The Babel tower story. And this is quite challenging to interpret since at first sight God here is shown as evil envious vaillant who spoils people's great enterprise. As a nice bonus it's also says that “Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building” thus casting doubt on God's ubiquitousness.\n \n So our task is to understand what all this means to us, what actual impact on your and my life, decisions and deeds it should have. Find its practical application, if you will. Should I stop learning foreign languages? Should we stop building skyscrapers? Abandon space exploration?\n \n The most obvious understanding one can make out of it is that it was just and act of intimidation, like God wanted to show who's the boss. But I'm sure it's not that simple. First of all, God was concerned with people's intentions, remember, they wanted “make a name for ourselves”. Which is nothing but the sin of hubris. And like a loving parent God guarded our forefathers from falling into it like we keep our children from falling into a ditch. Perhaps mankind was not yet ready for big projects then. Hopefully it is ready now. Hence with God in our minds and hearts we could and should study languages, build whatever we can and aspire for deepest space travel. But not to “make a name for ourselves” but to bring glory to the name of God. And well, if it's not the time yet I'm sure God will guard us again.\n \n That's my understanding and I hope you find it useful for yourself too. \n really, why would God need to 'came down to the city' if he's already been there? it's important to remember that events took place few thousand years ago. It's quite a long time and people's understand of God has changed since that. Hence those who wrote the Bible might be not familiar with the notion of ubiquitousness at all and just wrote it the best they could.\n and recorded at the same time? dunno, need to find it out, but I guess not much later