It seems surprising that God would want people to be divided as Genesis 11:1-9 suggests, until we remember that humankind has a terrible propensity to unify in their collective evil. The flood of Noah’s time, in fact, was an even more stringent response from God in response to what mankind had done during that time. And when we move past the Tower of Babel into the Canaanite conquest and the books of the prophets, we see God time and time again dealing with evil people doing evil things to others—things like exploiting the poor, sacrificing babies to their gods, and engendering prostitution for religious worship.
Meanwhile, the divisions inherent to the Tower of Babel incident were due to people self-organizing according to their shared language. Then they branched off and moved into different parts of the world, such that they became classified by their differences with respect to language, ethnicity, and geography. And since then, the nations just haven’t played nicely together. And yet God also promises to draw all nations to himself and to remove the threat of war among the nations. What are we to make of this?
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