Everybody’s building something with their name on it.
A company. A résumé. A practice with your name on the door. A foundation, a scholarship, a wing of the hospital, a brick in the walkway. A family you hope will carry it after you’re gone. I’m not being cynical about any of that. Most of it is good, and some of it is beautiful. But it’s worth noticing how old the project is, because the Bible tells the story of the first attempt at it very early, and it doesn’t go well.
Then it tells the story again. And again. And underneath every retelling is the same question. Not whether you’ll have a name. Who’s making it.
“Let us make a name for ourselves”
Genesis 11. The whole earth has one language. People settle on a plain in Shinar, figure out how to fire bricks, and have an idea.
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)
Read that again and listen to the pronouns. Us. Ourselves. Ourselves. Build ourselves a city. Make a name for ourselves. The tower isn’t really the point. The tower is a means. The point is the name.
Name — שֵׁם — šēm — name; reputation, fame, renown; (of God) his self-manifestation, his presence (BDB; HALOT).
In Hebrew the line is naʿăśeh-llānû šēm: “let us make for ourselves a name.” Three little words. A verb of making. A preposition pointing right back at the makers. And the thing they want. Hold on to that shape. It’s going to come back.
And then there’s a joke in the very next verse, and I don’t think it’s an accident. They’ve built a tower “with its top in the heavens.” And “the LORD came down to see the city and the tower” (11:5). Came down. The tower that was supposed to reach heaven is so small from where God sits that He has to come down to look at it. You can almost hear Him: That’s cute.
They wanted a name. They got one. “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth” (11:9). In Hebrew it’s a pun, bābel and bālal, Babel and “confused.” They set out to make a name, and the name they ended up with means the mess they made.
“Make your name great”
Turn one page.
1 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Genesis 12:1–2)
Same noun. Completely different grammar.
At Babel the subject of the sentence is us. Here the subject is I. Babel says let us make a name for ourselves. God says to Abram, I will make your name great, waʾăgaddĕlâ šĕmekā.
Make great — גָּדַל — gādal — to grow up, become great; piel: to make great, magnify (BDB).
Genesis puts those two chapters side by side on purpose. One is a name seized. The other is a name given. One builds up toward heaven. In the other, heaven comes to one man and says go, and everything that follows is promise, not achievement. Abram doesn’t build a name in Genesis 12. The only things he builds are altars (12:7, 8), and at the second one he “called upon the name of the LORD.” Babel wanted its own name on the building. Abram builds a place to call on somebody else’s. Mostly, though, he packs. God is basically telling a seventy-five-year-old it’s time to move out of his dad’s basement.
And the name he’s given has a purpose beyond itself: “so that you will be a blessing… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (12:2–3). The name God gives isn’t a monument. It’s a way for blessing to travel.
A promise nobody had heard in a thousand years
Now jump ahead about a millennium, to a king who wants to build something.
David has his throne, his city and his palace. Second Samuel 7 opens with the king “in his house,” with rest from his enemies, looking out at the ark of God sitting under a curtain, and the idea arrives: I live in cedar; God lives in a tent. I should build Him a house. It’s a good idea. The prophet Nathan even says yes. And that night God says no. Not you’re not allowed. More like you’ve got this backwards. You don’t build Me a house, David. I’m going to make you one (7:11). And somewhere in the middle of that reversal God says this:
9 And I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you. And I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. (2 Samuel 7:9)
Robert Bergen calls this “a covenantal promise not made by the Lord to an individual since the days of Abraham.”1 Nobody in Israel’s story has heard God say this to one person since Genesis 12.
Now look at the Hebrew, because here’s where it gets good. God doesn’t borrow Abram’s verb here. He borrows Babel’s.
Make — עָשָׂה — ʿāśâ — to do, make (BDB).
Babel: naʿăśeh-llānû šēm, “let us make for ourselves a name.” David: wĕʿāśitî lĕkā šēm gādôl, “I will make for you a great name.”
Same verb. Same noun. Same little preposition pointing at who the name is for. The one thing that changes is who’s holding the tools. At Babel people make a name for themselves. At David’s palace God makes a name for David. Babel’s sentence, with the right subject put back in it.
The chapter keeps reaching back to Abraham, too. Bergen and Harry Hoffner both trace a whole cluster of echoes.2 God calls David “my servant” (7:5, 8), the title God gave Abraham (Genesis 26:24). He promises an heir “who shall come from your body” (7:12), and the Hebrew there, ʾăšer yēṣēʾ mimmēʿêkā, is word for word what God said to childless Abram in Genesis 15:4. (The ESV renders it “your very own son” in Genesis and “who shall come from your body” in Samuel, which is why most English readers never notice it’s the same sentence.) And when David answers in prayer, he addresses God as “Lord GOD,” ʾădōnāy YHWH, seven times (7:18, 19 twice, 20, 22, 28, 29). That title doesn’t appear anywhere else in either book of Samuel. The first person in the whole Bible to use it is Abram, in Genesis 15:2 and 15:8, when he asks God about an heir and about a land.
There’s even a little wordplay in 7:9 itself. “A great name, like the name of the great ones”: šēm gādôl, haggĕdōlîm. A. A. Anderson suspects it’s deliberate. The Chronicler’s version of the chapter drops the word “great” (1 Chronicles 17:8), and so do most Greek manuscripts of Samuel.3
So David is standing in Abraham’s line, hearing Abraham’s promise, in Babel’s grammar, with God as the subject. One verse. What a promise.
He gives it back
Watch what David does with it.
God has just promised him a great name. David goes in, sits down before the LORD, and prays, and in that prayer the word great starts to migrate. The Hebrew root gdl runs all the way through it:
21 Because of your promise, and according to your own heart, you have brought about all this greatness, to make your servant know it. 22 Therefore you are great, O Lord GOD. For there is none like you… 26 And your name will be magnified forever… (2 Samuel 7:21–22, 26)
God said I’ll make your name great. David says your name be great. Wĕyigdal šimkā, may your name be magnified. David takes the great name he’s just been handed and hands it straight back. I love that.
Along the way, in 7:23, he remembers that God did this once already: He went to redeem a people for Himself, “making himself a name” in Egypt. (The verb shifts there to śûm, to set or place, but the idea is the same.) The only one in this chapter who has ever properly made a name is God, and He made it by rescuing somebody.
In so many ways this is the story of the scriptures. God, making a name for Himself by rescuing someone. Rescuing the very ones who would reject Him and tried to make a name for themselves.
The name above every name
Now come all the way forward.
Babel wanted a tower “with its top in the heavens.” That’s not an engineering spec. It’s a claim on God’s place. Build high enough, and you’re up where the name-giving happens.
Paul writes about the one person in history who actually belonged up there, and what He did with it.
5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5–11)
“A thing to be grasped.”
Grasped — ἁρπαγμός — harpagmos — robbery, violent seizure; something to which one can claim or assert title by gripping or grasping, something claimed (BDAG).
This one word has generated more scholarship than almost any other in Paul, and it isn’t settled. Some hear snatching: reaching out and seizing. Most hear clinging to or exploiting: holding tight to what’s already yours and using it for your own advantage. Serious people land on both sides of the grammar. But don’t miss where Paul starts the sentence. Jesus “was in the form of God.” Whatever harpagmos means, He isn’t reaching for something He lacks. The word is about grabbing. And the only person in the story with every right to the top of heaven is the one person who wouldn’t grab.
Then look at verse 9. “Therefore God… bestowed on him the name.”
Bestowed — χαρίζομαι — charizomai — to give freely as a favor, give graciously (BDAG).
It’s the verb built on charis, grace. Even the name above every name is given. Jesus doesn’t make a name for Himself. The Father gives it.
So set the whole line side by side. Babel reaches for a name and gets confusion. Abram is given a name and becomes a blessing. David is given a name, hands it back in prayer, and prays for God to do as He has promised. Jesus refuses to grasp anything and is given the name above every name. The shape was there from Genesis 12. It just took a long time to find someone who would stay inside it all the way down. Who makes a name great? God does. Who gives it? God does.
And the promise to David doesn’t get dropped along the way. When the angel tells Mary about her son, the first thing he says is “He will be great” (Luke 1:32). That’s 7:9’s great name, finally landing on the Son it was reaching for. Jesus is the true and better Son of David.
Where the names end up
The Bible ends with names too, and every one of them is given.
“To the one who conquers I will give… a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it” (Revelation 2:17). “I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from my God out of heaven, and my own new name” (3:12). The rider on the white horse “has a name written that no one knows but himself” (19:12), and on His robe, “King of kings and Lord of lords” (19:16). And at the very end, God’s servants “will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (22:4).
Nobody in Revelation makes a name. Every name is written on somebody by somebody else. Received.
And the city? Babel was a city built up, bricks and bitumen, top in the heavens, to make a name. Here’s the last city in the Bible:
2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21:2)
Coming down. At Babel God came down to see a tower that couldn’t reach Him. At the end, the city comes down from Him, with the names already written.
So here’s the good news.
You don’t have to make your name great. You were never built to carry that. It’s exhausting, for one thing. Babel was scattered across the earth trying. And the name you make is always a little bit Babel: it means, in the end, whatever mess you made getting it.
The other way is older than Abraham and newer than tomorrow. Receive the name. Let God make it. Let it be for somebody else’s blessing, not your monument. And if your life doesn’t come with the house the world says a name needs, if there’s no line, no legacy, no building with your name on it, God hasn’t forgotten your name.
Your name is safest in His hands.
It always was.
Notes
Footnotes
-
Robert D. Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel, New American Commentary 7 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996), on 2 Sam 7:9 (commentary on the chapter at 334–345). ↩
-
Bergen, 1, 2 Samuel, on 2 Sam 7:12 and 7:18 (the Gen 15:4 clause; ʾădōnāy YHWH first at Gen 15:2, 8); Harry A. Hoffner Jr., 1 & 2 Samuel, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015), 2:298–335, on 2 Sam 7:9 and 7:12. The count of ʾădōnāy YHWH (seven in 2 Sam 7, none elsewhere in 1–2 Samuel) was checked against the Westminster Leningrad Codex. ↩
-
A. A. Anderson, 2 Samuel, Word Biblical Commentary 11 (Dallas: Word, 1989), on 2 Sam 7:9 (commentary on the chapter at 109–128). ↩