Let us make us a name

“Let us make us a name” is the builders’ declaration at Babel, where the desire for a lasting collective identity is joined to the attempt to keep a people together. The phrase gives voice to their plan for a city and a tower, but the LORD’s intervention reverses its intended outcome: their speech is confounded, the building stops, and they are scattered across the earth.

The Phrase at Babel

The words occur within a shared plan. The people, who have one language and one speech, settle on a plain in Shinar and make bricks, burning them thoroughly and using slime for mortar. They propose to build both a city and a tower whose top reaches heaven. Making a name is paired with a further purpose: avoiding dispersion over the face of the earth.

The phrase therefore expresses more than an ambition for renown. In the builders’ own formulation, a common name and a built center are means of holding a unified population together. The account presents that aim against the earlier description of humanity divided into families, tongues, lands, and nations.

Intervention and Reversal

The LORD comes down to see the city and tower. The narration emphasizes that the builders are one people with one language, and presents their shared speech as enabling what they undertake. The LORD then confounds their language so they cannot understand one another.

The consequences directly undo the project’s stated purpose. The people scatter over the earth, and they leave off building the city. The place is called Babel because the LORD confounded the language there and scattered its builders. Their attempt to prevent dispersion thus ends in the very dispersal they feared.

Later Resonances

The phrase’s concern with making a name resonates with the Moab covenant’s warning against turning from the LORD to serve other gods. In that passage, an individual who hears the covenant curse may reassure himself that he will have peace while following a stubborn heart; the text instead associates covenant abandonment with judgment and the land’s devastation. The Babel episode and this warning are distinct contexts, but both place human security claims in tension with the consequences narrated by the text.

The later covenant address defines communal belonging through an oath made not only with those present but also with those absent, and recalls the exodus from Egypt. Its terms emphasize covenant and remembrance rather than a self-made name: Israel is called to observe the covenant, while Moses’s law is to be read publicly every seven years to men, women, children, and resident strangers. These later passages give the Babel phrase a wider textual contrast between a unity sought through human construction and a community sustained through obligation, memory, and teaching.