The Tower of Babel Bible story for kids

Every voice made sense.

A long, long time ago, the people of the whole earth used the same words. No translators. No puzzled faces. Everyone understood everyone else.

Together, they traveled to a wide, flat plain in a land called Shinar. There they stopped. They looked across all that open space... and made a plan.

"Let's make bricks!" somebody said.

They shaped bricks from clay and baked them until they were hard. Instead of mortar, they used thick, sticky tar.

Squish the clay. Bake it hard. Stack it high. Again. And again. And again.

"Let's build a city!" they said. "And a tower! A tower so tall it reaches all the way up to the sky! Then everyone will know our name. And we'll never, ever have to spread out."

That was the trouble. God had blessed Noah's family and told them to fill the earth. But these people said, "Let us make a name for ourselves. Let us stay right here."

The bricks rose. Row after row after row. The city grew around them, and the tower climbed above it.

The people looked up and smiled. "We're almost to the heavens!"

God looked... down.

The tower they thought was touching heaven? God came down to see it.

That is how small their greatest work was beside Him. The tower was tall to them. It was not tall to God.

God saw more than bricks. He saw proud hearts. The people were using the gift of one language to disobey Him, stay together, and make themselves great.

So God stopped the building. He confused their language, so they could no longer understand one another.

The Bible does not tell us exactly what that confusion sounded like. But perhaps it went something like this:

One builder said, "Pass me a brick!"

And his friend heard... "Pass me a fish?!"

"No — a brick!"

"A stick?!"

"Brick! Brick! Brick!"

"Pickle?!"

"Quack quack quack?!"

Faces scrunched. Hands waved. One builder pointed to a brick while another searched everywhere for a pickle.

And then the work stopped. The city was left unfinished. Families packed up and went their separate ways, just as God had said they must.

They called the city Babel, because there God confused the language of the whole earth.

They built so they would never be scattered. And scattered is exactly where they went — out and out, across the whole wide earth. Their tower could not reach God. But God came down anyway. He always does.

And God was with him. God was with her. God is with you, too.

May the same God whose purpose reaches farther than any tower... never lose track of you.