Beginnings · Not dated
Chapter 5
The Tower of Babel
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.
Noah’s descendants had come down from the mountains, and there were a great many of them now. Everyone in the world still spoke , the same words on every tongue. As people moved , they found a wide plain in and made their homes there.
“Come, we’ll make bricks,” they said to one another, “and fire them hard.” Kilns began to smoke all over the plain. They had brick to build with instead of stone, and to hold it together.
“Come, we’ll put up a city,” they said, “with a tower in it tall enough to touch the sky. We’ll make for ourselves, so we aren’t scattered all over the earth.” Course on course, the tower climbed above the plain, and the city spread out around its foot.
The bricks were still coming out of the kilns when the Lord and looked at what the children of Adam were building, the city and its tower. “Look at them,” the Lord said. “One people, one language, and they’ve barely begun. After this, nothing they set their minds to will be beyond them. Come, and confuse their speech there, so they can’t understand one another.”
A man high on the scaffolding called down for . The men below looked up at him, then at each other, and when they shouted back he couldn’t follow a word. Up and down the tower and all through the city, neighbor to neighbor, the same noise broke out, until no one could make sense of anyone outside their own family.
So the Lord scattered them far and wide across the earth, and work on the city stopped. It was called after that, a name that sounds like the Hebrew word for “confuse”, because there the Lord had confused the speech of the whole world. The kilns went cold, and the half-built tower stood empty over the plain.
They went out in every direction, family by family, each with its own language. Every one of them could be traced back to Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, who had all had sons after the flood, and those sons’ families were the .
The peoples of came from Japheth, through seven sons, Gomer, Magog and Javan among them, each nation spreading into its own land with its own language and its own clans.
Ham fathered Cush, , Put and Canaan. Cush also fathered , besides his five other sons, and Nimrod was the first great warrior on earth. Nimrod was a mighty hunter , and people still say of a man, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter in the Lord’s sight.” His kingdom began in Shinar, with Babel itself, Erech, Accad and Calneh. From there he moved north into Assyria and built and other cities, Rehoboth Ir, the great city of Calah, and Resen, out between Nineveh and Calah.
The came from Mizraim’s line, through the Casluhim, one of his seven peoples. Canaan’s descendants, Sidon his firstborn, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites and the other , held the land from the city of Sidon toward Gerar and on to Gaza, and toward Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, reaching to Lasha.
Shem’s family would matter most of all. He was Japheth’s , with five sons, and all the descendants of came from him. Eber, Shem’s great-grandson, had two sons, Joktan and . Joktan’s thirteen sons settled the country from Mesha out toward Sephar and the eastern hills. Peleg’s name means “division”, because in his day the earth was divided.
These were the families of Noah’s sons, generation by generation, nation by nation, and from them the peoples spread across the earth after the flood. From Peleg, Shem’s line would run down to a man named Abram.
That line began two years after the flood, with the birth of Shem’s son Arpachshad, when Shem was a hundred. Shem lived five hundred years more, with other sons and daughters.
From Arpachshad it ran on, father to son, through Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Reu and Serug to Nahor, and from Nahor to Terah. Arpachshad, Shelah and Eber each lived more than , Peleg, Reu and Serug a little over two hundred, and Nahor less than a hundred and fifty. Each had more sons and daughters.
Terah was seventy when the first of his three sons was born. They were , , who had his grandfather’s name, and Haran.
Haran had a son, Lot, and two daughters. Then, with his father , Haran died in his birthplace, . Terah wept for his son in the city where he had watched the boy grow up, and from then on Haran’s son Lot belonged to his grandfather’s household.
Nahor married his niece Milcah, one of Haran’s two daughters; the other was . Abram married . Sarai, though, . Each month her bleeding came, and each month it told her the same thing.
Terah left Ur for Canaan, and he took his son Abram, Abram’s wife Sarai and his grandson Lot with him. They got as far as the town of and made their home there. Terah lived to be two hundred and five. He , still far from Canaan, the land he had set out for.