Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:8) does not describe a gentle scattering. It describes a massacre.
The Word of the Lord — the Memra, that favorite Targumic circumlocution for the active divine presence — descends over Babel with seventy angels, one for each nation-to-be, and the builders suddenly cannot understand one another. Each speaks a different tongue and possesses a different script. Each asks a question his neighbor cannot answer. And the Targum does not soften what happens next: one slew the other.
This is a devastating addition to the Hebrew Bible's quieter version. Scripture says only that they ceased building. The Targumist tells us why. They ceased because they began killing. A civilization that had moments earlier spoken with one mouth turned its tools into weapons the instant it lost its shared vocabulary.
The reading is dark, but it is honest. The Targum knows what happens when communication fails. The person across the table is no longer a partner in the project; he is a stranger, and strangers frighten us into violence. The building ends not because the Holy One removes the bricks, but because the builders remove one another.
There is a quiet instruction here for every generation that has ever shared a language and then lost it — a family, a community, a people. What we call building is only ever the fruit of understanding. When the understanding dies, the tower dies with it. The bricks had always been the easy part.