No Bullshit Bible Lesson #4: The Tower of Babel

Genesis, Chapters 9-11:


After God was done flooding the Earth, he told Noah and his family to get to work repopulating the Earth:

        “Noah (and family),” God said, “You guys need to get started on some serious begetting. Oh, and all those animals you toiled for over a year to save? You are now allowed to eat them. But not their blood. You have to drain that out first, because that’s just for me. But you can’t be cruel to them. Or each other. Oh, and super-important...if you kill someone, then you forfeit your own life. I think maybe protecting Cain because he was a murderer probably led to all the shit I had to flood the Earth for. Am I rambling? Anyway: Go, multiply. Oh, and not to worry, your tedious begetting will not go to waste, I’m not gonna flood the place again. Here, I’ll invent rainbows to remind me, in case I forget.”

So, They started their begetting, one of the noteworthy begotten sons, was Canaan, son of Noah’s youngest, Ham.

Meanwhile, Noah started a vineyard and began making (and drinking) wine. One day, he got so drunk that he passed out naked in his tent. Ham saw him splayed out drunk in his tent and went and told his brothers, who went and covered him up, making sure not to look at his shriveled, 600-year-old begetting stick.

In the morning, Noah woke and saw that someone had covered him up. Using what can only be described as the best detective skills ever, he surmised that Ham had seen him naked and he got super-pissed.
        “Because my son saw me naked, I will put a curse on his son! Yeah, that’s it. Canaan’s brethren will be servants of servants! And my other two sons will be blessed by the Lord. In fact, God will enlarge Japheth and Canaan will be a servant to them both. So suck on that, Ham, you douchebag.”

Later, at the age of 950, Noah died.

In the meantime, though, his sons got to “know” their wives an awful lot. They begat and begat and begat. And the begotten began to beget. Ham had a grandson, who was given the unfortunate name of Nimrod, and he founded the city of Babel. And other of these begotten founded other cities, such as Sodom, Gomorrah, Adma, Zeboim, Lasha, etc. In the aforementioned Babel, they decided to build a tower to heaven. They made it of brick, with slime for mortar.

God came and saw this tower and did not approve of a tower to heaven, even if its use of slime for mortar made it a filed endeavor from the start.
        “Look at them, all talking to one another and sharing knowledge. That simply won’t do,” God said to himself.
So he cast the people all around the world and gave them all separate languages, so they would not be able to collaborate until someone invented the internet (or at least the telegraph).

Then, of course, more begetting. And everyone lives several hundred years, despite God’s previous declaration that people would only live to the age of 120. One of these, a descendant of Shem, was called Terah, and he had a son named Abram and one named Haran (who died) who had a son named Lot.

Terah took Abram and his wife and Lot and moved them to the land of Canaan, in a city that, coincidentally, had the same name as Lot’s deceased father: Haran.