Genesis 11:1-9
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.
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- Genesis 11:9 This name sounds like the Hebrew for “mixed up.”
Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition) © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.