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IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD
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Tower of Babel
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AUDIO
Tower of Babel
The story of the Tower of Babel does not recount historical facts, but instead is a myth of origins known as an “etiology.” The story serves to explain why the people of the world speak various different languages. The Bible tells us that the single human race originally had only one shared language.
Up to this point people lived as nomads, always on the move. In other words, they had no fixed place of residence. When they reached the plain of Shinar, they settled there and began to build houses, using bricks of baked clay and bitumen as mortar. The people then decided to build a city and a tower that would reach up to heaven, but God saw this as arrogance. God came down from heaven and made people suddenly speak different languages as punishment. This meant they could no longer understand each other and the building project failed.
Interestingly, the name of the city does not appear in the beginning of the biblical narrative. Only after God confuses the languages of the human race is it called Babel, because the Hebrew word “balal” means “to confuse”.