Thoughts on Genesis 11-12

It was at Babel that humanity, as a whole, first stopped belonging to God.

This is something I had failed to recognize for a long time, partially because Genesis 11 doesn’t explicitly declare it. Genesis 11 sees God confusing the people’s language and scattering them from Babel, but what Deuteronomy 32 tells us is that He was, in this act, disinheriting humanity and giving the nations over to lesser elohim to be ruled/governed by them.

Remember the days of old;

consider the years of many generations;

ask your father, and he will show you,

your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,

when he divided mankind,

he fixed the borders of the peoples

according to the number of the sons of God.

But the Lord’s portion is his people,

Jacob his allotted heritage.

From the beginning, God created humanity to be His people, and the fall of Genesis 3 didn’t change that. Despite their rebellion, humanity continued to be God’s people. At Babel, though, God finally disowns humanity, dividing them up according to the “number of the sons of God.” This is also why Psalm 82 declares the judgement of the gods because they have not ruled justly, and the psalm finishes with declaring that Yahweh will instead inherit the nations that had formerly belonged to these lesser gods, members of Yahweh’s divine council.

What this means for Abram/Israel then is that when God disinherited the nations from being His people, He then immediately selected Abram out from those disinherited nations to create a new people for Himself, and specifically a people through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed. In the context of the disinheritance of the nations then, this blessing of all the nations is their return to inheritance. Through Abram God will provide a means for all the nations of the earth to come back into His family and once again be His people.

I believe this is also what Paul is referring to when he declared before the Areopagus in Acts 30, in reference to idols, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” The Gentile nations were not expected to worship Yahweh because they were not Yahweh’s people. They could still be judged for their sin and violation of their own consciences (Romans 2), but God did not have the same expectations of the nations that He did of his own people. In Christ, though, the blessing God promised to Abram has come, and all peoples can be brought back into the people and family of God. So while He overlooked their ignorance in the past, there is now an expectation that they will avail themselves of the opportunity to turn from the lesser gods to which they have been subject and return to Yahweh Himself.