Event · The Beginning and Early Generations
The tower of Babel
The tower of BabelGenesis 11:1–9No calendar date
People build a city and a tower to make a name for themselves; the LORD confuses their language and scatters them.
- Main passage Genesis 11:1–9
Places named Shinar Genesis 11:2 · Babel Genesis 11:9
- Place in the order
- Explicit biblical sequence Scripture itself gives the order of these events.
- Historical setting
- No calendar date Unknown date
Genesis gives these events an order but no calendar date. Totals worked out from the genealogies depend on assumptions and differ between the Hebrew, Greek and Samaritan texts.
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Genesis 11:1–9 WEB
1The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. 2As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. 3They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. 4They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” 5The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. 6The LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. 7Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8So the LORD scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. 9Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. From there, the LORD scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.