Noah Named the Plain Overthrow and Then Canaan Took It

The Lord sent a mighty wind against the tower and overthrew it upon the earth. Not a flood this time. Not fire. A wind. The Book of Jubilees, composed in the second century BCE in Hebrew and held sacred by the community at Qumran, records this detail without drama: the tower fell, and when it fell, it lay in the land between Asshur and Babylon, in the land of Shinar. And they called its name Overthrow.

The name is a statement. Not Babel, which is the Torah's name for the city and carries the wordplay on confusion of language. Overthrow. The people who came to survey what was left of the great project looked at the rubble and named it for what God had done to it. The tower that was to have reached heaven became the place that was overthrown. Every subsequent generation that lived in Shinar would live in a land whose most prominent landmark was named for a catastrophe it had brought on itself.

The dispersion that followed moved like water finding its level. In the fourth week in the first year in the beginning thereof in the four and thirtieth jubilee, they were dispersed from the land of Shinar. Ham and his sons went into the land which he was to occupy, the south, the land of heat, the portion that Noah's lots had assigned them. Canaan, Ham's son, saw the land of Lebanon to the river of Egypt, and he saw that it was very good.

And here the story turns. Because Canaan's inheritance was to the west, toward the sea. His portion had been assigned. His father had received it by lot, before God and Noah, with the full ceremony of the earth's first post-flood administration. But Canaan looked at what Shem's portion included, the blended climate, the temperate center, the land running from Hamath down through Lebanon to the border of Egypt, and he decided that the good land was better than his oath.

He settled in Shem's portion. His father Ham came and told him: you have not settled in your portion. Go into your own land. His brothers came and told him: cursed are you, and cursed will you be beyond all the sons of Noah, by the curse by which we bound ourselves by an oath in the presence of the holy judge, in the presence of Noah our father. The oath had been spoken with Noah still living. The lot had been cast in the sight of God. The terms were not ambiguous.

But Canaan did not listen. He dwelt in the land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and his sons, until this day. The Jubilees author writes those three words, until this day, as though the disobedience is still ongoing in the moment of writing, as though the reader can look out a window and see Canaanites still in their stolen territory, still carrying their father's curse, still inhabiting land that was never meant for them.

Meanwhile, Japheth and his sons went toward the sea, into their own portion. Madai, Japheth's grandson, saw the sea-land of his inheritance and was not pleased. He went to his in-laws, to Elam and Asshur and Arpachshad, and begged for a different portion. They gave him a portion near them, from the families of Shem. Even this small departure from the original division is noted in the Jubilees text, as if to show that the arrangement Noah had set up was always under pressure, always being negotiated around, always being bent by the desire to have something other than what the lot had given.

The plain of Shinar, with its ruined tower and its name of Overthrow, was the background against which all of this negotiation happened. Nimrod rebuilt his cities in the shadow of what had been destroyed, naming them Babel and Erech and Eched and Calnah, each name a record of what the tower project had cost. The families of Ham went to war with each other in those cities. Chedorlaomer of Elam rose to power. The world Noah had tried to organize through lots and blessing and oath was already reshaping itself through the older forces of desire and ambition and refusal to accept what had been given.

The Book of Jubilees does not offer this as a story of failure. It offers it as an explanation. Why did Canaan end up in the land that Israel would later inhabit? Because Canaan broke the oath. Why was the plain of Shinar named Overthrow? Because the tower that stood there had been overthrown, and the people who built it had been scattered, and the world that God had given them to inhabit in peace was already being contested before the rubble from the tower had finished settling. The name Overthrow belongs to the land. The consequences of taking land that is not yours belong to the one who takes it. These are the accounting principles of the world Noah tried to organize on the mountain above Ararat, and they held, even when every human party involved was doing its best to ignore them.