Noah & Babel

Week 3: Hebrew Bible - Assignments - Reading - Resources - Images


GENESIS: The Tower of Babel (modern English)

Reading time: 3 minutes. Word count: 200 words.

The next story, which is probably one of the most famous episodes from the Book of Genesis: the story of the Tower of Babel. Remember that in the previous story it was Nimrod who was the founder of the kingdom of Babel.

Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

They said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly." And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth."

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech."

So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.


Questions. Make sure you can answer these questions about what you just read:

  • what did they use to build the tower?
  • how did God stop them from finishing the tower?
  • what finally happened to the people?

Source: World English Bible, Genesis 6-11. Weblink.


Modern Languages / Anthropology 3043: Folklore & Mythology. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
Page last updated: October 9, 2004 12:52 PM