Noah:

Once Avraham was born, God did not again punish a nation collectively unless the nation in question had deliberately harmed the Jewish nation. Sins committed by the members of the other nations against God are stored up in His memory to be requited at the time when the birth pangs of the Messiah have begun. Prior to Avraham’s birth, God’s attribute of Justice punished the generation of Noach and the generation of the Tower collectively for sins committed against Him.

Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (18^th Century)

The story of the tower of Babel is the corollary of this newly established covenant. On the one hand, the episode of Noach getting drunk illustrated that the attitudes of his three sons had indeed not remained identical. On the other hand, the torah seems to stress their unity of purpose which resulted in the enterprise of building the tower of Babel…God in His wisdom, did not intend for mankind to remain closely bunched together. Man erred in believing that their concentration was an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. When urbanization is the means to achieve moral perfection of man, then it is laudatory…

Yitzchak Arama (15^th Century)

God saw not only the seriousness of their (Babel) sin in the present, but also the future consequences. The Torah expresses this by saying that “God went down” and looked at the practical repercussions of their behavior. He saw that without decisive action, they had every chance of achieving their goal and corrupting mankind completely; They were “one nation” without different customs to separate them: they spoke “one language” which gave them clear communication; and they had already “started to do this,” so they were past the hardest stage of any project, getting it off the ground…God chose to confuse their languages and spread them throughout the world. This would be good for mankind since as a result any thoughts of denial of God would no longer be accepted.

Malbim (19^th Century)

After the Flood, God looks with new, almost inexplicable tolerance on the very problem of intrinsic evil that had precipitated destruction just a year before…Man is seen as an evolving being. God looks at the post Flood generation as a new and more hopeful infancy. It is true that “evil” is at its strongest at this stage. But the prospect of maturity is the reward of an evolutionary view of man. In a sense, Noah is a reborn Adam.

Aviva Zornberg (Contemporary)

Midway between Adam and Abraham, after the holocaust of the deluge, the world which God created gets another chance. A new page is opened…As if the world was created again at this very moment, this time in a covenant with mankind, the first covenant is made with all of humanity, referred to as “Bnai Noah,” children of Noah…Whatever the covenant stipulates is binding on all human beings, Jews included…While the Torah evolves as the particular instruction for Israel…it also sets the required condition for those who seek inclusion in the Noahide covenant of all human beings. Furthermore, salvation or “a share in the world to come,” is not limited to the Jews or those who join them…but is offered to all…The universal message the world got from Judaism until now was…either in the form of Christian Judaism or Moslem Judaism, both of which are tainted…

Pinchas Peli (20^th Century)