The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Acts 2:9-11BSB
Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism; Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!"
Earlier text
Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech. And as people journeyed eastward, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." So they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. "Come," they said, "let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth." Then the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. And the LORD said, "If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world, and from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.
Earlier text
Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them from there over the face of all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world, and from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth.
Earlier text
Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared,
Luke's catalogue of nations at Pentecost (Acts 2:9-11 — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Rome, Cretans, Arabs) is a designed reactivation of the Table of Nations (Genesis 10), the ethno-linguistic map for which Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) supplies the explanation. The allusion is structural and, in the Greek, verbal, and its inversions are deliberate. The verbal hinge sits just before the list, at Acts 2:6: the crowd "came together in bewilderment" — συνεχύθη, the very verb the Septuagint uses for the LORD's confusing of the language at Babel (συγχέω, LXX Genesis 11:7, 9) — "because each one heard them speaking his own language," sharing with LXX Genesis 11:7 not only the verb but its frame of each one hearing. The tongues (γλῶσσαι) that rest on the disciples and fill the crowd's ears (Acts 2:3-4, 11) are the γλῶσσα the LXX says was confused at Babel (Genesis 11:7). At Babel God "came down" to confuse the one language and scatter the builders ("Come, let Us go down and confuse their language," Gen 11:7); at Pentecost the Spirit comes down and the gathered "God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven" (Acts 2:5) each hear "the wonders of God" in their own tongues (2:11) — the multiplied languages no longer divide but each become a vehicle of one gospel. Babel's builders sought "a name for ourselves" (Gen 11:4) and were scattered; at Pentecost "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (2:21) and the scattered are gathered into one body. The confusion of tongues imposed in judgment is not erased but redeemed: diversity of language remains, while its dividing power is broken. Luke thus stages the inauguration of the canon-wide scattered-to-gathered reversal that the prophets promised (Zephaniah 3:9; Isaiah 66:18) and Revelation 7:9 consummates.