Kejadian 11:7

11:7 Come, let’s go down and confuse ¹  their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” ² 

Kejadian 13:7

13:7 So there were quarrels ³  between Abram’s herdsmen and Lot’s herdsmen. ⁴  (Now the Canaanites and the Perizzites were living in the land at that time.) ⁵ 

[11:7]  ¹ tn The cohortatives mirror the cohortatives of the people. They build to ascend the heavens; God comes down to destroy their language. God speaks here to his angelic assembly. See the notes on the word “make” in 1:26 and “know” in 3:5, as well as Jub. 10:22-23, where an angel recounts this incident and says “And the Lord our God said to us…. And the Lord went down and we went down with him. And we saw the city and the tower which the sons of men built.” On the chiastic structure of the story, see G. J. Wenham, Genesis (WBC), 1:235.

[11:7]  ² tn Heb “they will not hear, a man the lip of his neighbor.”

[13:7]  ³ tn The Hebrew term רִיב (riv) means “strife, conflict, quarreling.” In later texts it has the meaning of “legal controversy, dispute.” See B. Gemser, “The rîb – or Controversy – Pattern in Hebrew Mentality,” Wisdom in Israel and in the Ancient Near East [VTSup], 120-37.

[13:7]  ⁴ sn Since the quarreling was between the herdsmen, the dispute was no doubt over water and vegetation for the animals.

[13:7]  ⁵ tn This parenthetical clause, introduced with the vav (ו) disjunctive (translated “now”), again provides critical information. It tells in part why the land cannot sustain these two bedouins, and it also hints of the danger of weakening the family by inner strife.