*Chapter 11 Begins with the etiological story of how all the different languages of the world developed. It is not placed in time, but just kind of floats there and divides one genealogical account from another.
* For some reason, God felt threatened by these smart people building a tall tower, which can't have been any taller than the tallest buildings around today. So, he and some unnamed others go down and confuse the people's language so they can't cooperate any more and do things like build spaceships or go to the moon.
* Here's the tricky part. From where did God come down? If God is up, how far up is he? So far we haven't been able to figure that out, no matter how high we go.
*Now, no one can understand anyone else, which must have been a pain. Somehow God used this event to scatter people all over the world. This, the author tells us, is why the place is called "Babel."
He is apparently making a little pun on the word Babylon, which was in the area where the story supposedly took place.
*What the author doesn't seem to know is that many different languages existed even before the flood is supposed to have happened, and that the development of language is a natural phenomenon still occuring today.
See:
Tower of Babel
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