Genesis 11:8 Commentary and Bible Study

So the Lord forces them to do what they would not do in obedience to his instruction, and presumably they now complied with the locations, the destinations, that we speculate were assigned to them through the instrumentality of Eber or some such person. The unfinished city became a monument to their rebellion.There are those who believe that the initial meaning of the word ‘Babel’ was ‘house of the gods’, as though Nimrod, the constructor of the tower of Babel in the city of Babel, was saying to society, ‘You have heard of God, but we worship ‘gods’ in the plural. And idolatry had taken over. Babel actually means ‘the gate of the gods’, in the plural. That is what Nimrod called it: ‘You have got God; but I have got the gods.’ But it sounds very like something in Hebrew which means confusion, so there is a play on words here. ‘Therefore is the name of it called,’ that is by the church, by the godly line, ‘[confusion] because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.’So this is the beginning of the Sumerian empire, which became the Babylonian empire. Here it is with Nimrod. He is the first Sumerian. You will not read that anywhere but in the Bible. Only in the Bible history is the Samarian, Babylonian tradition connected with a man named Nimrod. But it is here. And he established it at Babel, in the land of Shinar.