Noah’s Sons and the Tower

Then Noah, first of all, built an altar to God and offered sacrifices from among the birds. Immediately afterward he was blessed by God together with his sons, and was commanded not to eat blood and not to shed the blood of any human being, because Cain, who had no such command, had stained the first age of the world. So the sons of Noah were left alone in a world that was then empty, for he had three: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. But Ham, because he had mocked his father when he lay senseless with wine, brought his father’s curse on himself. Ham’s son, named Cush, fathered the giant Nimrod, who is said to have built the city of Babylon. Many other towns are reported to have been founded at that time, but I do not mean to name them one by one here. [a]

Although the human race had by now multiplied, and people lived in different places and on islands, they all still used one language, as long as the multitude, which was afterward to be scattered over the whole world, kept together in one body. In the way of human nature, they planned to win a great name by building some great work before they parted from one another. So they tried to build a tower that would reach up to heaven. But by God’s decree, so that the labor of those at work on it might be hindered, they began to speak in languages of some kind very different from their usual speech, and no one understood anyone else. This made them all the readier to scatter, for since they looked on each other as foreigners, they were easily led to separate. And the world was divided among the sons of Noah so that Shem held the East, Japheth the West, and Ham the lands in between. After this, down to the time of Abraham, their family line offered nothing very remarkable or worth recording.