The Tower of Babel

11:1-9

11 Now at first, all the people on the earth spoke the same language, so that everyone understood each other. 2 As time passed, they moved from the eastern regions and eventually came to a wide, flat valley in the region of Shinar and stayed there. 3 Then they urged each other, “Come on, let us work together and make bricks from clay and put them in fire to make them hard.” They used bricks to build with instead of stone, and they used tar between the bricks instead of mortar. 4 Then they urged each other, “Come on, we should work together and build a city for us to live in that has a very tall building that reaches high into the sky. That way we will become famous, and we will not separate from each other and live all over the earth.”

5 But one day Yahweh came down from heaven and looked at the city and the very tall building that the people were building. 6 Then he said, “Look, they are one people group, and they all speak the same language. This is only the beginning of what they can do together. Soon they will be able to do anything they plan to do. 7 So we must go down there now and mix up their language so that they are not able to understand what they say to each other.” 8 In that way, Yahweh caused the people to leave from there and live in different places all over the world, so that they had to stop building the city and the tall building. 9 That is why the name of the city is Babel, which means “mixed up,” because that is where Yahweh mixed up the language that everyone on the earth shared, and in that way he made them spread out from there all over the earth.