God Came Down… and God Scattered: Acts of Punishment or Acts of Grace?

Throughout the stories in Genesis' primeval prologue, humankind's persistent sinfulness is met with punishment but also with acts of grace on the part of God. The last story, the Tower of Babel is usually understood as the ultimate act of disobedience on the part of humanity. In this inter...

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Published in:Review and expositor (Berne) 2006-05, Vol.103 (2), p.403-417
Main Author: deClaissé-Walford, Nancy L.
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description Throughout the stories in Genesis' primeval prologue, humankind's persistent sinfulness is met with punishment but also with acts of grace on the part of God. The last story, the Tower of Babel is usually understood as the ultimate act of disobedience on the part of humanity. In this interpretation, God punishes the people by scattering them over the face of the earth. There is no act of grace. Thus the primeval prologue ends in darkness; God moves to “Plan B” and decides to reveal Godself to humanity through a single family, that of Abram ben Terah. But what if we understood the scattering at the Tower as an act, not of punishment, but of grace on the part of God—an act that allowed humankind to fulfill the creation command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28)? How might that inform and affect our reading of the primeval prologue and the ancestral stories?
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