[11:1] At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words.
[11:2] As they wandered about in the East, they came to a plain in Babylonia and settled there.
[11:3] 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.
[11:4] 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.”
[11:5] Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which they had built,
[11:6] 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!
[11:7] Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.”
[11:8] So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.
[11:9] The city was called Babylon, because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the people, and from there he scattered them all over the earth.