11At this time the whole world spoke one language, and everyone used the same words. ²As people moved from the east, they found a plain in the land of Babylonia and settled there.

³They said to each other, “Let’s make bricks and bake them to make them hard.” So they used bricks instead of stones, and tar instead of mortar. ⁴Then they said to each other, “Let’s build a city and a tower for ourselves, whose top will reach high into the sky. We will become famous. Then we will not be scattered over all the earth.”

⁵The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. ⁶The Lord said, “Now, these people are united, all speaking the same language. This is only the beginning of what they will do. They will be able to do anything they want. ⁷Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not be able to understand each other.”

⁸So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹The place is called Babel ⁿ since that is where the Lord confused the language of the whole world. So the Lord caused them to spread out from there over the whole world.

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Footnotes

nBabel This name sounds like the Hebrew word for “confused.”