Footnotes

1. Genesis 11:1 After having presented in the list of peoples what might be called the mission field of the People of God, the biblical narrative dwells on a fundamental aspect of this field, one that is always alive in the various human groups, namely, the insistent need for unity. The passage, from the Yahwist source, makes use of an ancient popular story that seems to copy in an ironic way Mesopotamian texts on the dedication of its well-known temple towers.
   The story concerns a migrating people who come down from the mountains into a vast plain and feel the need of establishing a city center with a skyscraper tower that will guarantee the maintenance of their unity. Make a name for ourselves means to establish a power that will foster their cohesion and their own political identity. But, as happens in human undertakings, a moment comes in which intentions diverge, so that the unity of the people is broken, as if they were speaking different languages. The tradition sees in this occurrence an explicit manifestation of God, the author of human nature. The direction events take always depends on God.
2. Genesis 11:3 Bricks . . . instead of stone, and bitumen in place of cement: stone and cement were used as building materials in Canaan. Stone was scarce in Mesopotamia, however, so bricks and bitumen were used (as indicated by archaeological excavations).
3. Genesis 11:4 Tower so high that it touches the heavens: this is a direct reference to the most important temple tower (ziggurat) found in Babylon, which goes by the name of “the house that lifts high its head.” Scholars regard the ziggurats of Babylonia as the earliest skyscrapers.
4. 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).
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Genesis 11:28 Ur of the Chaldeans: Ur was an ancient city of the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia as well as a populous and prosperous one. In this case, the phrase is an anachronism, because the Chaldeans were not known to history until some thousand years after Abraham.
8. Genesis 11:31 Abraham traveled along the Euphrates to Haran, a trading town in northern Mesopotamia or Syria. This was the best route from which to reach Canaan and bypass the great desert with its people and animals (see Gen 12:4; Acts 7:2-4).