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Genesis 11 describes God warning that nothing will be beyond the builders of Babel. Pseudo-Philo quotes this warning as a prediction fulfilled when Israel makes the golden calf.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Genesis 11:6
Hebrew Bible
4 Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the entire earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had started building. 6 And the Lord said, “If as one people all sharing a common language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. 7 Come, let’s go down and confuse their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” 8 So the Lord scattered them from there across the face of the entire earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why its name was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the entire world, and from there the Lord scattered them across the face of the entire earth.
Pseudo Philo Biblical Antiquities 12:3
Classical
2 But while he was on the mountain, the heart of the people was corrupted, and they came together to Aaron, saying, “Make us gods to serve, as the other nations also have, for this Moses, by whom the wonders were done before us, has been taken from us.” Aaron said to them, “Be patient, for Moses will come and bring judgment near to us, and light up a law for us, and declare from his mouth the great excellence of God, and appoint judgments for our people.” 3 When he said this, they did not listen to him, so that the word might be fulfilled that was spoken in the day when the people sinned in building the tower, when God said, “And now, if I do not stop them, they will dare everything they take it into their minds to do, and worse.” But Aaron was afraid, because the people were greatly emboldened, and he said to them, “Bring me the earrings of your wives.” And the men sought each one his wife, and they gave them at once, and they put them in the fire, and they were made into a figure, and out came a molten calf.
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Notes and References
“... Pseudo-Philo views early biblical material as prophetic in nature and often shows how this material was fulfilled in the later biblical narrative. For example, setting the human lifespan at 120 years (Gen. 6.3) is fulfilled in the length of Moses’ life (LAB 9.8; Deut. 34.7), while making the golden calf (Exod. 32) fulfills God’s predictions in Gen. 11.6 that humans will go from bad to worse (LAB 12.3). Bauckham believes that at many points Pseudo-Philo’s retelling of biblical history parallels the manner in which the Matthean and Lukan evangelists retell the Jesus story as they find it in the Gospel of Mark and in other traditions. ...”
Evans, Craig A.
"Luke and the Rewritten Bible: Aspects of Lukan Hagiography" in Charlesworth, James H., and Craig A. Evans (eds.) The Pseudepigrapha and Early Biblical Interpretation
(p. 189) JSOT Press, 1993
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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