Home

For Teaching

Genesis 11: What the Passage Says

87 claims across 32 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Genesis 11 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The whole earth has one language. People settle on a plain in the land of Shinar and say they will build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, to make a name for themselves and not be scattered over the earth. The LORD comes down, says nothing they plan will be kept from them, confuses their language and scatters them; they stop building, and the place is called Babel. The rest of the chapter traces the family line from Shem to Terah, then names Terah's household, which sets out from Ur of the Chaldees for Canaan and settles in Haran.

Claim by Claim

  1. 11:1
    • The whole earth had one language.
    • The whole earth had one set of words.
  2. 11:2
    • They journeyed, moving either from the east or toward the east (the direction is ambiguous).
    • They found a broad valley in the land of Shinar.
    • They settled there.
  3. 11:3
    • They spoke to one another.
    • They proposed making bricks.
    • They proposed burning the bricks thoroughly.
    • They used brick in place of stone.
    • They used bitumen in place of mortar.
  4. 11:4
    • They said they should build themselves a city.
    • They said they should build a tower with its top in the heavens.
    • They said they should make a name for themselves.
    • They said this was so that they would not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
  5. 11:5
    • The LORD came down.
    • He came down to see the city and the tower.
    • The city and the tower had been built by the sons of men.
  6. 11:6
    • The LORD spoke.
    • The LORD said they were one people.
    • The LORD said they all had one language.
    • The LORD said this was the beginning of what they would do.
    • The LORD said that now nothing they planned to do would be withheld from them.
  7. 11:7
    • The LORD said, Come, let us go down.
    • The LORD said they would confuse their language there.
    • The purpose was that they would not understand one another's speech.
  8. 11:8
    • The LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth.
    • They stopped building the city.
  9. 11:9
    • The city was named Babel.
    • It was so named because the LORD there confused the language of all the earth.
    • From there the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.
  10. 11:10
    • These are the generations of Shem.
    • Shem was one hundred years old when he fathered Arphaxad.
    • He fathered Arphaxad two years after the flood.
  11. 11:11
    • Shem lived five hundred years after he fathered Arphaxad.
    • Shem fathered sons and daughters.
  12. 11:12
    • Arphaxad lived thirty-five years.
    • Arphaxad fathered Salah.
  13. 11:13
    • Arphaxad lived four hundred and three years after he fathered Salah.
    • Arphaxad fathered sons and daughters.
  14. 11:14
    • Salah lived thirty years.
    • Salah fathered Eber.
  15. 11:15
    • Salah lived four hundred and three years after he fathered Eber.
    • Salah fathered sons and daughters.
  16. 11:16
    • Eber lived thirty-four years.
    • Eber fathered Peleg.
  17. 11:17
    • Eber lived four hundred and thirty years after he fathered Peleg.
    • Eber fathered sons and daughters.
  18. 11:18
    • Peleg lived thirty years.
    • Peleg fathered Reu.
  19. 11:19
    • Peleg lived two hundred and nine years after he fathered Reu.
    • Peleg fathered sons and daughters.
  20. 11:20
    • Reu lived thirty-two years.
    • Reu fathered Serug.
  21. 11:21
    • Reu lived two hundred and seven years after he fathered Serug.
    • Reu fathered sons and daughters.
  22. 11:22
    • Serug lived thirty years.
    • Serug fathered Nahor.
  23. 11:23
    • Serug lived two hundred years after he fathered Nahor.
    • Serug fathered sons and daughters.
  24. 11:24
    • Nahor lived twenty-nine years.
    • Nahor fathered Terah.
  25. 11:25
    • Nahor lived one hundred and nineteen years after he fathered Terah.
    • Nahor fathered sons and daughters.
  26. 11:26
    • Terah lived seventy years.
    • Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
  27. 11:27
    • These are the generations of Terah.
    • Terah fathered Abram, Nahor, and Haran.
    • Haran fathered Lot.
  28. 11:28
    • Haran died in the presence of his father Terah, that is, before Terah's own death.
    • Haran died in the land of his birth.
    • That land was Ur of the Chaldees.
  29. 11:29
    • Abram and Nahor took wives for themselves.
    • The name of Abram's wife was Sarai.
    • The name of Nahor's wife was Milcah.
    • Milcah was the daughter of Haran.
    • Haran was the father of Milcah and the father of Iscah.
  30. 11:30
    • Sarai was barren.
    • She had no child.
  31. 11:31
    • Terah took Abram his son.
    • Terah took Lot, son of Haran, his grandson.
    • Terah took Sarai his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Abram.
    • They went out from Ur of the Chaldees.
    • Their intended destination was the land of Canaan.
    • They came as far as Haran.
    • They settled there.
  32. 11:32
    • The days of Terah were two hundred and five years.
    • Terah died in Haran.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

11:1
The Hebrew literally reads "one lip and one set of words", "lip" being the ordinary Hebrew word for a language or dialect. The doubled phrase means everyone spoke the same tongue and used it the same way.
11:2
Shinar is the Hebrew name for southern Mesopotamia, the flat river plain of the Tigris and Euphrates in what is now southern Iraq, the region later known as Babylonia. The Hebrew of the opening phrase can mean "from the east," "in the east," or "eastward"; translators differ.
11:3
In the KJV, "Go to" is a sixteenth-century way of saying "Come on" or "Let's get to it," not an instruction to go anywhere. The detail about materials would have struck an early reader as foreign: in the hill country of Canaan people built with quarried stone and lime mortar, but the Mesopotamian plain has no stone, so builders there used sun-dried or kiln-fired mud brick set in bitumen, the natural tar that seeps to the surface in that region, which the KJV calls "slime." Fired brick and bitumen made unusually durable, waterproof structures.
11:4
A tower "whose top may reach unto heaven" was a stock phrase in Mesopotamian building inscriptions for a very high tower; it need not mean the builders literally expected to arrive in the sky. The structures it evokes are ziggurats, stepped brick temple-towers that stood at the center of Mesopotamian cities. "Make us a name" means to win lasting fame or leave a permanent memorial.
11:5
"The children of men," rendered here as "the sons of men," is a Hebrew idiom that simply means human beings. "Builded" is the old past tense of build.
11:6
"Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do" uses "imagined" in its older sense of "planned" or "devised," not "fantasized." The sentence is about capability, not daydreaming.
11:7
"Let us go down" uses a plural for the speaker, as in Genesis 1:26 ("let us make man"). Interpreters have long disagreed about what the plural indicates (a heavenly court being addressed, a formal or deliberative way of speaking about oneself, or something else) and the Hebrew itself does not settle it.
11:9
The point is a play on words. "Babel" is simply the Hebrew name for the city of Babylon; in Babylonian its own name was understood as "gate of the god." The Hebrew verb here for "confuse" is *balal*, which sounds like Babel, so the verse reads the great city's name as "Confusion."
11:10
"These are the generations of" translates a formula (Hebrew *toledoth*) used throughout Genesis to open a new section, roughly "this is the account of what came from." This list runs from Shem, one of Noah's sons, down to Abram, narrowing the story from all humanity to one family. Note that the ancient manuscript traditions do not agree on these figures: the Greek and Samaritan versions give different numbers, and the Greek adds an extra generation (Cainan) between Arphaxad and Salah.
11:11
Across this list the lifespans fall steadily, from Shem's six hundred years down to Terah's two hundred and five, and by a few generations later they are near ordinary human length. The genealogy in Genesis 5, before the flood, ran to figures in the nine hundreds, so the numbers are stepping down through the chapter rather than staying level.
11:12
Salah is the same person the modern translation calls Shelah. King James spellings of Hebrew names reached English through Greek and Latin, which is why they often differ from spellings taken straight from the Hebrew.
11:16
Eber's name is built from the same consonants as the word "Hebrew," and ancient readers connected the two; the root carries the sense of crossing over or passing through.
11:18
Peleg's name resembles the Hebrew word for "division" or "split," and Genesis 10:25 says that in his days "the earth was divided." Whether that refers to the scattering of peoples described earlier in this chapter, or to something else such as the splitting of water channels, is not stated.
11:26
This does not mean the three sons were triplets born in Terah's seventieth year. The formula means Terah was seventy when he began fathering these sons; the eldest is not necessarily the one named first.
11:28
Ur was a major city in southern Mesopotamia. "Of the Chaldees" identifies it for later readers: the Chaldeans were a people who dominated that region many centuries after Abram's time, so the phrase is like saying "Ur, in what is now Chaldean territory." "Died before his father" means he died during Terah's lifetime, not in his presence. "The land of his nativity" is the land of his birth.
11:29
Milcah was Nahor's niece, the daughter of his brother Haran. Marriage between close kin within the extended family is normal in these narratives and is not presented as remarkable. Iscah is named here and never mentioned again.
11:30
"Barren" states a fact about Sarai, not a judgment. In a world where a household's survival, property and name passed through sons, a couple without children faced the end of the family line, and the note is placed here because it defines the problem the following chapters turn on.
11:31
The Haran they settle in is a different name in Hebrew from Haran the brother who died, the two only look alike in English spelling. The city of Haran lay far to the northwest, in what is now southern Turkey, on the main trade route between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean; it was a well-known caravan town. Canaan is the land along the eastern Mediterranean coast, roughly modern Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and southwestern Syria.
11:32
The numbers here do not fit together neatly. If Terah was 70 when Abram was born (verse 26) and Abram left Haran at 75 (Genesis 12:4), Terah would have been 145 at that point, yet he lives to 205. The Samaritan version of the text reads 145 here; the Hebrew reads 205, and the tension is left standing.

Read Genesis 11