World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 11
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The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of , and they lived there. They said to one another, "Come, let's make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, "Come, let's build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to , and let's make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth." came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. 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. Come, let's go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there confused the language of all the earth. From there, scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth. This is the history of the generations of : was one hundred years old when he became of two years after the flood. lived five hundred years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived thirty-five years and became of . 13 lived four hundred three years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. 14 lived thirty years, and became of . 15 lived four hundred three years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived thirty-four years, and became of . 17 lived four hundred thirty years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived thirty years, and became of . 19 lived two hundred nine years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived thirty-two years, and became of . 21 lived two hundred seven years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived thirty years, and became of . 23 lived two hundred years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived twenty-nine years, and became of . 25 lived one hundred nineteen years after he became of , and became of more sons and daughters. lived seventy years, and became of , , and . Now this is the history of the generations of . became of , , and . became of . in the land of his birth, in of the Chaldees, while his was still alive. and married wives. The name of wife was , and the name of wife was , the daughter of , who was also of . was . She had no child. took his son, the son of , his son's son, and his daughter-in-law, his son wife. They went from of the Chaldees, to go into the land of . They came to and lived there. 32The days of were two hundred five years. in .
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The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis