At that time everyone on earth spoke one language. And as they traveled from the east, they arrived at a valley in Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us build a city and a tower whose top will reach the sky; and let us provide for ourselves there, so that we will not be scattered over all the earth.” And they said, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them hard.” (Bricks were their stones, and asphalt their mortar.)
And the Lord saw the city and the tower that the humans were building. And he said, “If this is how they have begun to act, while they are one people and they all have one language, nothing theywish for will be beyond their reach. Come, let us go down and make a babble of their language, so that no one will understand what anyone else is saying.”
So they stopped building the city, and the Lord scattered them over all the earth. That is why the city is named Babel, because it was there that the Lord made a babble of the language of all the earth, and from there he scattered them over all the earth.