OT Week 5 - Tower of Babel

Here's a picture from Distant Shores Media and Sweet Publishing that we've used to represent this week.

Here's a fun group game we played for Week 5:

Babel Blocks

Review Game – Week 5

Use a Jenga or other block building game set to help your students master the material. On each student’s turn, roll a WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE die (we made these out of cardstock... has one face for each element of the week, then a "you pick" side and a "roll again" side). They must say something from the question that turns up. When they do, they can put a block on the tower.

Build it as high as you can, and then point out that you were able to work together!

• How well would building it work if you couldn’t talk to each other?

Do the game again and again until you need to move on.

This is the script we used to share the Biblical account of Babel:

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11

Noah had three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. They all had children, who had children, who had children, who had children, who had children... They had a lot of children. God had told them to have a lot of kids, but He also told them to fill up the earth. But, the whole world had one language and everyone understood each other. The people found a big, wide open space in Shinar and settled there to live. They didn't spread out, but stayed all together.

The people started building buildings out of bricks, not stone, and they used tar to stick the bricks together. So they baked, baked, baked the bricks until they were hard and ready to be put together! They said, “Let's build a great big city, with a tall, tall tower that goes way, way, way up into the sky! We will be the most famous people in the world! If we don't do this, we will be scattered over the whole earth!”

But what had God told them to do? He'd told them to fill the earth! So God looked at the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “They all speak one language, and if they keep going like this, there won't be anything that they won't be able to do together!"

That might sound like a good thing, and it might be if everyone was doing the right things! But remember before the Flood, everyone was only thinking about bad things... what would happen if everyone decided to do the wrong thing? What bad things could they come up with to do?

God said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” God said "let us"... why did He say "us?" Tell me about who God is... (God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God created the universe. Jesus and the Holy Spirit were with God in the Beginning.)

That day, someone probably asked for a hammer and the other person gave them a sheep! Or maybe someone wanted water and the other person scratched their head! Or maybe someone said, "stop!" and instead the other person threw mud on their toes! Do you think people would be able to work together if they couldn't understand each other?

The Lord scattered them from the Tower of Babel and they went all over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why the city was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.