2. As people moved from the east, they found a plain in the land of Babylonia and settled there.
3. They said to each other, “Let’s make bricks and bake them to make them hard.” So they used bricks instead of stones, and tar instead of mortar.
4. Then they said to each other, “Let’s build a city and a tower for ourselves, whose top will reach high into the sky. We will become famous. Then we will not be scattered over all the earth.”
5. The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.
6. The Lord said, “Now, these people are united, all speaking the same language. This is only the beginning of what they will do. They will be able to do anything they want.
7. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not be able to understand each other.”
8. So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9. The place is called Babel since that is where the Lord confused the language of the whole world. So the Lord caused them to spread out from there over the whole world.
10. This is the family history of Shem. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, his son Arphaxad was born.
11. After that, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters.