Genesis 11:1-11

Good News Translation

The Tower of Babylon

11 At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words. ² As they wandered about in the East, they came to a plain in Babylonia and settled there. ³ They said to one another, “Come on! Let's make bricks and bake them hard.” So they had bricks to build with and tar to hold them together. ⁴ They said, “Now let's build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.”

⁵ Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which they had built, ⁶ and he said, “Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want! ⁷ Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.” ⁸ So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ The city was called Babylon,^[a] because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the people, and from there he scattered them all over the earth.

The Descendants of Shem^(A)

¹⁰ These are the descendants of Shem. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he had a son, Arpachshad. ¹¹ After that, he lived another 500 years and had other children.