According to
Genesis Chapter 11 of the
Bible, the 'Tower of
Babel' ( ''Migdal Bavel'') was a
tower built to reach the heavens by a united
humanity.
God, observing the arrogance of humanity, resolves to confuse the previously uniform
language of humanity, thereby preventing any such future efforts. The tower's destruction is not described in Genesis, but is mentioned in the
Book of Jubilees, and elsewhere (see '
Destruction', below). An interpretive account of the story explains the tower's destruction in terms of mankind's deficiency in comparison to God: within a religious framework, mankind is considered to be an inherently flawed creation dependent on a perfect being for its existence, and thus the construction of the tower is a potentially hubristic act of defiance towards the God who created them. As a result, this story is sometimes used within a religious context to explain the existence of many different languages.
Narrative
The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Historicity
Historical and linguistic context
The Greek form of the name is from the native
Akkadian ''Bāb-ilim'', which means "Gate of the god". This correctly summarizes the religious purpose of the great temple towers (the
ziggurats) of ancient
Sumer (which many believe to be Biblical Shinar in modern southern Iraq). These huge, squared-off stepped temples were intended as gateways for the gods to come to earth, literal stairways to heaven. "Reaching heaven" is a common description in temple tower inscriptions. This is the type of structure referred to in the Biblical narrative, though artists and biblical scholars envisioned the tower in many different ways.
Pieter Brueghel's influential portrayal is based on the
Colosseum in Rome, while later conical depictions of the tower (as depicted in Doré's illustration) resemble much later Muslim towers observed by 19th century explorers in the area, notably the
Minaret of Samarra.
M. C. Escher depicts a more stylized geometrical structure in
his woodcut representing the story.
Ziggurats are among the largest religious structures ever built. Some suppose that the Biblical narrative is a reaction to the ancient Mesopotamian system of beliefs reflected in these impressive structures, beliefs that ruled the hearts and minds of some of the greatest civilizations of ancient times.
The
Hebrew version of the name of the city and the tower, ''Bavel'', is attributed in Gen. 11:9 to the verb ''balal'', which means ''to confuse or confound'' in Hebrew. The ruins of the ancient city of Babylon can be found near the city of
Hillah, in modern-day Iraq, in the province of
Babil, approximately 60 miles south of Baghdad.
According to the
documentary hypothesis, the passage is derived from the
Jahwist source, a writer whose work is full of
puns, and like many of the other puns in the Jahwist text, the element of the story concerning the scattering of languages is thought by many to be a
folk etymology for the name ''Babel'', attached to a story of a collapsing tower.
Historical linguistics has long wrestled with the idea of a
single original language. Attempts to identify this language with a currently existing language have been rejected by the academic community. This was the case with
Hebrew, and with
Basque (as proposed by
Manuel de Larramendi). Yet the well-documented branching of languages from common ancestors (such as most current European languages from ancient Indo-European) points in the direction of a single ancestral language. The main issue of dispute is the date, which most modern scholars would put several thousand years before the traditional date for the demise of the Tower of Babel.
A large construction project in the ancient world might have used pressed labor from a diverse set of conquered or subject populations, and the domain of the empires covering Babylon would have contained some non-Semitic languages, such as
Hurrian,
Kassite,
Sumerian, and
Elamite, among others.
In Genesis 10, Babel is said to have formed part of
Nimrod's kingdom. It is not specifically mentioned in the Bible that he ordered the tower to be built, but Nimrod is often associated with its construction in other sources.
There is a
Sumerian myth similar to that of the Tower of Babel, called ''
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta'', where
Enmerkar of
Uruk is building a massive ziggurat in
Eridu and demands a tribute of precious materials from
Aratta for its construction, at one point reciting an incantation imploring the god
Enki to restore (or in Kramer's translation, to disrupt) the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions -- named as
Shubur,
Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (the region around
Akkad), and the
Martu land.
One recent theory first advanced by
David Rohl associates Nimrod, the hunter, builder of Erech and Babel, with Enmerkar (i.e., Enmer the Hunter) king of
Uruk, also said to have been the first builder of the
Eridu temple. (
Amar-Sin (c. 2046-2037 BC), third monarch of the
Third Dynasty of Ur, later attempted to complete the Eridu ziggurat.) This theory proposes that the actual remains of the Tower of Babel are in fact the much older ruins of the ziggurat of Eridu, just south of
Ur, rather than those of Babylon, where the story was later transposed. Among the reasons for this association are the larger size of the ruins, the older age of the ruins, and the fact that one title of Eridu was ''NUN.KI'' ("mighty place"), which later became a title of Babylon. Both cities also had temples called the
E-Sagila.
Traditionally, the peoples listed in Chapter 10 of Genesis (the
Table of Nations) are understood to have been scattered over the face of the earth from Shinar only after the abandonment of The Tower, which follows as an explanation of this cultural diversity. Some, however, see an internal
contradiction between the mention already in Genesis 10:5 that "From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with his own language" and the subsequent Babel story, which begins "Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words" (Genesis 11:1). Others answer this claim with the fact Genesis is listing the descendants of Noah's son
Japheth, not stating a time period as much as referring to separate cultures. They claim that there is no reason to presuppose these descendants had gotten their own languages prior to the Tower's construction.
Etemenanki: the ziggurat of Babylon
Main articles: Etemenanki
In 440 BC
Herodotus wrote:
Babylon's outer wall is the main defence of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength. The center of each division of the town was occupied by a fortress. In the one stood the palace of the kings, surrounded by a wall of great strength and size: in the other was the sacred precinct of Jupiter (Zeus) Belus, a square enclosure two furlongs [402 m] each way, with gates of solid brass; which was also remaining in my time. In the middle of the precinct there was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong [201 m] in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight. The ascent to the top is on the outside, by a path which winds round all the towers. When one is about half-way up, one finds a resting-place and seats, where persons are wont to sit some time on their way to the summit. On the topmost tower there is a spacious temple, and inside the temple stands a couch of unusual size, richly adorned, with a golden table by its side. There is no statue of any kind set up in the place, nor is the chamber occupied of nights by any one but a single native woman, who, as the Chaldeans, the priests of this god, affirm, is chosen for himself by the deity out of all the women of the land.
This ''Tower of Jupiter Belus'' is believed to refer to the Akkadian god
Bel, whose name has been hellenised by Herodotus to ''
Zeus Belus''. It is likely that it corresponds to the giant ''ziggurat to
Marduk'' (
Etemenanki), an ancient ziggurat which was abandoned, falling into ruin due to earthquakes, and lightning damaging the clay. This huge ziggurat, and its downfall is thought by many academics to have inspired the story of the Tower of Babel. However, it would also fit nicely into the Biblical narrative — providing some archaeological support for the story. More evidence can be gleaned from what King Nebuchadnezzar inscribed on the ruins of this ziggurat.
In 570s BC,
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, seeking to restore the ziggurat, wrote of its ruinous state,
A former king built [the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps. Merodach, the great lord, excited my mind to repair this building. I did not change the site, nor did I take away the foundation stone'' ? ''as it had been in former times. So I founded it, I made it; as it had been in ancient days, I so exalted the summit.
In other sources
Destruction
It is not mentioned in the Genesis account that God directly destroyed the tower; however, the accounts in the
Book of Jubilees,
Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10),
Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6),
Josephus (Antiquities 1.4.3), and the
Sibylline Oracles (iii. 117-129) do state the tradition that God overturned the tower with a great wind.
Jubilees
The ''
Book of Jubilees'', known to have been in use between at least 200 BC and 90 AD, contains one of the most detailed accounts found anywhere of the Tower.
And they began to build, and in the fourth week they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt which comes out of the sea, and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinar. And they built it: forty and three years were they building it; its breadth was 203 bricks, and the height [of a brick] was the third of one; its height amounted to 5433 cubits and 2 palms, and [the extent of one wall was] thirteen stades [and of the other thirty stades].(Jubilees 10:20-21, Charles' 1913 translation)
Midrash
Rabbinic literature offers many different accounts of other causes for building the Tower of
Babel, and of the intentions of its builders. It was regarded in the Mishnah as a rebellion against God. Some later
midrash record that the builders of the Tower, called "the generation of secession" in the Jewish sources, said: "God has no right to choose the upper world for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God" (Gen. R. xxxviii. 7; Tan., ed. Buber, Noah, xxvii. et seq.).
The building of the Tower was meant to bid defiance not only to God, but also to
Abraham, who exhorted the builders to reverence. The passage mentions that the builders spoke sharp words against God, not cited in the Bible, saying that once every 1,656 years, heaven tottered so that the water poured down upon the earth, therefore they would support it by columns that there might not be another deluge (Gen. R. l.c.; Tan. l.c.; similarly Josephus, "Ant." i. 4, § 2).
Some among that sinful generation even wanted to war against God in heaven (Talmud Sanhedrin 109a.) They were encouraged in this wild undertaking by the notion that arrows which they shot into the sky fell back dripping with blood, so that the people really believed that they could wage war against the inhabitants of the heavens (
Sefer ha-Yashar, Noah, ed. Leghorn, 12b). According to
Josephus and Midrash Pirke R. El. xxiv., it was mainly
Nimrod who persuaded his contemporaries to build the Tower, while other rabbinical sources assert, on the contrary, that Nimrod separated from the builders.
Apocalypse of Baruch
The ''
Third Apocalypse of Baruch'', known only from Greek and Slavonic copies, seems to allude to the Tower, and may be consistent with Jewish tradition. In it, Baruch is first taken (in a vision) to see the resting place of the souls of "those who built the tower of strife against God, and the Lord banished them." Next he is shown another place, and there, occupying the form of dogs,
Those who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they had built the tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they took a gimlet, and sought to pierce the heavens, saying, Let us see (whether) the heaven is made of clay, or of brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest.'' (Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, 3:5-8)
Qur'an and Islamic traditions
Though not mentioned by name, the
Qur'an has a story with similarities to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, though set in the Egypt of Moses. In Suras 28:38 and 40:36-37
Pharaoh asks
Haman to build him a clay tower so that he can mount up to heaven and confront the
God of
Moses.
Another story in Sura 2:102 mentions the name of
Babil, but tells of when two angels taught the people of Babylon the tricks of magic and warned them that magic is a sin and that their teaching them magic is a test of faith. A tale about Babil appears more fully in the writings of
Yaqut (i, 448 f.) and the ''
Lisan el-'Arab'' (xiii. 72), but without the tower: mankind were swept together by winds into the plain that was afterwards called "Babil", where they were assigned their separate languages by Allah, and were then scattered again in the same way.
In the ''
History of the Prophets and Kings'' by the 9th century Muslim historian
al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, Allah destroys it, and the language of mankind, formerly
Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages. Another Muslim historian of the 13th century,
Abu al-Fida relates the same story, adding that the patriarch
Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original tongue, Hebrew in this case, because he would not partake in the building.
Other traditions
Various traditions similar to that of the tower of Babel are found in
Central America. One holds that
Xelhua, one of the seven giants rescued from the deluge, built the
Great Pyramid of Cholula in order to storm Heaven. The gods destroyed it with fire and confounded the language of the builders. The
Dominican friar Diego Duran (1537-1588) reported hearing this account from a hundred-year-old priest at Cholula, shortly after the conquest of Mexico.
Another story, attributed by the native historian Don Ferdinand d'Alva Ixtilxochitl (c. 1565-1648) to the ancient
Toltecs, states that after men had multiplied following a great deluge, they erected a tall ''zacuali'' or tower, to preserve themselves in the event of a second deluge. However, their languages were confounded and they went to separate parts of the earth.
Still another story, attributed to the
Tohono O'odham Indians, holds that
Montezuma escaped a great flood, then became wicked and attempted to build a house reaching to heaven, but the Great Spirit destroyed it with thunderbolts. (
Bancroft, vol. 3, p.76; also in
History of Arizona)
According to
Dr Livingstone, the
Africans whom he met living near
Lake Ngami in 1879 had such a tradition, but with the builders' heads getting "cracked by the fall of the scaffolding" (''Missionary Travels, chap. 26'').
James George Frazer has identified Livingston's account with a tale found in
Lozi mythology, wherein the wicked men build a tower of masts to pursue the Creator-God, Nyambe, who has fled to Heaven on a spider-web, but the men perish when the masts collapse. He further relates similar tales of the
Ashanti that substitute a pile of porridge pestles for the masts. Frazer moreover cites such legends found among the
Kongo people, as well as in
Tanzania, where the men stack poles or trees in a failed attempt to reach the moon
[1].
Traces of a somewhat similar story have also been reported among the
Tharus of
Nepal and northern
India (''Report of the Census of Bengal'', 1872, p. 160), as well as the
Karbi and
Kuki people of
Assam (Frazer). The traditions of the
Karen people of
Myanmar, which Frazer considered to show clear 'Abrahamic' influence, also relate that their ancestors migrated there following the abandonment of a great
pagoda in the land of the
Karenni 30 generations from Adam, when the languages were confused and the Karen separated from the Karenni. He notes yet another version current in the
Admiralty Islands where mankind's languages are confused following a failed attempt to build houses reaching to heaven.
There have also been a number of traditions around the world that describe a divine confusion of the one original language into several, albeit without any tower. Aside from the Ancient Greek myth that
Hermes confused the languages, causing Zeus to give his throne to
Phoroneus, Frazer specifically mentions such accounts among the Wasania of
Kenya, the Kacha
Naga people of Assam, the inhabitants of
Encounter Bay in Australia, the
Maidu of California, the
Tlingit of Alaska, and the
K'iche' of Guatemala. (See also:
Mythical origins of language)
The
Estonian myth of "the Cooking of Languages"
[2] has also been compared.
According to one modern legend, "sack" was the last word uttered before the confusion of languages.
[3]
Height of the tower
The height of the tower is largely a matter of speculation, but since the tower symbolically can be considered a precursor to humankind's desire to build tall structures throughout history, its height is a significant aspect of it. The tower commissioned by
Nebuchadnezzar in about 560 BC in the form of an eight-level ziggurat is believed by historians to have been about 100 meters (328 feet) in height.
The narrative in the book of Genesis does not mention how tall the Biblical tower was, and it has traditionally not been much of a subject of debate. There are, however, relevant extra-
canonical sources. The ''Book of Jubilees'' mentions the tower's height as being 5433
cubits and 2 palms (8,150 feet, 2,484 meters high), or nearly 2.5 kilometers, several times taller than
the tallest modern structures. The ''Third Apocalypse of Baruch'' mentions that the 'tower of strife' reached a height of 463
cubits (694 feet and 6 inches, 212 meters high), taller than any other structure built in the ancient world including the
Pyramid of Cheops in Giza, Egypt, and taller than any structure built in human history until the construction of the
Eiffel Tower in 1889.
Gregory of Tours (I, 6) writing ca. 594, quotes the earlier historian
Orosius (ca. 417) as saying the tower was "laid out foursquare on a very level plain. Its wall, made of baked brick cemented with pitch, is fifty cubits wide, two hundred high, and four hundred and seventy stades in circumference. A stade contains five agripennes. Twenty-five gates are situated on each side, which make in all one hundred. The doors of these gates, which are of wonderful size, are cast in bronze. The same historian [Orosius] tells many other tales of this city, and says: 'Although such was the glory of its building still it was conquered and destroyed.'"
The 14th century traveler
John Mandeville also included an account of the tower, and reported that its height had been 64
furlongs (= 8 miles), according to the local inhabitants.
The 17th century historian
Verstegan provides yet another figure - quoting Isidore (probably St.
Isidore of Seville) he says that the tower was 5164 paces high, about 7.6 kilometers, and quoting
Josephus that the tower was wider than it was high, more like a mountain than a tower. He also quotes unnamed authors who say that the spiral path was so wide that it contained lodgings for workers and animals, and other authors who claim that the path was wide enough to have fields for growing grain for the animals used in the construction.
In his book, "Structures or why things don't fall down" (pub Pelican 1978 - 1984), Professor J.E. Gordon considers the height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, 'brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot (2000 kg per cubic metre) and the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better than 6000 lbf per square inch or 40 megapascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 7000 feet or 2 kilometres before the bricks at the bottom were crushed. However by making the walls taper towards the top they ... could well have been built to a height where the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty in breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight"
See also
★
Babel
★
Babel fish
★
Babylon
★
Babylonia
★
Borsippa
★
Burj Dubai, planned to be the tallest building in the world
★
Confusion of tongues
★
Etemenanki
★
Haman (Islam), said to have been commissioned to build a tower to heaven
★
Linguistic divergence
★
Origin of language
★
Palace of Soviets
★
The Tower (Tarot card), a
Tarot card in the
Major Arcana
★
Warsaw Radio Mast, the tallest well-documented structure ever built by humans
★
Wrathful Dispersion
★
Ziggurat
★ ''
Metropolis'', in which the Tower of Babel is a key theme
★
Castle in the Sky, a mid-1980s
Japanese animation about the legend of a floating castle in the sky which once ruled over Earth. The movie's castle design was influenced by
Pieter Brueghel the Elders painting of the Tower of Babel.
★
Sons of Noah
External links
★
The Encyclopedia of Babel - collection of references to Babel in history, arts and literature
★
Genesis 11 (KJV)
★
The Tower of Babel from the Brick Testament.
★
Babel In Biblia: The Tower in Ancient Literature by Jim Rovira
★
Is there archaeological evidence of the Tower of Babel?-Christian Source.
★
Our People: A History of the Jews - The Tower of Babel
★
Tower of Babel CreationWiki
★
Tower of Babel envisioned by science fiction artist
Frank Wu
★
Discover Babylon with Google Earth
References
1. Frazer, ''Folk-Lore in the Old Testament''(1918), chap. 5.
2. Kohl, ''Reisen in die 'Ostseeprovinzen'', ii. 251-255
3. Entry on "Sack" in Betty Kirkpatrick (ed), ''Brewer's Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable'', Cassell, London, 1992.
★ Pr. Diego Duran, ''Historia Antiqua de la Nueva Espana (Madrid, 1585)
★ Ixtilxochitl, Don Ferdinand d'Alva, ''Historia Chichimeca'', 1658
★ Lord Kingsborough, ''Antiquities of Mexico, vol. 9
★ H.H. Bancroft, ''Native Races of the Pacific States'' (New York, 1874)
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