The story the Bible is telling is this: Genesis 10 describes the division of humanity into seventy nations and seventy languages. Genesis 11 tells of how one imperial power conquered smaller nations, imposing its language and culture on them, thus directly contravening God’s wish that humans should respect the integrity of each nation and each individual. When at the end of the Babel story God ‘confuses the language’ of the builders, he is not creating a new state of affairs but restoring the old.
