After the flood, God told Noah and his family, “be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.” (Genesis 9:7)
Many years passed, and Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, had many children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
Now the whole world at that time had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar [Babylonia] and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel [Babel sounds like the Hebrew word for confused] —because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.
From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
excerpts and edited passages taken from Genesis 10:1b through Genesis 11:1-9
