SYNOPSIS: A great "tower" is built. God confounds their language and they disperse.
The brief, self-contained fable, "The Tower of Babel", which has been inserted between the Table of Nations and the tol'dot section connecting Noah to Abram, is obviously allegorical. "Structurally, the story is a tiny literary masterpiece" opines Everett Fox (p. 47). As Martin Buber (p. 27) points out, the reasons include the playful and skilful use of language, with the humans' calls "Let us make bricks" and "Let us build a city" obtaining God's retort "Let us go down [to see what's going on]," and their "lest we be scattered" leading to the consequence "and God scattered them" (see notes below for more details).
The story's etiological function is to explain why humanity dispersed and came to speak mutually unintelligible languages. More importantly, it has a moral: humans should know their place and not "challenge their gods" by undertaking extravagantly ambitious works. The cultural backdrop is explicitly Mesopotamian: shin‛ar, mentioned at the beginning of the story, is the BH name for Sumer, while at the end the unfinished town is named bavel, i.e. Babylon. The tale also closes on a name game: Babel, because the people started babbling. Moreover, the "tower" motif (in H, migdal) is reminiscent of the famous pyramyd-shaped ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia.
Speiser (pp. 75-6) gives an interesting analysis, observing that the composition is at the same time obviously Mesopotamia-oriented and specifically Israelite in its approach to the subject and its message. The Mesopotamian component, he argues, is not limited to knowledge of the ancient architectural feats of Babylonian civilisation since he also finds in the Bible story allusions to Mesopotamia's own literary traditions, which express exultation at such feats. The specifically Israelite contribution is to be seen in the ways in which the Bible account contrasts with all that: instead of glorifying the Babylonians' building prowess it ridicules it, and rather than calling it an eternal wonder, the builders are portrayed as giving up on their ambitions when they absurdly find themselves no longer able to understand what each other is saying thanks to a rather roguish prank played on them by the true master of the universe - God. The story is well known, of course, but the gentle irony is transformed into biting satire if, as Speiser believed, the whole thing is a bit of a take-off of a loved piece of ancient Mesopotamian literature.
11:2 b'nas'‛am miqqédem
It is not clear to me if this says that "they" (we don't actually know who they are!) were travelling to the east, from the east or in the east. The good news is that it doesn't seem to matter. But in any case, since in other respects (see next note) this appears to be an Israelite composition, from that vantage point the whole of Mesopotamia was miqqédem.
11:3 hava nilb'na l'venim...
A further Mesopotamian trait, together with an Israelite perspective, of this narrative may be seen in the emphasis placed on the process of making bricks and the method of using them (11:2, JPS: watt'hi lahem hall'vena l'áven 'brick served them as stone', etc.). Bricks were a common building material in Mesopotamia; in Canaan they were not. Therefore, Speiser points out, the mention of bricks lends the story authenticity but the insistence on details about a technical matter that to Mesopotamians would have been mundane is more likely to reveal an Israelite author, rather than suggest a ready-made piece of literature lifted wholemeal from a Mesopotamian cultural context. In terms of literary technique, notice the formula used here: hava nilb'na l'venim 'Come let us make bricks', and also (11:4) hava nivne lánu ‛ir 'Come let us build a city', and compare with 11:7.
11:4 pen nafutz ‛al pne kol ha'áretz
'Else we shall be scattered all over the world' (JPS); the verb p-w-tz means 'to disperse (intr.), be scattered.' Cf. 11:8 wayyáfetz etc.
11:5 wayyéred YHWH lir'ot...
Hallmarks of J are the name YHWH and the anthropomorphism of the image of God popping down from heaven to check out what his humans were up to down here this time.
11:7 hava ner'da
'Come let us go down.' EF (p. 47), citing Fokkelman, points out that God's speech begins with precisely the same syntactic formula as that of the humans in 11:3. The effect verges on irony: the people said "Come on, let's build a tower to heaven!" and God said "Come on, let's put an end to this!" So also MB p. 27.
w'nav'la sham s'fatam
'Let us confound their speech there.' The verb root is b-l-l 'to confuse.'
lo yishm'‛u ish s'fat re‛éhu
Lit. 'nobody will hear each other's speech.' Often sh-m-' 'to hear' has the extended sense of 'to obey'; here it means 'to understand.'
11:8 wayyáfetz... ‛al pne kol ha'áretz
'And Our Lord scattered them all over the world' (NBIE), using the Hiphil (causative) of p-w-tz. Buber (p. 27) points out that this is in response to the humans' pen nafutz... in 11:4.
11:9 ‛al ken qara sh'ma‛ bavel ki sham balal YHWH s'fat kol ha'áretz
Name game: "Babel" (bavel) 'Babylon' is explained from balal 'he confused', a rather bad pun and not the real origin of the name, needless to say.
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