Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said.
Genesis 16:1-2 (NIV)
The text is quite clear. We are not called to use the gifts of Empire to try to force God’s blessing into our lives.
It’s not by our efforts, nor the might of Empire that moves God to keep His promises.
God has to intervene.
So many lessons here.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth; and they stopped building the city.
Genesis 11:8 (NASB)
Genesis 11 doesn’t tell us that the people stopped building the Tower of Babel after God confused their languages. It says they stopped building the city.
I suspect this tells us that God was primarily interested in stopping the expansion of Empire, as Empire enslaves us.
The writers want you to see something that isn’t plainly obvious in this story. It’s subtle.
As people moved eastward, they found a plain in [a] Shinar and settled there.
Genesis 11:2 (NIV)
The [a] footnote tells us that this is Babylonia.
Babylonia is Nimrod’s Empire:
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord; that is why it is said, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.” The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Uruk, Akkad and Kalneh, in Shinar.
Babylonia is the region that housed the great city of Babylon. This isn’t obvious in the text yet, but the translators want to preserve this understanding for you later. This would be the place that the Jews lived during the Babylonian exile.
Babylon is linked to wickedness, captivity, and darkness. It’s the place where Israel was held captive for about 70 years, and it was perhaps during this time that the Jewish sages began refining/organizing their scriptures.
One thing that stands out is how much anti-Babylonian messaging show up in the newly articulated scriptures, starting with “Shinar.”
The meaning of “Shinar” is unclear. It might mean “two Rivers,” or “the land between two rivers,” perhaps referring to the Tigris and Euphrates.
However, the root of Shinar is שער (s’r), which is associated with violence in various forms:
Noun שער (sa’r), means horror.
Verb שער (sa’ar) means to sweep or whirl away, like a storm.
Verb שער (sha’ar) means to break
Adjective שער (sho’ar) means horrid or disgusting
The sages of the Midrash include even more thoughts on this, saying that “Shinar” sounds like “she’ein ne’or,” which means “no one is awake” at night because they have no candles (Midrash HaMevo’ar)
It is a place of darkness.
At the time when Amraphel was king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, Kedorlaomer king of Elam and Tidal king of Goyim…
Genesis 14:1 (NIV)
Later, when Shinar is introduced to us again in Genesis 14, we’ll meet Amraphel, the King of Shinar.
Amraphel means “Speaker of Darkness.”
Shinar is the bad place.
They also took Lot, Abram’s nephew, and his possessions and departed, for he was living in Sodom.
Genesis 14:12 (NASB)
When the kings of Empires captured Lot, the rabbis suggest that they knew exactly who Lot was, and that perhaps they could demand a ransom for him from Abraham.
ויקחו את לוט בן אחי אברם, they made a special effort to capture Lot because he was Avram’s nephew. They were aware of his wealth. They were expecting that Avram would pay a heavy ransom for the release of his nephew.
Sfnorno on Genesis 14:12:1
The shift for me here is that empire does represent bondage and slavery, and these things are definitely not good. But they are not the same as “wickedness,” which is also not good, but they are different, and treated differently in the text.