Line Of Ham: Canaanites: Nimrod: Babel: Babylon
Instead of there having been any immediate fulfillment of Noah's prophecy, the line of Ham at first takes a very leading place in the world. The posterity of his son Canaan—specially accursed—seize and divide among them the fairest and best situated of all lands, the garden of the orient, which God had already allotted to the seed of Shem (by Abraham). To the Phoenician branch of Canaan the world is indebted for the invention of writing, arithmetic, astronomy, and shipping. But the most remarkable of all the sons of Ham was Nimrod.
Nimrod was the Belus of the ancient Assyrians, who established the despotism of Babylonia, and founded the great cities of Babylon and Nineveh. He was regarded as being deified and placed in the heavens, with his sword and leash of hounds—the brightest and largest constellation. In truth the vague and gigantic outline of the colossal figure of Orion, spreading athwart the whole eastern horizon, is no unfit representation of the huge personality of the mighty hunter and warrior, whose dim and vast form looms, from the starlit past, over the Asian plains. Apparently he was the original Baal, or lord; not so much a god as a demigod; not so much like Zeus on the Olympic heights, waving his ambrosial locks, as like the stupendous figure of Thor, grasping his ponderous hammer, and stalking amongst his companion Jotuns on the Norse mountains.
Nimrod is the typical man of the world, and Babylon is the typical city. They are both strong and attractive to outward sight; Nimrod the very beau ideal of authority, but he is, as his name signifies, “Rebel “; and Babylon the wonder of the world for beauty and organization, but it means “Confusion.” In due time, we find, God selects a man and develops a city; but the man is not the lordly Nimrod, nor is the city the stately Babylon. Thenceforward the man and city of the earth wage relentless war, century after century and millennium after millennium, against the man and city of God. Let the reader note well the characteristics of each and especially their origins. “All things,” says Plato, “are symbolical, and what we call results are beginnings.” The converse of this is also equally true: what seem beginnings are merely results; Babylon and its system are results of the great principles of human disposition which forced them into existence.
And this is what makes the offense of building Babel (which is now generally recognized, as having been the nucleus of Babylon) so extreme, and the judgment thereon so severe—the motive. It may be said, What crime is there in building a high tower? None, but the motive that impelled it made it a crime: that motive was a deliberate determination made by a people, who had lately been the object of God's mercy and deliverance, to exclude Him from all part in their arrangements; to take from His hand the scepter of government and magnify their own name at the expense of His. It is not only high treason, but it transcends that crime as the high treason of Lotharius and his brothers, in deposing their father from the throne of France, transcends ordinary high treason; it added thereto the heinous crime of ill-using one who had an especial claim on their affection and respect, the one who had given them being, sustenance, preservation, and wealth. Now Junius Brutus, when his sons conspired to dethrone him, had them put to death; and though many may doubt the naturalness of Brutus' sentencing them, none doubt that they fully deserved it. The judgment, however, falling on the conspirators of Babel, was not of such an extreme nature. God had originally told them to disperse and replenish the earth: they build this beacon tower to hinder that; whereon God scatters them in judgment. He has His way eventually (as always), and they have to submit; but whereas it should have been the submission of obedience and happiness, it is now brought about in the way of penalty, disaster, and to the race the permanent inconvenience of diverse speech..
When the law comes it does nothing to accommodate itself to this confused speech; it is given in the one primitive language, and only one; and if men wanted to know God's requirements, they must learn that language. But when the gospel comes, the curse becomes a blessing: the way in which the difficulty of diverse speech is miraculously met at Pentecost is a present and overpowering evidence of the nature and origin of the message. All this is very characteristic: man brings curse out of blessing; and God brings. blessing out of curse.
Nimrod and his city then are the outward symbols of rebellion “which is as the sin of witchcraft” —outward symptoms of inward disease. The inception and development is heroic and rapid; while yet God's man is undisclosed from Chaldean idolatry, Nimrod rises with colossal power, and while yet Zion is unfounded, Babylon shines with luminous glory. The world's wonder; in magnitude greater than London; in symmetry more beautiful than Paris; in temples and palaces more imposing than Rome—surrounded by a wall as high as St. Paul's dome, and as broad as a wide road; so it developed. With a mighty overthrow, indelible disgrace, and eternal disaster—so it fell. After generations of laborious searching, travelers find a few heaps of calcined bricks to be all that is left of the powerful Babylon, while they puzzle each other as to which of the blasted and blackened piles, Mujelibe or Birs-Nimrod, is the original Babel.
But the enmity of Babylon against Zion does not end with the destruction, of the material cities; it is prolonged into the spiritual realm,, and so we find—as though the spirits of two deadly foes had escaped from their slain bodies, and continued the struggle—that, since the death of the two cities, there has arisen a spiritual Zion, attacked ceaselessly and ruthlessly by that spiritual Babylon, the final doom of which shall be when the mighty angel shall cast a great millstone into the sea, saying, “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found again no more at all Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!”