King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 11
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And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of ; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto ; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the of the whole earth. And came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So scattered them abroad from thence upon the of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did scatter them abroad upon the of all the earth. These are the generations of : was an hundred years old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: And lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: 13And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. 14And Salah lived thirty years, and begat : 15And Salah lived after he begat four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived four and thirty years, and begat : 17And lived after he begat four hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived thirty years, and begat : 19And lived after he begat two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived two and thirty years, and begat : 21And lived after he begat two hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived thirty years, and begat : 23And lived after he begat two hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived nine and twenty years, and begat : 25And lived after he begat an hundred and nineteen years, and begat sons and daughters. And lived seventy years, and begat , , and . Now these are the generations of : begat , , and ; and begat . And before his in the land of his nativity, in of the Chaldees. And and took them wives: the name of ’s wife was ; and the name of ’s wife, , the daughter of , of , and of . But was ; she had no child. And took his son, and the son of his son’s son, and his daughter in law, his son ’s wife; and they went forth with them from of the Chaldees, to go into the land of ; and they came unto , and dwelt there. 32And the days of were two hundred and five years: and in .
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
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