The Dispersal of the Nations
God read the hearts of the wicked people of Babel, and punished them in the very way that they had feared. He made their might of no avail, took from them their power, and destroyed them as a nation, scattering them over the face of the earth. The huge tower and great walled city by which they had hoped to perpetuate their strength, plunged them into dissension. They quarreled over their work, and grew mutually suspicious. Falsehood was bred in the world, and a man’s tongue no longer spoke the language of his heart. “Let us go down,” God is represented as saying, “and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” They fled from one another. Thus the descendants of Ham lost their early power.
Then came the days of the “Semites,” the descendants of Shem, whose names are carefully recorded, at least in the line of the “first-born,” an ascendancy regarded as highly important among the Hebrews. Shem had been the first-born in the eleventh generation from Adam. In the fourteenth came Eber, whose name is given as the source of the word Hebrews. Then in the twentieth generation came Abram or Abraham, who stands as the chief figure brought out in the story of the patriarchs.
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