The Hamite inhabitants of the city in Shinar wanted to make a shem, a name, for themselves rather than looking to “the God of Shem” and calling on His name. They hunkered down and united for the honor of their own name in the city of their own making, so that they might resist the mandate of God to exercise dominion over the whole earth for His glory.

After the great flood of Noah, God reestab­­lished “the world that then existed” out of the floodwaters (see 2 Peter 3:5–6). Even though man’s heart remained as evil as before (Gen. 6:5; 8:21), God determined not to destroy the earth again by flood and expressed this decree to all creation as a common-grace covenant (8:21–9:17). Then He repeated the dominion mandate to the human race as at the beginning: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (9:1–3, 7; see 1:28).

In the Genesis narrative of these two worlds, preflood and postflood, the focus is on names. Genesis 5 gives the names of the generations from Adam to Noah and his three sons (preflood). Likewise, all of Genesis 10 gives names of the three sons of Noah (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) and their descendants (postflood). By the end of Genesis 10, there is a focus on Shem and his line, which is then picked up in Genesis 11:10–30, moving to Terah and to his sons, and especially to Abram, who carries on the story from that point, beginning in Genesis 12.

The postflood story of Noah’s unfolding family line, however, is interrupted by the Tower of Babel episode (11:1–9). This well-known and vivid story certainly captures the imagination, but by intruding on the narrative of Noah to Abram, it cries out for explanation. Is this simply the story of how the one human language became many? Genesis 11:1–9 is indeed a pause in the action and explains language dispersal, but we are already told this more or less in 10:5, 20, and 31. Accordingly, there must be more to the story of Babel, which we now look into by focusing on the dominion mandate and how it plays out on “a plain in the land of Shinar” (11:2).

In 11:1–9, there are certain repeated issues that draw our attention. The first is dispersal (vv. 4, 8–9). The renewed dominion mandate states clearly that human beings after the flood were to fruitfully teem on the whole earth and fill it (9:1, 7). Dominion over creation was implied when God delivered living creatures and plant life into human hands (vv. 2–3), which requires responsible cultivation and husbandry as well as development of technology and tools to accomplish this. Certain places such as the plains of Shinar in the southern part of Mesopotamia (11:2; see 10:10; 14:1; Dan. 1:1–2), for example, housed predatory animals such as lions, panthers, and hyenas that made building walls and cities necessary for protection.

Therefore, building a city (Gen. 11:4) seems perfectly consistent with the dominion mandate. The development of baked bricks with tar-based mortar (“bitumen”) produced an exceptionally strong building material equivalent to stone (v. 3) that is still in evidence today in places such as the Ziggurat of Ur. This kind of technological advance seems to be just what the Lord intended for humans in the dominion mandate. But there’s a catch in what the people say in Genesis 11:4: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

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