The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one languagek and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,a they found a plain in Shinarb l and settled there.

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricksm and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,n and taro for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens,p so that we may make a nameq for ourselves; otherwise we will be scatteredr over the face of the whole earth.”s

5 But the Lord came downt to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same languageu they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let usv go downw and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”x

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth,y and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babelc z—because there the Lord confused the languagea of the whole world.b From there the Lord scatteredc them over the face of the whole earth.

From Shem to Abram

11:10–27pp—Ge 10:21–31; 1Ch 1:17–27

10 This is the accountd of Shem’s family line.

Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the fatherd of Arphaxad.e 11 And after he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters.