Originally posted by square_peg
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Human beings.
Their hearts were rebellious--God had previously told them to fill the Earth (aka spread across it), so instead of following that command, they stayed in one place, and as a further sign of rebellion, they decided to make a name for themselves by building a tower to the heavens as a demonstration of power and authority that they didn't have.
Their hearts were rebellious--God had previously told them to fill the Earth (aka spread across it), so instead of following that command, they stayed in one place, and as a further sign of rebellion, they decided to make a name for themselves by building a tower to the heavens as a demonstration of power and authority that they didn't have.
What do you understand by "tower to the heavens?" Did they mean into the atmosphere or such a tower that heaven could be contacted/interacted with? "Babel" in Babylonian means "gate of God." Here is what Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, understood to have occurred at Babel:
Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power... Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners [in the Flood]; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion...
Because it's not a good thing when you have an entire movement of people united against you.
God confused their language to shatter the unity that they previously had.
Because movements are much weaker when they're disjointed and scattered.
Probably not literally, since, as real life has already proven, people would eventually come to understand different languages and be able to translate words and communicate across them. But the point of the story, expressed through humor, seems to be that mankind is so small compared to God that the tower that they thought would reach to the heavens actually required God to come down in order to see it, and that all God needed to stop their unified rebellion was to confuse their language. So the deeper meaning could be said to permanently apply.
This is an odd question, since it should be manifestly clear to everyone who's bright enough to not be a futurist () that no tower can ever literally reach to the heavens. The tower was never possible, and so it makes no sense to ask if another such tower would be possible. But there can certainly still be mass unified rebellions against God/moral principles.
Can't be any dumber than your completely substance-free post was. I answered all those questions exactly the way I would've answered them when I was a preterist, and exactly the same way I would've answered them when I was a futurist. As I said, there's no apparent connection between the Babel story and eschatology at all, so unless or until you do, I'll just have to assume this bizarre obsession you have with preterism (in which you attribute human qualities to it and whatnot) is part of some underlying psychological problem that probably requires therapy.
You're drawing an awful lot of inferences from a character who's mentioned in only one or two chapters of the Bible, but this doesn't have any connection to preterism or Christianity. For one thing, there was no Christ yet at that time (the historical events that led God to promise to send a Messiah hadn't occurred yet--heck, ancient Israel didn't even exist yet) so there couldn't have been anyone who was anti-Christ. Even if you re-word this to mean that Nimrod represented the future function of an antichrist in the sense of interpreting "Christ" as "anointed" and thereby being anti-anyone who is anointed, it's still irrelevant. Preterism involves a belief that the historical emperor Nero specifically represented a type of antichrist; that someone long before that may have been a similar type of person has nothing to do with it. You haven't shown any indication that you even understand what preterism entails.
Micah 5:5 And he will be our peace
when the Assyrians invade our land
and march through our fortresses.
We will raise against them seven shepherds,
even eight commanders,
6 who will rule the land of Assyria with the sword,
the land of Nimrod with drawn sword.
I know you and your ilk think there's a lot of random crap in the Bible (that is, when you even bother reading it), but I happen to think and the Bible asserts that ALL Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching. Nimrod is mentioned in this clearly eschatological verse for a reason, not for no reason.
I would be much more inclined to take this seriously if your OP wasn't so insubstantial and incoherent.
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