The Story

After the flood, Noah’s family grew, and soon there were many people on the earth again. In those days, everybody spoke the same language and used the same words, so anyone could talk to anyone else. As the people travelled, they found a big flat plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there.

The people had a proud idea. They learned to bake bricks hard like stone and to stick them together with sticky tar. Then they said to one another that they would build a city and a tower so tall its top would reach to heaven. Their reason is right there in the Bible: "let us make us a name". They did not want to be scattered over the earth, as God had said. They wanted everyone to admire them, and they wanted to stay together in one famous place.

So the building began. The people worked together day after day, and the sound of building filled the plain. Up and up went the city walls and the tower, brick upon brick. The people must have felt very clever and very important. Nobody was stopping to thank God or ask what He wanted. In their hearts, they were trying to be great without Him.

But God saw the city and the tower. God knew that if the proud people stayed together with one language, nothing would stop their proud plans. So the LORD came down and mixed up their language, so that suddenly they could not understand one another! Imagine the confusion on the building site: a worker asking for bricks, and his friend answering in words that sounded like nonsense. Nobody could work together anymore, and the building stopped.

Then God scattered the people abroad over the face of all the earth, just as He had always planned. The city was called Babel, "the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth" in that place. That is why the world has so many languages and so many peoples in so many lands. The tower never reached heaven — because God is the greatest of all, and He always will be.