Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:6) preserves a sentence that has given interpreters trouble for centuries. God looks down at the builders of Babel and says: they will not be restrained from doing whatever they imagine.
Read that slowly. This is not a verse about power. It is a verse about imagination.
The Aramaic sharpens what the Hebrew Bible leaves ambiguous. The danger at Babel is not that humanity has grown strong. The danger is that humanity has grown united in appetite. One people, one tongue, one desire — and no internal friction to slow any of it down. A civilization without disagreement is a civilization without brakes.
The Targumist wants you to notice that the Holy One does not condemn ambition itself. The text does not say they planned something evil. It says they planned something, and nothing would stop them. The problem is the unchecked line. The problem is momentum.
There is a strange mercy buried in what follows. By scattering the tongues, God is not punishing unity — He is restoring the possibility of pause. Translation forces thought. Disagreement forces revision. A world in which every plan sails through unchallenged is a world in which every plan, good and bad alike, arrives.
The builders of Babel wanted frictionlessness. The Targum suggests that friction is the thing that keeps us human. What we call argument, heaven sometimes calls protection.