Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.”
(Genesis 11:8-9)

God came, investigated, and disrupted the plans of the devil. This wasn’t judgment. This was an anti-corruption action. This was humanotherapy. It was harsh, yes. But it forced humanity to abandon united rebellion. It forced humanity to turn their imaginations and efforts to something other than defying God’s commands. He scattered them throughout the Earth, and humanity populated it. Humanity spread, multiplied, and were fruitful in their efforts to subdue the Earth. We’ve done it imperfectly, dominating (domination) instead of stewarding (dominion), but the mark of our spreading as been the differences in our language. Time and again ungodly people have tried to subdue the world under their rule, but the barrier of language invested in culture has proven their undoing. It is hard to truly join together with someone whose language you don’t know in your heart.

This is the point at which humanity spread to all the areas of the world. The Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia, and all of Africa. This is the point from which we dispersed.

The sage Radak writes: ”ויפץ ה, G’d did not scatter the people by physically depositing them in different parts of the earth. By mixing up their languages, the people themselves started moving away from one another, in accordance with their ability to understand one another, Seeing that they were unable to communicate with one another coherently, their building project had to be aborted at any rate. The dispersal process was gradual, as methods of transportation were severely limited. People moved predominantly north from Mesopotamia, rather than to the desert regions in the southern Arabian peninsula. לבנות העיר, if they stopped building the city, they most certainly also stopped building the Tower. The city, of smaller dimensions than originally planned, remained, seeing that one group of people speaking the same language remained there.’