Genesis 11:8-10

New Catholic Bible

Footnotes

1. Genesis 11:8 Scattered them over the whole earth: God countered their prideful rebellion at its very origin. They had chosen to settle, but he forced them to scatter. This account relates how it was that the families of the earth were separated, “each clan in the nations with their own language” (Gen 10:5) and were “divided up to become all the nations on the earth after the flood” (Gen 10:32).
2. Genesis 11:9 Babel (i.e., Babylonia), according to a popular etymology, meant “gate of god” or “gate of the gods.” The sacred writer, having told of the failure of the human undertaking (and the failure also of the gods who wanted to be worshiped on the Mesopotamian towers), asks us to read the name “Babel” as a reminder of that failure: he suggests a connection with the root bll, “to confuse,” from which the form balbel and then, by contraction, babel, would supposedly be derived.
3. Genesis 11:10 These verses are from the Priestly tradition, a continuation of the genealogy begun in chapter 5, except for verses 28-30, which are Yahwist. Beginning perhaps with Arpachshad, named as son of Shem, the list of names here is a real genealogy, a document of the family of Abraham; only the numbers continue to be symbolic and conventional, without any strictly historical value. Abraham comes from a seminomadic family or clan that has settled in the city of Ur, at that time on the shores of the Persian Gulf and already rich and powerful, especially in the 21st and 20th centuries B.C.
   Abraham and his family travel up the valley of the Euphrates and settle in upper Mesopotamia. The period of these events may be around 1850 B.C.