At this point the whole Earth all spoke one language. Wait a minute, didn't the last chapter just say that people developed their own tongues? What the fuck happened to that?

Anyway, as usually happens when you get a large group of people together, some really crazy ideas took shape. The people decided to build a big tower so as to reach Heaven, since God was no longer returning anyone's phone calls. God, not liking the idea that these uppity humans could come up with a clever idea if they worked together, destroyed the tower and confused everyone so they all started speaking different languages. This made the Tower of Babel Reunion Party a real ordeal.

So there was a guy named Shem (not to be confused with Shemp, who walked with Moe and Larry). Anyway, despite all that nonsense that God spouted earlier about man living to only a hundred and twenty years, Shemp…er, Shem…lived way way longer than that, and poked many a Stooge in the eyes, except when God would inspire said stooge to put his hand up in front of the bridge of his nose. Thus was written Stooge law: One shall be wary of the eye poking, and must be ever ready with the hand of thwarting to protect the eyes from the evils of the fingerpoke. Amen.

Anyway, despite the fact that God had very clearly stated that men weren’t supposed to live beyond 120 years, many generations of Shem’s children lived far longer than that. Eventually, Terah was born. Terah has no relevance to our story, except that he was Abram’s father and Lot’s grandfather. Abram, as we shall see, turned out to be kind of a big deal.

So Abram had a brother named Nahor, who got himself a wife and raised some kids. Abram, on the other hand, decided to marry Sarai, who it turns out was barren. Bummer.

So it came to pass that Terah brought the primary characters in our little story (Abram, Sarai, and Lot) to Harad, which was just beyond Canaan. He then lived well beyond God’s chosen lifespan, and finally keeled over well after anyone had stopped caring about what sort of inheritance they could expect.