The Tower of Babel is a structure featured in chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis, an enormous tower intended as the crowning achievement of the city of Babilu, the Akkadian name for Babylon. Babel was a city that united humanity, all speaking a single language and migrating from the east; it was the home city of the great king Nimrod, and the first city to be built after the Great Flood. The people decided their city should have a tower so immense that it would have “its top in the heavens”. 

However, the Tower of Babel was not built for the worship and praise of God, but was dedicated to false man-made religion, with a motive of making a ‘celebrated name’ for the builders. However God (Lord, Yehovah, Allah, Yahweh) seeing what the people were doing and sinning against him, confused their languages and scattered the people throughout the earth.

“Babel” is a cosmopolitan city typified by a confusion of languages.

The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The phrase Tower of Babel does not actually appear in the Bible; it is always, “the city and its tower” or just “the city”.

wikipedia.en