“Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” (Genesis 11:7)
Here the question that needs to be asked is who are the pronouns “their” and “they” referring to. The obvious answer is the inhabitants of Babel. However, we need to go on and ask, “Who are the inhabitants of Babel,” and with the answer to that question we are right back at Genesis 10 and the table of nations. So, the confusion of “their language” is the confusion of the language of the nations who had disobediently sought to create a unipolar world in defiance of God.
Now, if we grant that it is a small step to think that the confusion of the languages was in keeping with the existence of the nations so that each nation, as descended from Noah, was confused with a language in keeping with its national identity. The reason I point this out is that there exists a kind of school of thought that denies the familial-national dynamic in this passage insisting instead that the division here was not familial-national but only linguistic. The argument seemingly goes that the division at Babel was of such a nature that men from the different family-nations of Genesis 10 were all jumbled up together in the linguistic dispersion. We are therefore expected to believe that all those people who God divided by language were each and all nationally mixed in the linguistic division that God visited them with.
I am suggesting that the weight of the context of the passage is overwhelmingly against that kind of reading. Genesis 11 is not merely a linguistic division but it is a linguistic division in keeping with the already pre-existing familial-national distinctions. God wanted distinct people group Nations and the language confusion was pursuant to that end.
Babel was a nation spreading event and the way God spread the nations was to give them each a tongue so they could not create the unipolar world that defied God and so they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him (Acts 17:27). All of this is more than suggestive that God’s plan for the World is a Biblical Nationalism wherein there is a God-ordained unity and diversity honored. The diversity is found in the reality of nations and the unity is envisioned in each diverse and distinct nation submitting to God as their Creator, Christ as their Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit as their Sanctifier.
Obviously, the sequence of events is that Noah and his family come off the ark, God makes a covenant with Noah and ordains that humans will live under govt, complementing patriarchal rule, Noah’s descendants are then ordered to disperse and inhabit their own territory per ethnic/family divisions, but then they congregate at Babel to establish a conglomerated empire and God has to confuse the languages in order to compel the separation in nations. However, the separation into nations was ordained first, and then the confusion of language was a chastisement due to disobedience. The division by languages may be removed, ultimately, in the New Heavens and New Earth, but the division by nations will remain. (Rev 21:24, 22:2). Alienists will spit blood and foam at the mouth if you try to point this out.
The contemporary church conflates the division by ethno-families, which was part of God’s intention for how mankind should live with the division by language, which was a chastisement for disobedience. The mind of the modern evangelical has been so warped and twisted that it simply will not admit any biblical teaching on the ethnic division. The modern Reformed mind refuses to own that God’s intent for social order is Biblical Nationalism. It’s a type of spiritual blindness imposed by God upon those who desire an egalitarian Internationalist Marxist order.
