Tower of Babel and genealogy stuff. I often wonder what God wants us to get out of these 'family line' passages. Is there anything to learn here for us today? I always want to skip over these passages (and usually do, or skim them) but have the nagging thought that I'm missing something.

A couple of other points:

11:5 – God 'came down to see' the tower. He obviously knew about it or he wouldn't have known to come down. It's just interesting to me that the Bible states that he 'came down' to see it.

I've heard the tower of Babel passage used to show how powerful it would be if the church was unified. But God found this unity here a bad thing. So much so that he acted to destroy it. Was it just their motives that God found offensive? We've surely built bigger towers today than they were capable of them. Why did God destroy their efforts and does not do the same for ours?