Discovery BoxGenesis 11:5-8 
Context11:5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people 1 had started 2 building. 11:6 And the Lord said, “If as one people all sharing a common language 3 they have begun to do this, then 4 nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. 5 11:7 Come, let’s go down and confuse 6 their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” 7
11:8 So the Lord scattered them from there across the face of the entire earth, and they stopped building 8 the city.
1 tn Heb “the sons of man.” The phrase is intended in this polemic to portray the builders as mere mortals, not the lesser deities that the Babylonians claimed built the city.
2 tn The Hebrew text simply has בָּנוּ (banu), but since v. 8 says they left off building the city, an ingressive idea (“had started building”) should be understood here.
3 tn Heb “and one lip to all of them.”
4 tn Heb “and now.” The foundational clause beginning with הֵן (hen) expresses the condition, and the second clause the result. It could be rendered “If this…then now.”
5 tn Heb “all that they purpose to do will not be withheld from them.”
6 tn The cohortatives mirror the cohortatives of the people. They build to ascend the heavens; God comes down to destroy their language. God speaks here to his angelic assembly. See the notes on the word “make” in 1:26 and “know” in 3:5, as well as Jub. 10:22-23, where an angel recounts this incident and says “And the
7 tn Heb “they will not hear, a man the lip of his neighbor.”
8 tn The infinitive construct לִבְנֹת (livnot, “building”) here serves as the object of the verb “they ceased, stopped,” answering the question of what they stopped doing.
