The Tower of Babel, the Confusion of Tongues and the Furnace of Ur

"And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech." People come to the valley of Shinar, learn to fire brick, and resolve to build a city and a tower with its top in heaven, to make themselves a name lest they be scattered. The Torah never states their sin outright, so the sages read closely: the fault lay not in building but in unity turned against God and against man — a midrash says that when a brick fell from the tower they wept, and when a man fell no one turned around. The answer comes not by flood or fire but by confusion of tongues; the work stops and mankind scatters, suffering exactly what it feared. Seder Olam dates this to 1996, when Abraham was forty-eight. Two years later comes what the Torah calls simply "Ur of the Chaldees": Nimrod demands that Abraham bow to fire, he refuses, and he is thrown into a blazing furnace. Abraham emerges unharmed; his brother Haran, who waited to see the outcome, dies in the flames.