquered fifty city governors with the mace of the god Ilaba,”²¹ “enabling him to rule all of Sumer to the headwaters of the [Persian] Gulf.”²² Thus “Uruk was smitten with weapons; its kingdom was brought to Agade.”²³

No king until Sargon had unified these many cities into “a single territorial state,”²⁴ and with Sargon came “the emergence of a new ideology of kingship,” no longer a shepherd of men but a hero on the battlefield.²⁵ In these conquests, he claims that “Sargon, king of the world, was victorious in 34 battles; he destroyed their city walls as far as the shore of the sea.”²⁶ He colonized Sumer with his own Akkadian people, who “saw themselves as dominating local populations rather than working pacifically with them.”²⁷ Not content with Sumer, he began to spread northward to the land later known as Assyria, waging a campaign northwest into Syria to the edges of the Mediterranean, and then later he fought the eastern powers in Iran.²⁸ People could readily imagine him saying: “Truly the mighty king, the king of battle, am I. No other king has yet gone where I have.”²⁹ Later, “in his old age, all the countries revolted against him and besieged him in Akkad,” but “Sargon went out, defeated his adversaries, annihilated them, and slew their very large army,” keeping his empire intact in his hands.³⁰ He died in the fifty-sixth year of his rule, likely in his eighties by then.

He left the throne to his son Rimush, who faced an immediate rebellion all over. He put it down with relish, claiming in campaigns against various rebellious city to have killed thousands of men, expelled thousands more, and taken thousands of prisoners captive³¹ – all in all, about a third of all adult men in the land did he subject to “cruel punishment, mass execution, or forced labor,” while confiscating massive tracts of land for his loyalists.³² He boasted of being “fully three times victorious over Sumer,” part of his own kingdom, “in battle.”³³ When he was assassinated after nine years, the throne was left to another son of Sargon, Manishtusu – or, as he put it, “the god Enlil made him great, called his name, and granted to him the scepter of kingship.”³⁴ He ruled fifteen years and waged battle overseas as far as Arabia,³⁵ but he was also a builder, enlarging temples in Nineveh.³⁶

His reign also ended by assassination, putting power in the hands of his son Naram-Sin, a man all too like his grandpa Sargon.³⁷ A “profoundly unpopular king,” he faced a huge rebellion by people fed up with his empire.³⁸ “All the four quarters revolted against him and confronted him,” his records say.³⁹ He brags that “he filled the Euphrates River with their bodies.”⁴⁰ Thus “he was victorious in nine battles in one year, and the kings whom they raised, he captured.”⁴¹ He “expanded the empire, quashed revolts, ruled for four decades, and eventually declared himself a living god..., a god made flesh.”⁴² “They built within Agade a temple to him,”⁴³ and he began spelling his name, “Naram-Sin the Mighty,” with the symbol for godhood tacked on;⁴⁴ he encouraged people to regard his late father as divine,⁴⁵ and flatterers named themselves Rimush-Is-My-God, as they'd already been renaming themselves Sargon-Is-My-God.⁴⁶ Naram-Sin was the first king to brag what a great hunter he was.⁴⁷ What Sargon, his sons, and his grandson built, the Akkadian Empire, was the world's “first attempt to exercise political control over an extended and diversified territory,”⁴⁸ an attempt widely resented by those under it.⁴⁹

Later kings of Assyria, which the prophets call “the land of Nimrod” (Micah 5:5), were obsessed with Sargon's legacy.⁵⁰ They imagined Sargon had laid down the gauntlet for his successors: “Lo, the king who wants to equal me: where I have gone, let him also go!”⁵¹ They thus used Sargon's memory as “ideological justification of an ever-expanding empire” of their own.⁵² And Genesis answers that memory by painting its picture of Nimrod.⁵³ We read that “Cush fathered Nimrod” (Genesis 10:8), even though Nimrod's story is nowhere near the Cush in Africa; probably, this bit is pasted in with a wink because Sargon got his start in Kish.⁵⁴ “The beginning of his kingdom was Babel” – part of the kingdom of Kish, in Sargon's day⁵⁵ – “and Uruk, and Akkad,” the other cities where Sargon became king, and “all of them in the land of Shinar,” Sumer and Akkad (Genesis 10:10).⁵⁶ After rooting his kingdom there, Nimrod “went into Assyria,” the land north of Shinar, “and built Nineveh, with the broad places of the city, and Kalhu, and the spring source between Nineveh and Kalhu, which is the great city” (Genesis 10:11-12) – both those cities being in Sargon's territory and later capitals of the Assyrian Empire.⁵⁷

Genesis 10:9 pictures Nimrod as “a champion warrior,”⁵⁸ “driven by a lust for domination,”⁵⁹ so that he becomes “a deceiver, an oppressor, and a destroyer of earthborn creatures.”⁶⁰ He “dared to usurp dominion over others that were not willing to allow it,”⁶¹ for “as a hunter behaves toward beasts, which are naturally wild and free, so did he oblige mankind to be in servitude and to obey him.”⁶² His achievements were through “murder and bloodshed,” and he “used tyranny to gain for himself a sovereignty that did not belong to him.”⁶³ Thus Nimrod “acquired his kingdom through civil might and not through justice.”⁶⁴ That all sounds very like Sargon & Sons.

For Nimrod had “begun to be a powerful one on the earth” (Genesis 10:8), reminding us of the disturbing folks before the flood who, born to the sons of God and daughters of man, were “the powerful ones who were of old” (Genesis 6:4). Looking back to them, Nimrod casts himself as a giant astride the world, a great hero winning glory, something more than a mere man.⁶⁵ And just like them, Nimrod's appearance in the Bible is an omen of a coming tragedy.⁶⁶ The words and themes used to describe Nimrod tie him closely to the story of Babel,⁶⁷ which naturally has led many readers through the years to put him on scene as the ringleader of that project,⁶⁸ with both stories being about “the imperial concentration of power.”⁶⁹ He offered his people a utopia, a city safe from floods and foes; he dangled the tower's upward rise as a beacon of progress.⁷⁰ But his real aim was to ape the powerful “men of the name” before the flood by making himself a legend.⁷¹ Kings often stamped their name and claim onto the bricks of their mighty works.⁷² This tower is to be a great imperial spectacle to “demonstrate the might, authority, and greatness – in short, the 'name' – of the regime.”⁷³

As early Americans read this story, “old Nimrod collected a nation of robbers” who “swiftly advanced beyond the line of justice, while crimson carnage and pale devastation stalked behind them through the land. Slavery and despotism were the effects of conquest.”⁷⁴ With that in mind, the bricks and mortar remind us of Israelites slaving at brick-making in a foreign land (Exodus 1:13-14), and given how Sargon & Sons forced captives to slave at their building projects, we wonder whether the builders of the tower are all acting as voluntarily as it seemed last week.⁷⁵ Could they be under Nimrod's thumb, their blood, sweat, and tears demanded by the state?

Sargon's empire was “bureaucratic and centralized,” imposing uniformity where there'd been none before.⁷⁶ The Assyrians after him bragged of imposing 'one mouth' on their diverse subjects, that is, unifying many peoples under the state agenda.⁷⁷ Infamously, “for totalitarian governments, conformity is the stuff of life.”⁷⁸ Gradually, indoctrination can lead to “unquestioning allegiance” from most subjects.⁷⁹ Dissenters from Nimrod's project, those who question the state, can expect pointed questions – and pointed swords – aimed back at them.⁸⁰ And so, through his “campaign for world domination” so audacious as to catch the sight of the LORD,⁸¹ Nimrod “corrupted the condition of the human way of life by a new way of living,” the way of the kingdom of man.⁸²

The very name 'Nimrod' is Hebrew for 'We shall rebel!' – he's a rebel against the LORD God.⁸³ No wonder Pastor Joseph dubbed Nimrod “a man of blood in contempt of heaven.”⁸⁴ For the sake of his heroic ventures, he was willing to profane the world, break all norms, defy deity in order to grasp power.⁸⁵ It's unsurprising that Christians, seeking a spiritual reading of the Bible, found that Nimrod “signifies figuratively the devil himself, the head of all evils,” who “scorned to be obedient to the will of his Maker” and thus “strove to obtain the citadel of God.”⁸⁶ From Nimrod, “the spirit of domination ran through the world like a raging plague.”⁸⁷

This story might seem irrelevant – after all, Sargon came to power so long ago that, if you went back even half that far, you'd have to wait a century and a half to hear angels sing to shepherds outside Bethlehem. But some early Jewish readers imagined Nimrod got his start through democratic election,⁸⁸ and he only “little by little transformed the state of affairs into a tyranny.”⁸⁹ And now we find ourselves poised in an election season of our own, with candidates for various offices promoted by political parties: Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, Solidarity, you name it. When our nation was yet dawning, Pastor Joseph referred to our elections as the time when “we choose such as we esteem men of the greatest wisdom and probity.”⁹⁰ But Pastor Joseph also warned that, if these United States weren't careful, “proud, selfish, and wicked” people will “lust for offices for which they are utterly unfit,” and to get them, politicians would “make or propagate a thousand lies to stir up the jealousy of the people, enrage the multitude, and clear the seats of honor for themselves,” the fruit of which might lead to any number of “land-defiling crimes,” not unlike Nimrod's.⁹¹ Whether Pastor Joseph's prophecy has come to pass or not, well... you be the judge.

“Such a great tempest of a time” as ours calls for great wisdom on our part to navigate it, understanding that “the chief intention of a ruler, as of... any private person” like ourselves, “should be to please God in his [or her] works.”⁹² Thankfully, Christians in ages past thought a lot about what a good political authority should be like. For starters, ideally, “royal power must... acknowledge priestly dignity as superior,” that is, the state should give the utmost respect and support to religion, not exclude it.⁹³ The Bible tells us that “a ruler who lacks understanding is a cruel oppressor” (Proverbs 28:16), and “the ruler will not be able to understand the duties of government fully if he does not know the reason why it was instituted.”⁹⁴ As we look at the candidates for office, we can ask ourselves questions like, “Who shows the most respect for people of faith? Who seems to better understand what our government is for? Which of these people seems to have the most wisdom in life?”

Christians also observed that political rulers do well “if they prefer to govern their own base desires more than to govern any peoples.”⁹⁵ They got that from the Bible, which advises that “whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit is better than he who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32). Nimrod might be a mighty man on earth, but his heroism falls short of turning the sword at his own inward passion and desire. Nimrod can conquer cities and countries, but greater is anybody who conquers his own spirit. Can you imagine a politician who'd rather lose an election than lose her temper, who prefers governing his heart to governing a nation? Christians have long said that, “where it is the practice to select the prince by vote,” voters should look for “calmness and equability of temperament and a sober disposition devoid of all rashness.”⁹⁶

Christians also said that any political system “should be so arranged as to remove from the king the opportunity of becoming a tyrant” like Nimrod, “and, at the same time, his power should be restricted so that he will not easily be able to fall into tyranny.”⁹⁷ As we try to navigate this tempest we're in, one question we might want to ask is, “Which of these people, if in office, would face the greatest opposition when tempted to overreach? Who will have the most eyes watching their every move, the loudest voices keeping them accountable?”

It might sound odd to American ears, but the classic Christian view is that “all the particular goods which men obtain, whether wealth or profit or health or skill or learning, are directed, as to their end, to the good of the community.”⁹⁸ And so “the further it departs from the common good, the more unjust the government will be.”⁹⁹ So good rulers won't use their position “to satisfy their personal animosities,” not to serve this or that special interest, not to cater even to the majority at the expense of the minority, nor vice versa.¹⁰⁰ A good ruler is chosen for “wisdom, a sense of justice, personal restraint, foresight, and concern for the public well-being.”¹⁰¹ In our day, this is even harder because we Americans can't even agree on what the good of a community is. A good ruler, though, is one who pursues the true common good, not a false common good such as homicide or mutilation under the guise of medical care, or racial prejudices under the guise of national solidarity.

Part of the common good includes preserving the country's unity, and “when it is removed and the community is divided against itself, social life loses its advantage and instead becomes a burden. It is to this end, therefore, that the ruler of a community ought especially to strive: to procure the unity of peace.”¹⁰² Nimrods are, paradoxically, the opposite: they “prohibit those things which create fellowship among men.”¹⁰³ America has been losing social cohesion and trust for decades, or, as one sociologist put it, “without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities,”¹⁰⁴ until, as in the late Roman empire, “all are distant in affection from each other.”¹⁰⁵ Are any candidates trying to bridge that gap in affection? Who aspires to foster fellowship? Who's a unifier?

Then, since “the good of the community should not be established for a particular length of time only,” wise men tell us that a good political leader will “ensure that successors take the place of those who are faltering,” that is, they'll make the kingdom stable over time.¹⁰⁶ Nimrod didn't do that: Sargon's sons both fell to assassins, and his era's “wave of social change” led to deep “political instability.”¹⁰⁷ Unlike the Akkadians and Assyrians, we don't have a hereditary monarchy; what we do have is a political process that, as one expert puts it, “depends on responsive representative institutions, fair elections, active civic participation, freedom of expression, and adherence to constitutional norms.”¹⁰⁸ As we try to navigate this tempest with wisdom, we ask ourselves, “Which candidate sounds best for supporting that? Will this person act to preserve our process as trustworthy, reliable, fair, and respected? Will he or she make America more politically stable for the future?”

Another threat to a community “arises from within, and consists of perversity of will” when “some people are negligent in carrying out the duties which the commonwealth requires, or even damage the peace of the community when they transgress against justice and disturb the peace of others”; hence, a good political leader will “restrain the men subject to him from iniquity by laws and commands, penalties and rewards.”¹⁰⁹ So as we navigate, we ask, “Will this person hold other officials to do what the public actually needs done? Will this person punish people who disturb others unjustly through crime?”

And then “the third obstacle to the preservation of the commonwealth comes from an external cause, as when the peace is undone by the invasion of enemies,” an issue ancient Israel often had to face (2 Kings 13:20).¹¹⁰ The responsibility of their king was to defend people from outside aggression (1 Samuel 14:47); they wanted to be able to say, “The king delivered us from the hand of our enemies” (2 Samuel 19:9). (Here, arguably, Nimrod excelled... discounting.all the times Sargon, Rimush, and Naram-Sin had to fight their own subjects!) So a good political leader, wise men said, will “furnish the community subject to him with protection against enemies.”¹¹¹ As we navigate our present tempest, we simply ask, “Will this candidate do that? Will he or she make Americans safe?”

But the reason why communities exist isn't just for safety. We were made social creatures “to live according to virtue,” and the whole point of “human association is a virtuous life.”¹¹² Nimrods notoriously aim to “prevent their subjects from becoming virtuous and increasing in nobility of spirit.”¹¹³ But a good political leader will use the powers of government to lead Americans toward being better people, toward rising above our base desires of the flesh, toward loving what's good – something we're not used to thinking of law being for, in our American way of thinking. And, of course, the best political leaders of all “make their power the servant of God's majesty, using it to spread the worship of God as much as possible.”¹¹⁴ How very unlike Nimrod that would be!

Within the bounds of encouraging people toward virtue, political leaders are called to promote prosperity. Yet early Christians mourned that, in late Rome, many citizens were “captives under an appearance of liberty.”¹¹⁵ Part of the reason was “tax collectors'... incessant and even continuous destruction,” so that the state would “extort tribute from the poor man for the taxes of the rich, and the weaker carry the load for the stronger.”¹¹⁶ On the other hand, medieval Christians worried that 'democracy' was when “the common people oppress the rich by force of numbers,” so that “the whole people will be like a single tyrant.”¹¹⁷ In the present tempest, we might ask, “Who is calling us to be our best selves as a community?  Who will lift undue burdens off the poor, without oppressing others? Who is likeliest to help our community prosper?”

Of course, certainly many candidates will claim they'll do many of these things, and more. One ancient source remarked that Nimrod's aim was to make all people “continuously dependent on his own power,” promising the state's provision against all ills.¹¹⁸ Just so, in a democracy, “the voters listen during every election year to a constant litany of promises,” few of which are anything but convenient illusions.¹¹⁹ The Bible advises us, on the other hand, to “put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation” (Psalm 146:3). 

Even so, what you do and I do, if anything, might still lead us to somebody who's a little bit of a Nimrod. But here's the Bible's good news. Everything Nimrod does is “in the sight of the LORD” (Genesis 10:9), always subject to God's sovereignty. The LORD, not any Nimrod, is “actually king of the world.”¹²⁰ “The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Psalm 103:19). Satan, Sargon, Caesar, President – they're all living in the shadow of the LORD's throne up above. If they have any sense, then, “the LORD is to be feared by the kings of the earth” (Psalm 76:12). Whatever happens this month, “it is [God] who gives earthly kingdoms to the godly and the ungodly alike, according to his pleasure..., and if his reasons are hidden, does that mean that they are unjust?”¹²¹ Even as God's nation was oppressed by the rulers of the earth, they whispered to every tyrant, nimrod! – 'we will rebel,' one day, when salvation comes!¹²² For one day, God would “shake the heavens and the earth and overthrow the thrones of kingdoms” (Haggai 2:21-22). And that's a “divine determination which shall not be frustrated.”¹²³

Of Sargon, it was said of old that those “who are with him are twelve,” and that as long as he had divine support, “Sargon will let his voice resound in the land.”¹²⁴ And so, in the fullness of time, the LORD stooped down into humanity, and Christ let his voice resound in the land, “proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God; and the twelve were with him” (Luke 8:1). Only his kingdom means healing and liberty for all, it means righteousness and peace and joy wild enough to shake heaven and earth (Luke 7:22; Romans 14:17). And where Sargon and his twelve chiefs approached the forest wood, where he “bowed down and readied his weapons” and “offered the pure sacrifices” to seek victory by conquest,¹²⁵ Jesus, deserted by his twelve chiefs, didn't fear to approach the wooden cross, where he bowed his head and readied not weapons of carnal warfare but a humble heart (Philippians 2:8). This True King offered a purer sacrifice than Sargon could understand, rising to present his whole life and death to God for his people, and so, this complete, Jesus “sat down at the right hand of God” (Ephesians 5:2; Hebrews 10:12-13). 

Now it's like Cotton Mather said it: “The people of God may need some shakes be given unto the world..., but such a mighty arm has our Savior. … If he do but utter his voice..., there shall everything be done that his people can wish for. A powerful Nimrod that has made nations to shake with the terror of his arms: our Lord Jesus Christ can easily shake such a one down into his grave.”¹²⁶ And one day, the shout will ring out true and clear: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever!” (Revelation 11:15). Therefore, “let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28). Amen.

Our Mountain's a Molehill

The captive monarch could hardly believe what he was seeing. He could tell for some time that Nebuchadnezzar's soldiers were on the verge of being home, but young Jehoiachin, the surrendered king of Judah, could behold it now, and his mom and wives and friends could see it too, judging from their gasps. He'd been seeing glittering blue in the heart of the blue sky, but now that the tall city walls were in sight, spanning the mighty river, the mountain looming in its midst was all the more visible – a broad pyramid of seven great stages, a tower looming over everything. Jehoiachin's jaw gaped; not a sight in all Jerusalem prepared him for this... this... which could've buried the temple of the LORD beneath itself.¹ Next to him, a soldier wiped a homecoming tear from his eye. “Etemenanki,” he murmered. Jehoiachin didn't know the word. But he did recall an old, old story...

“And it came to pass, in their journeyings in the east” – these people whose wanderings hasn't let them develop a clear identity beyond a mysterious 'them,' wandering southeast hundreds of miles from the mountains of Ararat, hunting for somewhere to call home² – “and they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there” (Genesis 11:2). Shinar's the region we'd today call southern Iraq, essentially the land otherwise known as ancient Sumer,³ although 'Shinar' was a late westerner's word for the plain, not a native one.⁴ Thousands and thousands of years ago, this fertile Mesopotamian plain between the Tigris River in the east and the Euphrates River in the west “became a magnet for migrants” from all over, able to support many lifestyles with its bounty.⁵

In Genesis, though, this story is set in a time when “all the earth had one lip and the same words” (Genesis 11:1) – not only is communication easy, but the people gathered there “share a common understanding of the world.”⁶ A prospect arises, in this “society built on confidence and trust,”⁷ of “unanimously accomplishing one single purpose,” of getting everybody on the same page for one big idea.⁸ And so “they said, a man to a companion, 'Come!'” (Genesis 11:3). “Each man thus roused his neighbor,” acting as an evangelist for this big idea, busying himself in grassroots community organizing.⁹ This is, in modern terms, practically “participatory democracy.”¹⁰ And it's a landslide, issuing in a “generally agreed-upon plan of action.”¹¹

Here's the plan: “Come, let us brick bricks” (Genesis 11:3). They took clay-rich river mud and, from March to October, spent their free time mixing it with sand and hay, kneading it with water into a thick mixture, shaping it into rectangles, and leaving it to dry beneath the warm sun for a day or two in the dry air.¹² They'd later come up with the myth that the world's first brick came from the hands of a wise god who'd nipped off a hunk of clay and grown a forest of reeds just so he could make that brick.¹³ We've found sun-dried mud bricks archaeologists say are over nine thousand years old, but almost seven thousand years ago, someone realized you could make a better, stronger brick by baking it in an oven.¹⁴ That's what they do here in Genesis: “Let us brick bricks and burn them to a burning” (Genesis 11:3), making them “stable, strong, and meant to endure for ages.”¹⁵

“To them,” the people who settled in Shinar, “the brick was for stone, and bitumen was for them as mortar” (Genesis 11:3). To Israelite eyes, accustomed to natural stone and mortar, brick and bitumen “were poor substitutes,” a hint that we should read on critically.¹⁶ But the combination of kiln-fired bricks and bitumen as construction staples in that part of the world goes back before 3000 BC, to “the beginning of urbanization.”¹⁷ It stimulates their imagination to new heights, and so “they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city'” (Genesis 11:4). The people of Sumer were exceptional pioneers at building cities.¹⁸ It's “a technical fruit of the human orientation toward social existence,” a “collective effort” that “magnifies the power of the human will.”¹⁹ In the story, the builders pitch this city as if “the fulfillment of a recurrent human dream, a dream of humankind united, living together in peace and freedom, no longer at the mercy of an inhospitable or hostile nature.”²⁰ Of course, a city, however consensus-based, will birth “technologies of control” leading to a “stratified society.”²¹

And this isn't just any generic city. Only at the end of the story does the writer let slip its name: Babel – which we know more familiarly by the Greek spelling, 'Babylon' (Genesis 11:9), on the east bank of the Euphrates River. Early Babylon, whenever it was first founded, was actually a rather unimportant podunk town, largely unnoticed by its neighbors.²² Over time, though, it slowly grew into a metropolis of “astonishing palaces, mighty temples, imposing gates..., and grand ceremonial boulevards..., the embodiment of divine and secular power.”²³ And there was, in Babylon, a temple dedicated to the city's patron god, Marduk. This central temple was called “Esagila, the exalted sanctuary,”²⁴ and in Sumerian, 'Esagila' means “House with Top Raised High.”²⁵

Which reminds us of what else they said: “Let us build a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). Even though the Bible uses just the generic Hebrew word for 'tower,' every major city in this part of the world had one special building that towered over the rest. They called it a ziggurat, from a root word meaning 'to be built up high,' and just about everybody now recognizes that the tower in this verse is meant to be a Babylonian ziggurat.²⁶ Developed from the high platforms that earlier Sumerian settlements perched their temples on, a ziggurat was “the most visible part of the Mesopotamian temple complex.”²⁷ A ziggurat was a tower of stages, wide to narrow, built of a large core pyramid of sun-dried mud bricks, covered by a mantel of baked bricks. Generally on one side, there'd be three huge ramp staircases, one coming from straight ahead and the other two running up the front of the ziggurat to meet it.²⁸ At the top was a small shrine, the ziggurat's 'head,' built of glazed brick and surrounded by groves of greenery.²⁹ Those who built a ziggurat really did say they “raised as high as heaven the head of the ziggurat,”³⁰ so that “its top was high and reached the heavens.”³¹

The ziggurat in Babylon had a name, Etemenanki, which is Sumerian for “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth.”³² Built in a courtyard on the west side of Babylon's Processional Way, we know Etemenanki was 300 feet wide by 300 feet long and, if we believe the Babylonians, about 300 feet high.³³ That's their great tower whose top reaches the heavens: almost a third the height of the Eiffel Tower. No wonder later Jewish imagination made it nearly 700 feet high,³⁴ or even over eight thousand feet high.³⁵ But even on the lowest estimates, Etemenanki would've taken over ten million bricks to build.³⁶ In the time when Jehoiachin saw it, Nebuchadnezzar's dad said he'd repaired it using “mud bricks without number” and “baked bricks like countless drops of rain,” cementing them together with a flood of “refined and crude bitumen.”³⁷ Nebuchadnezzar then continued the work “using bitumen and baked brick,” and at the top, he said, he “resplendently built a holy shrine, a well-adorned bedroom, using baked bricks colored with shining blue glaze.”³⁸

A ziggurat, to the Babylonians, “represented a mountain peak close to heaven and had roots like a tree reaching down to the underworld.”³⁹ These artificial buildings were meant to bind together what was above and what was below, linking all the realms of the world. So a ziggurat was “the obvious channel of communication between the celestial and terrestrial spheres,”⁴⁰ essentially a human “hotline to heaven.”⁴¹ A ziggurat was “built in honor of the divinity that resides at the summit,” since the shrine at the top “served as the residential quarters for the god” between heaven and temple.⁴² Effectively, the ziggurat was one huge stairway for a god to walk down, descending from heaven above to the earth below to be with us.⁴³ And so, by mentioning a ziggurat, Genesis implies “the first biblical mention of polytheism,” the pagan portrait of many gods made in our image.⁴⁴

It's not for nothing that the earliest Sumerian way of writing the word 'god' was a little star, because these many gods were held to manifest their judgments through heavenly portents people could observe and interpret.⁴⁵ The peoples of Mesopotamia were famously obsessed with astrology as far back as records go, and it's often thought that ziggurats, which we now know were built to align with the heavenly bodies, hosted special rituals and also made a convenient place for priests to gather their data.⁴⁶ If so, then on the tower, “the priests, watchfully yet apprehensively, conducted measurements of the heavenly motions, on the basis of which they sought knowledge useful for the life of the city,” using “celestial divination as a source for effective policy creation” in Babylon.⁴⁷

That's what the builders have in mind when they call to “build ourselves a city and a tower, and its head is in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). But the Babylonians had a different story about where their city and its tower came from. In the beginning, they said, the gods were at war with a monster-goddess named Tiamat, a losing battle until a strapping young god named Marduk stepped up to bat for them. Marduk carved up Tiamat's corpse to make the world, and as the crowning achievement, Marduk declared he intended to make himself a home in this world: “I will name it Babylon, Houses of the Great Gods!”⁴⁸ Out of gratitude, the other gods say they want to build his shrine of rest, and he happily accepts their generous offer: “Build Babylon, the task you have sought; let bricks for it be molded, and raise the shrine!”⁴⁹ The gods spend a whole year just making all the bricks, and then, “when the second year arrived, they raised the top of the Esagil..., they built the soaring ziggurat... and established homes for Anu, Enlil, Ea, and him. In splendor he sat down before them.”⁵⁰ Marduk welcomes the gods at last to a fancy feast, declaring, “This is Babylon, your place of residence; sing merrily here, sit down amid its joyfulness!”⁵¹ So, to sum up, the Babylonians said theirs was a city built by gods and for gods, shortly after the world was made – “Babylon, called into being by the heavens.”⁵² These same gods had built the tower of Babel, the “soaring ziggurat,” whose shrine welcomed the gods of highest heaven.

That was the mainstream story, but other Babylonians had an even more radical one: “All the lands were sea,” and then “Babylon was made, Esagil was created,” and only then, after Babylon and its temple, did the original god make the other gods, who gratefully “gave an exalted name to the pure city,” Babylon, “in which they were pleased to dwell.”⁵³ In that version, Babylon and its temple actually predated the gods worshipped in it; they were born there, which is why some called “Babylon the place of the creation of the great gods,”⁵⁴ and “Esagil: house which creates all the gods.”⁵⁵ For some Babylonians, their city was even more divine than the gods!

They called it “Babylon, the city whose brickwork is ancient,”⁵⁶ but Genesis shoots back that there was no Babel in the beginning; Babylon appears only chapters and chapters into the world's story.⁵⁷ They even called it “Babylon, the creator of god and man,”⁵⁸ but Genesis answers that it's just a city and tower “which the sons of humanity built” (Genesis 11:5). The builders of Babel may be taken by the later residents for gods, but Genesis has their number: they're the children of Adam, wayward flesh and blood. Babylon is seriously demoted.

And Babylon, Genesis says, shouldn't have gotten started. The order of events so far has been mimicking the kinds of building stories Babylonians told. First they'd start with the circumstances that led to the decision to build something, then they'd discuss the preparations that were made, and only then would they go on to narrate the construction. But in Babylonian stories, the decision to build something never went ahead without stating that the gods signed off on the project; in fact, Babylonians would tell you that any time people tried to build a new city without divine approval, it was an open invitation to disaster. Well, guess what gets pointedly skipped over in Genesis? The part where the builders of Babel get permission. It's “a major violation of divine/human protocol.”⁵⁹ The sad truth is that “they took counsel with their own judgment, not with God, to build a city.”⁶⁰

What makes it worse is why they're doing it. “Let us build to ourselves a city and a tower” (Genesis 11:4). The Babylonians may claim all this work is a tribute to the gods, may aim to pass it all off as hospitality toward heaven, but Genesis exposes their piety as a pretense for pride: “Their motivation for constructing sacred space was to bring benefits to themselves.”⁶¹ So it's really all about them, “co-opting religion in the service of self-worship.”⁶² Pagans of this character can't even help but take the names of their own false gods in vain!

A ziggurat would've been visible from many miles away, “from practically every point of the urban hinterland,” and that visibility would define a sense of territory and community.⁶³ Babylonians thought of Babylon as the center of the world, and their gods claimed it as a “place of repose for all time,” never to find a closed door or a missing welcome mat there.⁶⁴ Just like that, the builders in Genesis aim to avoid being “scattered on the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:4), losing the protection and stability of this home they're building, forfeiting what they feel they've gained.⁶⁵ As if they're the gods of Babylon, they want it as their place of repose forever, there to maintain strength and safety and security through their dense crowd and thick city walls.⁶⁶ And once people accept the city and take rest in it, they'll be stamped by it, Babelites forever.⁶⁷

The builders also declare, “Let us make for ourselves a name” (Genesis 11:4). They want “to be remembered in perpetuity,” to achieve something so remarkable that it “will never pass into oblivion.”⁶⁸ They aim to be “the agents of their own eminence.”⁶⁹ That was part of the reason for a ziggurat, whose landscape-dominating power on the plain would easily “generate a sense of civic pride” within.⁷⁰ The Babylonians really did want their city, Babylon, to “be exalted throughout the inhabited world,” to have fame and influence everywhere.⁷¹ And if it were, then the whole world might forever have ziggurat minds and ziggurat hearts.

It's not for nothing that they describe a tower “with its head in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4). While Babylonians think their ziggurats bind heaven and earth together, from the Bible's point of view they “transgress the boundaries of heaven and earth.”⁷² Nebuchadnezzar himself described his work on the tower as “raising the superstructure of Etemenanki to have its summit rival the heavens.”⁷³ From the Bible's point of view, that boast to 'rival the heavens' is “offensive and blasphemous.”⁷⁴ Though Babylonians never thought to use a ziggurat to storm heaven, their latent dream was “to ascend to heaven” (Isaiah 14:13), as if their burnt bricks were squared seraphim ferrying them aloft, that mortared mud and clay men might touch heaven with their earthiness,⁷⁵ and so maybe “to become like gods themselves.”⁷⁶ No wonder later Jews spoke of “the tower of war against God.”⁷⁷

The builders of Babel made a monument, “the massive structure of a building of fantastic proportions,” as the heart of an even vaster and growing city.⁷⁸ It's a perennial truth that “the human race... always longs for more and reaches out for greater things..., always lusting after more.”⁷⁹ We have “a boundless capacity to dream up grand projects,”⁸⁰ and Babel rises from the page as “the place where every human achievement was possible.”⁸¹ “This they have begun to do; and now all that they imagine to do will not be withheld from them” (Genesis 11:6). “Whatever human minds conceive, they can achieve.”⁸² That's what Babel is all about.

If humanity enjoys unmitigated success here and now, “nothing will succeed in checking their impulse” – they'll run roughshod over every boundary.⁸³ We'll never believe that any no is serious, that any line should be drawn, any limit respected. And in our day especially, “the project of Babel has been making a comeback,” yielding “everywhere evidence of a revived Babylonian vision.”⁸⁴ We cleave the atoms of the universe in twain, we ape life and monkey around in genetic codes, we design artificial intelligence to slave for us and stave off a cosmic loneliness, we dream of setting foot on Mars, then colonizing heaven and her stars – but would we build anything there but a Babel above?⁸⁵ There's a frightfulness of human reach without restraint, power and genius naked of wisdom and love.

So it is in our lives. What are we prepared to build in life to avoid the things we fear? What do we do, to dreams do we chase, in our endless quests to make ourselves a name that lasts, to build a legacy that can be looked at? To what lengths will we go to advance our vision for how the world should be shaped, how life should be lived? Even the nobler ziggurats we profess to build to God are often brick-by-brick paeans to ourselves and our agendas. Unmoored, that way always “ends with us rallying all the forces at our disposal to serve whatever god of worldly flourishing we have made for ourselves.”⁸⁶

But still its builders persist. They raise their tower, “intended to pave the way for a divine entrance to the city.”⁸⁷ At this point in a building story, we expect a festival to celebrate the finished tower, where the building will be dedicated and the god is invited to come down on it.⁸⁸ No doubt they expect “the lord of Babylon, Marduk the exalted,”⁸⁹ to show up, of whom they believe that “no god can alter the utterance of his mouth,” and “when his anger is ablaze, no god can face him.”⁹⁰ But instead we read that Yahweh, “the LORD, came down” (Genesis 11:5). And Babel will find him to be a very big surprise indeed.

What they have built – and what we build – may be “so gigantic from a human perspective” that it appears in their eyes as a literal skyscraper; but God does not see as we see.⁹¹ “The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of humanity had built” (Genesis 11:5). Their lofty, impressive, fabulous tower, and their vast, lively, mighty city, which they expect to present loud and large before his face, is in his eyes “so puny,” “so insignificant,” that they aren't even visible from his heaven.⁹² They're “so far from the heavens that God must come down to see it,”⁹³ that he has to “go down in order to scrutinize the scene.”⁹⁴ It's actually an extremely funny satire, as if they present before heaven their monumental city and tower, and the Lord makes a show of grabbing his microscope and stooping to squint at their miniscule grandeur.⁹⁵

But “what could empty human presumption have achieved... even if it outstripped the whole region of the cloudy air?”⁹⁶ Every ziggurat was highly “prone to collapse” and needed constant maintenance, due to subsidence in the ground and its unstable core – and that went double for Etemenanki.⁹⁷ You can visit the site today, but you won't even have to lift your eyes; it's a little dirt hill inside a sunken square moat, hardly worth writing home about. Babylon, as an icon of human achievement, was as unstable as a house built foolishly on shifting sands (Matthew 7:26). So are the little Babels we can't seem to stop ourselves from building whenever people “follow the feelings and desires of their own heart in doing or saying whatever they please.”⁹⁸ Like the pitiful ruins in Iraq today, our labors for self are “impermanent and futile,” hardly rising before the Lord.⁹⁹

Babel was a template, and the Bible's last dizzying visions zoom out on human history and behold there one vast culture, Babylon the Great, which through the ages allures and intoxicates the world's peoples, plying them with prosperity and pride (Revelation 14:8). “She glorified herself and lived in luxury” (Revelation 18:7). This is “the great city that has dominion” within world culture even today (Revelation 17:18), for “in the spiritual sense, Babylon is the devil's city.”¹⁰⁰ And to all, she offers a drink from her “golden cup full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4). It's a nauseating picture, a genuine grotesque.

But the city that boasts it births its gods will mourn their deaths from her own deathbed. “Her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (Revelation 18:5), so “her judgment has reached up to heaven and has been lifted up even to the clouds,” higher than Etemenanki's peak (Jeremiah 51:9). “Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should fortify her strong height,” even if Babylon achieves every dream she can muster, “yet destroyers would come from me against her, declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 51:53). As for the Babylon of history, so for Babylon the Great. On that day “the great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell” (Revelation 16:19), “for here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 13:14). “Thus shall Babylon sink, to rise no more” (Jeremiah 51:64).

But as the Lord once came down and shall come down again to see that tower and its city, so in between did the same Lord God come down, in our flesh and in our blood, to survey our sin and the monuments of our pitiful pride. He came to call us in mercy to tear them all down and to cease our construction, that we might instead move to a better “city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14), “the city that has foundations” of grace amazing, the city “whose designer and builder is God” and not the sons of men (Hebrews 11:10), “the holy city... coming down out of heaven from God,” and not trying to rise up to heaven from earth (Revelation 21:2).

St. Augustine offered these shocking words of wonder, that “all the wicked belong to Babylon, as all the saints to Jerusalem. But Babylon gradually changes into Jerusalem; and how could it do that, unless through him who justifies the godless?” The gateway to this new city is the cross by which the Lord justifies even the ungodliest Babel-builder who will only hand his brick-basket over to the thorn-crowned God who stooped to serve. Zion is Babel's only hope. So now “walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers..., that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever” (Psalm 48:12-14). It has towers – its tower is the church, raised not by human hands¹⁰¹ – but it needs no ziggurat standing tall, “for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb,” and “the glory of God gives it light” (Revelation 21:22-23).

Two cities there are, then: Babylon, grand and luxurious, and Zion, a city under Babel's thumb until her years are done. And two perspectives there are: the sight of man, in which our towers rise high and nigh unto the sky, and the sight of the LORD, in which love looms larger and mercy alone is monumental. Of such things, Babylon has not known. Which city stands at the heart of the world? Which is the center of your world? Is it the city of man, or is it the city of God? Is it the city of today and tomorrow, or the city of eternity? And whose sight do you trust? For in what you see as mountains and what you see as molehills, therein lies the vision that will guide your life. May you see and walk by the glory of God. May you climb no tower but the cross, on whom the One in whom heaven and earth are bound as one died for you, that a better city might rise again. Amen.

A Broader View; or, Here Comes Everybody!

“This tenth chapter [of Genesis] is seemingly barren and appears to serve no purpose. … It is considered full of dead words.”¹ That was Martin Luther's admission about how a lot of people felt about it five centuries ago. And I'm guessing you won't find it too hard to sympathize! I doubt this is anybody's favorite chapter. Nobody's picking their life verse out of Genesis 10. This isn't the place you turn for inspiration or consolation, most likely. It's a long list of names, barely any of which we recognize. It's so tempting to skim it or skip it; let's get on with the good stuff. That's the temptation. Except Paul had to nag us about how “all Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16) – and he didn't make an exception here. Luther ended his consideration of this chapter by calling it “a most precious treasure..., a mirror in which to discern what we humans are.”² So... what's it all about?

This chapter of the Bible is so unique it has its own special name: the Table of Nations. Really, this is the first time the word 'nation' even shows up in the Bible; there are no nations, no distinguished ethnicities, that show up in the first nine chapters, but there sure will be after this.³ In my Bible, the word 'nation' shows up 594 times – starting with five here (six in Hebrew) in this chapter. And what makes Genesis 10 unique is that it's basically “a verbal atlas,”⁴ “a sophisticated exercise in world cartography,”⁵ “a kind of ethnic map of the world.”⁶ Using the shape of a genealogy, it's a world map; the names in it are mostly not individuals, they're people groups.

The names in it might seem pretty unfamiliar, and that's no new thing. For millennia, readers of Genesis have been trying to hunt down all the names in this chapter, correlating it to their pictures of the world's peoples.⁷ But now in the twenty-first century, after a couple hundred years of archaeology, we've nearly managed to fully sketch out this Bible altas. The 'sons of Japheth' are peoples, “all Indo-European nations,” who lived north or northwest of Israel, especially in what's now Turkey, Mediterranean islands, and into Europe.⁸ Gomer's the Cimmerians, who lived by the Black Sea; listed under him are Tegarama, a city in east-central Turkey, Riphath (still a mystery), and Ashkenaz, a people otherwise called the Scythians; Magog is the country of Lydia, a rich and powerful people of west Turkey; Madai are the Medes of northern Iran; Javan are the Ionian Greeks of south Turkey, and associated with him are Elishah and the Kittim, all of Cyprus; the Rodanim, of the island of Rhodes; and Tarshish, the distant colony of Tartessos in south Spain; Tubal and Meshech are neighbors in east Turkey, Tabali and Mushki (Mushki is where the famed Midas was a real king); and Tiras is could be a Mediterranean people called the Turscha or even the ancient Turkish city of Troy, of Trojan Horse fame.⁹

Ham is mainly associated with peoples who lived south and southwest, especially in Africa, and his sons are listed from north to south. Cush was a famous people who lived in Ethiopia and Sudan, and the various sons credited to him are all in east Africa or across the Red Sea in southwest Arabia; Mizraim is just Egypt, and of his listed sons, the Naphtuhim and Pathrusim are just the people of north and south Egypt, the Ludim are Lydian mercenaries who fought for Egypt, the Anamim are a North African people west of Egypt, and the Caphtorim are from the island of Crete to Egypt's northwest; Ham's third son Put is further west of Egypt in Libya; and then Canaan covers all the peoples up the east Mediterranean coast, with some being the groups Israel fought for their promised land, like the Jebusites, Amorites, Hivites, and Girgashites, while others lived further north in Lebanon and west Syria, like the cities of Sidon, Arqa, Siyannu, Sumur, Hamath, and the island of Arwad.¹⁰

Finally, Noah's last-listed son Shem covers the peoples who lived east, southeast, and northeast of Israel in different parts of Asia. Elam is the furthest east, and was a prominent people in southwest Iran, later replaced by the Persians; Asshur is, of course, the Assyrians, in north Iraq; nobody's really sure what Lud's doing here; Aram is the Arameans, who lived in different places including much of what we call Syria, though his sons are tougher to pin down; and the delightfully named Arpachshad probably refers to south Iraq, while his descendants through Joktan are almost all tribes, towns, and oases in southern Arabia.¹¹

To the people who lived thousands of years ago, before we had the kinds of maps we use today, that was a big world, full of so many different kinds of people to keep track of; no wonder the Bible sums each bunch up “by their clans, by their languages, in their lands, in their nations” (Genesis 10:20). One ancient Bible retelling of the Bible, with people cast as animals like a cartoon, pictures here “every kind of species: lions, leopards, wolves, dogs, hyenas, wild boars, foxes, conies, pigs, falcons, vultures, kites, eagles, and ravens.”¹² The Bible has its eyes wide open to so many clans with many customs, pursuing diverse ways to express their humanity.

This list has “about seventy members”¹³ – some say that “the peoples listed amount precisely to seventy,” if you count 'em right.¹⁴ Even though some are vast populations and others are single cities, the Jewish rabbis regularly referred to them as “the seventy nations of the world.”¹⁵ And this picture of seventy, hardly a coincidence for being such a round multiple of seven and ten, is “a literary device to convey the notion of the totality of the human race,”¹⁶ revealing “the completeness of God's order.”¹⁷

Now, again, this chapter is a world map as drawn from an Israelite perspective, a “repository of traditional knowledge.”¹⁸ We shouldn't expect to read here about nations Israel didn't already know by name, like peoples in China or England or the New World.¹⁹ For that matter, this chapter was likely revised and edited at several stages to update it in light of Israel's changing contacts with the world.²⁰ Appearance and skin color play zero role in how this table maps the world; instead, it's organized by things like geography, political relationships, and economic ties.²¹ This chapter “attaches equal weight to multiple levels of belonging.”²² So it's really not surprising we have our share of duplicates here – Lydians creeping into all three divisions, Sheba and Havilah showing up in both Ham and Shem, not to mention a bunch that'll later resurface as Abraham's kids. As one bishop said, “if somewhere the name of a people... has been registered doubly..., let no one wonder or doubt.”²³

Okay, so why did God bother to stick this chapter in his Bible? What is it supposed to tell us? Well, remember that “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'” (Genesis 9:1). That was just a chapter ago, and “the blessing is in the process of being realized” in chapter 10.²⁴ The blessing is working! All Noah's sons are fruitful; they're multiplying, and the earth is being filled.

Second, “such a table of nations is unique” in the literatures of the ancient world,²⁵ showing off “a universal consciousness not perceived elsewhere” in any other culture,²⁶ except somewhat in ancient Greece.²⁷ Weirdest of all, Israel's table of nations doesn't even name Israel, as if confessing that “Israel appears late on the world stage” and “cannot elevate itself” above other nations.²⁸ This chapter shows off “God's broad concern for all peoples,”²⁹ that he takes “an interest in all people, in their own right.”³⁰ God is “a God whose purposes transcend the particularism of Israel,” and so his scriptures are calling them to transcend it, too.³¹ They cherish this humbling list without their name, a portrait of a world still waiting for them, a gentle reminder to us as well to “appreciate the different people groups of our own time” in their own right, all the peoples of the earth.³²

But each of those nations is listed under the heading of at least one of the sons of Noah, for these are “the clans of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on earth after the flood” (Genesis 10:32). St. Paul, when he's preaching in Athens, comments that “God made from one every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26). In saying 'God made,' he's attesting that no nation is a mistake of mortal man, that each has its distinctive dignity, a God-given peoplehood to live out; but in saying 'from one,' he's saying that this wide world of nations, “as diverse and distinct as they might be, had a common origin,”³³ that they “share a common heritage.”³⁴ This chapter's genealogy “conveys relatedness across the entire system,”³⁵ “binding all humanity together” as “children of one father, Noah.”³⁶ And so “brothers remain brothers, even if they choose never to interact,” or worse.³⁷

Ancient genealogies always “made creative use of the past” so as to speak “to a present situation.”³⁸ This chapter is littered with sevens – seven sons and seven grandsons of Japheth, seven total descendants of Cush, seven sons of Mizraim (the Philistines don't count), twelve plus twice-seven children of Shem, a set of four-times-seven genealogy words – but “no sevens in the structuring of the Canaanite genealogy,”³⁹ which is the detailed but disruptive passage “literally at the center of the chapter.”⁴⁰ The chapter orders Noah's sons in increasing circles of contact with Israel,⁴¹ and subtly draws our attention to the thrice-invoked name of Eber.⁴²

This chapter not only mentions all these nations, but focuses on their “lands” (Genesis 10:5, 20, 31); and old Jewish retellings make that a key part of the story. In those retellings, Noah's three sons settle at the base of the mountain, with Japheth facing west, Ham facing south, and Shem facing east.⁴³ As the decades pass and their people begin fighting over space, they divide it “in an evil manner between themselves.”⁴⁴ In response, Noah “divided by lot the land which his three sons would possess,”⁴⁵ putting their deed into writing, “portioning out each part according to an inheritance for each.”⁴⁶ “Noah divided by lot for Japheth and his sons... the whole land of the north in its entirety,” and “for Shem there emerged the second lot” in “the middle of the earth,” and “for Ham there emerged the third share” “toward the south.”⁴⁷ Then “the sons of Noah divided their allotments among their sons” accordingly.⁴⁸ The retellings close the scene with Noah making “them all swear an oath to curse each and every one who desired to seize a portion which did not come in his lot.”⁴⁹

Now, the psalms confess that “the LORD is high above all nations” and “reigns over the nations” (Psalms 113:4; 47:8) – all nations live in “one world governed by God”⁵⁰ – and the proverbs remind us that “the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). So even if Noah had his sons cast lots, ultimately it was the LORD who “apportioned for each... a territorial possession, specifically establishing the boundaries thereof.”⁵¹ That's what Moses tells us, at least: “the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance..., he fixed the borders of the peoples” (Deuteronomy 32:8), “each group occupying the country that they lit upon and to which God led them, so that every continent was peopled by them.”⁵² That's why St. Paul preached to the Athenians that the very God they “worship as unknown..., who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth,” also “made from one every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined... the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:23-26).

So far, so good. But we haven't yet let Moses finish his statement: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance and divided the sons of Adam, he fixed the borders of the people according to the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8). Ancient readers understood here that “there are many nations and many people, and they all belong to [God], but over all of them he caused spirits to rule,”⁵³ that the nations should be “handed over to angels” and remain “under them.”⁵⁴ “For by an ancient and divine order, the angels are distributed among the nations,”⁵⁵ “entrusted with the patronage of nations.”⁵⁶ Thus, “in dividing the nations of the entire world, he appointed a leader for each nation,”⁵⁷ “its own patron angel.”⁵⁸ Jews zeroed in on the chief guardian angels of these nations as “seventy shepherds,”⁵⁹ who “bear responsibility for the welfare of the nations of the world.”⁶⁰ This is the Bible's mighty answer to the stories other nations told, where it was the gods who drew lots to divvy up the land among themselves, and whichever people lived there were just an afterthought.⁶¹

So if each nation has its own appointed guiding spirit, why's the world... you know... the way it is? Some Jews speculated that these 'sons of God' were less than faithful, that “those seventy shepherds were... guilty,”⁶² since, like the psalm says, these “sons of the Most High... have neither knowledge nor understanding” of the mysteries of God's plan (Psalm 82:5-6), so they “judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked” (Psalm 82:2). While some Christians countered “that the angels have done their guardianship, and that it is no fault of theirs if other nations wandered off,”⁶³ Jews lamented that “the polluted demons began to lead astray the children of Noah's sons and to lead them to folly and to destroy them.”⁶⁴ They wondered if maybe that was the mystery of God's plan, that “he caused spirits to rule so that he might lead them astray from following him.”⁶⁵

Either way, “when those who dwelt on earth began to multiply, they produced... many nations, and again they began to be more ungodly than were their ancestors.”⁶⁶ That's why the Apostle Paul tells his sad story of how, although they “knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21) – “all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17), living in a state of “separation from the knowledge of God,” leading to a spiritual void that ached to be filled.⁶⁷ For “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened; claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21-22) and “began to worship creatures.”⁶⁸ In spite of this, Paul reflects that God “allowed the nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts 14:16), and to “set up new ways of life for themselves and new institutions of their choice,” for better or for worse.⁶⁹

The Old Testament tends to think it was for the worse that “the nations have sunk in the pit that they made” (Psalm 9:15). How often we read lines like, “the LORD is enraged against all the nations” (Isaiah 34:2), “the LORD has an indictment against the nations” (Jeremiah 25:31)! He shows Ezekiel a frightful vision about “the land of Magog” and “Meshech and Tubal” (Ezekiel 38:2), with whom are aligned “Persia and Cush and Put..., Gomer and all his hordes..., the house of Togarmah from the uttermost parts of the earth” (Ezekiel 38:5-6), all supported by “Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish” (Ezekiel 38:13). “All the nations of the earth will gather against” the people of God (Zechariah 12:3). But it's a trap for them: “In the latter days, I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me when through you... I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (Ezekiel 38:16). “A sword shall come upon Egypt, and anguish shall be in Cush... and Put and Lud and all Arabia and Libya” (Ezekiel 30:4-5), “I will send fire on Magog and on those who dwell securely in the coastlands, and they shall know that I am the LORD” (Ezekiel 39:6), “and I will set my glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see my judgment that I have executed” (Ezekiel 39:21).

It's no wonder the Apostle Paul adds a twist to Moses' words, saying that God apportioned nations not just space but time – that he “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26).⁷⁰ The nations aren't eternal groupings; their boundaries, identities, and their very existence are all “flexible over time.”⁷¹ Peoples and nations die away by catastrophe or demographic collapse, by merger or assimilation. But nations are also born – gradually (Isaiah 66:8), but it does happen. You won't find Americans in this Table of Nations, but here we are. Paul wants us to know that all this is in the hands of God, that in the wisdom of his plan he assigned both a place and a time to every nation, “all to be overturned in divinely appointed times.”⁷²

And yet, Paul says, God's purpose in doing so was “that they should seek God, if perhaps indeed they might feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:27). After all, even as the nations strayed in willful forgetfulness, God “did not leave himself without witness, but did good” to each nation by providing for them (Acts 14:17). The psalmists begged God to reveal himself even more to the nations, “that you way may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations; let the peoples praise you, O God” (Psalm 67:2-3). They pledged themselves to the task: “I will give thanks to you, O LORD, among the peoples; I will sing praises to you among the nations” (Psalm 108:3). And they called on others to join them: “Declare his glory among the nations” (Psalm 96:3), “say among the nations, 'The LORD reigns!'” (Psalm 96:10). They call to the nations directly to “praise the LORD, all nations; extol him, all peoples!” (Psalm 117:1). The early Jewish rabbis noticed that each year, at the Feast of Booths, over seven days God had them sacrifice seventy bulls, plus a seventy-first bull on the eighth day (Numbers 29:12-38). They reasoned that the last bull was for themselves, and with the others Israel was called, as God's priestly nation in the world (Exodus 19:6), to atone for the sins of the other seventy.⁷³

The Old Testament is full of faith that the LORD God “shall inherit all the nations,” not just his chosen portion (Psalm 82:8). For the prophets saw coming a time to “gather all nations” to “come and see my glory,” God says; “I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish and Pul and Lud who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away that have not heard my fame or seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the nations” (Isaiah 66:18-19). “To the LORD shall bow down, each in its place, all the lands of the nations” (Zephaniah 2:11). “O LORD..., to you shall the nations come from the ends of the earth and say, 'Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies, worthless things in which there is no profit'” (Jeremiah 16:19). “Many nations shall join themselves to the LORD in that day, and shall be my people” (Zechariah 2:11).

And the prophets knew that it would take a Prince of Peace – “of him shall the nations inquire” (Isaiah 11:10). This Child of Promise, the Servant of the LORD, “will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isaiah 42:1), will be “a light for the nations” (Isaiah 42:6), so that the LORD's “salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). To that end, during his ministry, not only does Jesus select twelve apostles for the twelve tribes of Israel, but he “appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two” (Luke 10:1), an advance group “to teach the salvation of all peoples,”⁷⁴ symbolizing ahead of time that “Jesus is sending his representatives into all the known nations of their day.”⁷⁵ These seventy disciples discover that “even the demons are subject to us” in Jesus' name, for he's given them “authority to tread... over all the power of the enemy” (Luke 10:17-19) – the nation-misleading spirits, even the seventy shepherds, are subject to the seventy disciples.

The prophets foretold, though, that this Lord would suffer “by oppression and judgment,” be slaughtered and buried (Isaiah 53:8), even as the wicked cast lots to divide his clothes as if they were the world divided evilly by the nations (Psalm 22:18). But through this, “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD” (Psalm 22:27). From his cross, this Savior “shall sprinkle many nations” with his saving blood (Isaiah 52:5), by which he has “ransomed people for God from every tribe... and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). “And his resting place shall be glorious” (Isaiah 11:10) – because his tomb is empty! Jesus lives, that “repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations” (Luke 24:47)!

And so “go, therefore,” says he in resurrection splendor, “and disciple all nations,” baptizing and teaching them the ways of the Lord who tears away “the veil that is spread over all nations” (Matthew 28:19-20; Isaiah 25:7). He did not say to preach to some nations, to disciple some nations, to give life to some nations; he said all nations. Before the world is at last redeemed in full, “the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations” (Mark 13:10), so that the Church which manifests God's omni-national mystery may astound “the rulers and authorities” over nations “in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10) – “and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:24). What that end brings, John has seen and told us: “Behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples..., standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out in a loud voice: 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on our throne and to the Lamb!' And all the angels were standing around the throne..., and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying: 'Amen!'” (Revelation 7:9-12). Amen, and amen!