One Righteous Family and a Very Tall Tower

Genesis 6–11; Moses 8: What Noah and Babel Tell Us About Stubbornness—in All Directions

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Noah preached for decades.

Moses 8:20 records this plainly: "And it repented Noah, and his heart was pained that the Lord had made man on the earth, and it grieved him." He walked the same grief God walked. He looked at his generation and felt it.

Then he preached. For years. Moses 8:23 gives us this: "And it came to pass that Noah continued his preaching unto the people, saying: Hearken, and give heed unto my words; Believe in God... repent of your sins."

And for the most part: nothing. His generation refused.

This week contains two stories of human stubbornness, but they're not the same story. In Genesis 6–9, stubbornness closes the door to salvation and opens it to judgment. In Genesis 11, stubbornness is almost comic—a refusal to scatter, a tower that collapses into linguistic chaos. Each story asks something about what human pride costs. Each answers differently.

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Who Noah Was

Moses 8:27 gives us the three-part description: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generation, and Noah walked with God."

Perfect here does not mean sinless. The Hebrew tamim carries the meaning of complete, whole, without moral blemish in intention. It's the same word used of Job, of Abraham. It means Noah's direction was right. His face was toward God.

And he "walked with God"—a phrase used also of Enoch. Two people in all of pre-flood scripture described this way. Walking with God is an active image. Not just believing in God. Not just worshipping periodically. Walking. Present. Consistent. Direction sustained over time.

Moses 8 adds something Genesis alone doesn't give us: Noah's sons, their wives, and the context of the corruption around them. "And God saw that the wickedness of men had become great" (Moses 8:22). Noah's household was an island. Surrounded.

This is worth holding for a moment without resolving too quickly into comfort. Noah's faithfulness wasn't rewarded with an easier environment. His environment got worse around him as he walked more closely with God. The two things don't always track the way we'd prefer.

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The Ark and the Covenant

Genesis 6:18 contains the first explicit use of the word "covenant" in the scriptural narrative: "But with thee will I establish my covenant."

Before a single plank of the ark is laid, God establishes covenant. The form of salvation precedes the labor of building it.

The structure of the ark itself carries symbolic weight that the rabbis and many Christian commentators have explored. The Hebrew word tebah appears elsewhere in scripture only once: describing the basket that floats Moses on the Nile in Exodus 2. The infant Moses survives water in a tebah. Israel survives Egypt because of that survival. The word choice—rare enough to be notable—suggests the ark isn't just a boat. It's a pattern. Water and preservation. Judgment and deliverance running through the same event simultaneously.

After the flood, the covenant is sealed with a rainbow. Genesis 9:13: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth." The Hebrew qeshet is a battle bow—a warrior's weapon set aside. The symbol of judgment hung up in the sky as a sign that this particular judgment is over. God is not at war with the earth. He is bound to it by covenant.

Elder D. Todd Christofferson taught in April 2009 that God's covenants are fundamentally expressions of His character: "In God's plan, covenants are not legal transactions but revelations of His nature." The rainbow is less contract and more portrait.

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The Tower

Genesis 11 arrives without warning. Noah's descendants are gathering. One language. One speech. And they decide to build a tower—specifically, to avoid being scattered across the earth.

Genesis 11:4: "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

Lest we be scattered. They had been commanded to scatter and fill the earth (Genesis 9:1). They are refusing. The tower is an act of collective defiance dressed up as an architectural project.

God's response is subtle and almost wry: "Come, let us go down, and there confound their language" (Genesis 11:7). This echoes the council language of creation—"Let us make man" (Genesis 1:26). The same voice that spoke the world into being now scrambles the speech of its inhabitants. The tower falls not to a storm or a conqueror but to the impossibility of finishing a project when nobody can understand each other.

There is something human and recognizable in Babel. The desire to be known, to leave a mark, to avoid the vulnerability of being scattered. We build things to protect ourselves from the very exposure that growth requires. God scrambles the language not to punish but to push—to force the scattering that leads to blessing across all nations (a blessing eventually fulfilled in Abraham, called in the very next chapter).

The Jaredites—whose story opens the book of Ether in the Book of Mormon—flee from the Babel confusion. The brother of Jared prays that their language be preserved. God honors that prayer and leads them to a promised land. Babel is not only judgment. For those who ask, it becomes an exodus.

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Open Your Come Follow Me Manual

The manual this week has a strong section on what faithfulness looks like when it isn't immediately rewarded. Noah is one of the great scriptural case studies. Let the Spirit show you where in your life that lesson applies.

Come Follow Me Manual – Week 7