The Hebrew Bible plays on words: the city is called Bavel because there the Holy One confused — balal — the tongues of the earth. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 11:9) preserves the wordplay and then sharpens it. The name is not a description of an event. The name is a permanent diagnosis.
A city named Confusion. A capital whose very title memorializes its failure. In the Targumic reading, Babel does not just happen to become confused; Babel is confusion, and every generation that mistakes noise for greatness lives under its banner.
The Aramaic paraphrase is spare here — the Targumist lets the etymology do the work — but the choice to preserve the double act is deliberate. Twice the Lord does something at Bavel: first He mingles the speech, and then He disperses the speakers. The confusion is followed by the scattering. First you stop understanding one another, and only then do you drift apart. The emotional order is exact. Misunderstanding precedes distance.
For a tradition obsessed with names — with how a people is named, how a child is named, how the Holy One is named — this naming is the deepest wound. Babylon will rise again in the Hebrew Bible, in the Prophets, in the exile. Every time the name is spoken it summons this moment. Bavel is the city where humanity learned that building together is a spiritual achievement, not a technical one. When the shared tongue fails, the stones refuse to rise.