Rabbi Abba began: “If you crush a fool among the groats in a mortar with a pestle, his folly will not be removed from him” (Proverbs 27:22). Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: This is analogous to one who crushes barley grains with a pestle, thinking that he is rendering them high quality. But even after he raises and lowers it, “his folly will not be removed from him.” So it was with the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion. [Two years] after the Flood, “the entire earth was of one language and of common speech.”