11At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words. ²As they wandered about in the East, they came to a plain in Babylonia and settled there. ³They said to one another, “Come on! Let’s make bricks and bake them hard.” So they had bricks to build with and tar to hold them together. ⁴They said, “Now let’s build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.”

⁵Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which those men had built, ⁶and he said, “Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want! ⁷Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand one another.” ⁸So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹The city was called Babylon,^g because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the people, and from there he scattered them all over the earth.

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Footnotes

gbabylon: This name sounds like the Hebrew for “mixed up”.