¹The whole world had one language with a common vocabulary. ²As people moved toward the east,^athey found a plain in Shinar ^[Babylonia^[ and settled there.

³They said to one another, “Let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used bricks as stones and tar^bas mortar.

⁴Then they said, “Let’s build a city for ourselves and a tower with its top in the sky. Let’s make a name for ourselves so that we won’t become scattered all over the face of the earth.”

⁵The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the descendants of Adam were building. ⁶The Lord said, “They are one people with one language. This is only the beginning of what they will do! Now nothing they plan to do will be too difficult for them. ⁷Let us go down there and mix up their language so that they won’t understand each other.”

⁸So the Lord scattered them all over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹This is why it was named Babel, because there the Lord turned the language of the whole earth into babble. From that place the Lord scattered them all over the face of the earth.

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Footnotes

a 11:2 Or “from the east.”
[Proper names or foreign words whose meaning is significant for understanding a particular Bible passage are translated in brackets following the name or phrase
b 11:3 Or “bitumen.”