Tower of Babel

A famous Mesopotamian structure mentioned in the Bible, a description that modern scholars believe was based on memories of a ziggurat erected in Babylon during the rule of its Neo-Babylonian dynasty. According to Genesis 11, all people originally spoke a single language. Large numbers of them attempted to build a great city with an unusually high tower in the land of Shinar, the Hebrew word for Sumer, or southern Mesopotamia. See-

A picture depicting the infamous Tower of Babel. According to Genesis 11, God halted the production of the tower by making all people speak a different language so no one could communicate and properly construct the tower. akg-images, London.

Ing this, God did not want that tall structure to approach Heaven, and he halted construction by causing the people to begin speaking many different languages, so that they could no longer properly coordinate their work. The passage reads in part:

Now the entire Earth was of one language and uniform words. And it came to pass when they. . . found a valley in the land of shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us. . . build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” ... And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. And the Lord said, “Lo! ... They all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. ... Let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion.” And. .. they ceased building the city. Therefore, He named it Babel, for there the Lord confused the language of the entire earth, and from there the Lord scattered them upon the face of the entire earth. (Genesis 11.1-9)

Most modern scholars see evidence that this biblical story was based on both mythical and real aspects of Mesopotamian culture at a time when the Hebrews were in close contact with Babylonian society. First, biblical scholars believe that the book of Genesis was compiled from a variety of sources only a century or so following the Babylonian captivity. This was the deportation of large numbers of Hebrews from the defeated kingdom of Judah in Palestine to Babylonia in the early sixth century b. c. In Babylonia, the scholars point out, the Hebrews would have been exposed to Mesopotamian culture, including local myths. One well-known Sumerian myth, called “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” told how there was once just a single human language and how the gods Enki and Enlil purposely caused people to begin speaking a multitude of tongues.

More importantly, these scholars say, the captive Hebrews worked on local Babylonian construction projects, and it appears that one of these was a large ziggu-rat raised in Babylon by the king who had brought the Hebrews to that city, Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned ca. 605-562 b. c.). This structure—the great ziggurat of Ete-menanki, dedicated to the god Marduk— had been initiated by Nebuchadnezzar’s predecessor, Nabopolassar (ca. 626-605 B. C.), but had been left unfinished. Using a large workforce that included several subject peoples, including the Hebrews, Nebuchadnezzar completed the ziggurat. Evidence shows that it had a core of clay held in place by an outer shell of sun-dried clay bricks some 50 feet (15m) thick. For added strength, bitumen (tar) was used as mortar. The building featured eight levels: seven tall layers of brick, each slightly smaller than the one below it, and a temple at the top. Each level was connected to the others by staircases that wound around the perimeter. According to Nebuchad-nezzar’s description of the project, the temple at the apex had blue glazed tiles on the outside, a cedar roof, and gold-plated walls studded with lapis lazuli on the inside. The authenticity of the king’s inscriptions are corroborated by a description of the structure by the Greek historian Herodotus, who saw it with his own eyes in the century after its completion:

It [the temple complex] has a solid central tower, one furlong [about 656 feet (200m)] square, with a second erected on top of it, and then a third, and so on up to eight. All eight [levels] can be climbed by a spiral way running around the outside, and about half way up there are seats for those who make the ascent to rest on. On the summit of the topmost [level] stands a great temple with a fine couch in it, richly covered, and a golden table beside it. (Histories 1.181)

Thus, the prevailing theory is that the biblical account of the Tower of Babel is based on a real Babylonian building that some Hebrews helped construct and later generations of Hebrews, among them the authors of Genesis, remembered.

See Also: Babylon; Bible; Marduk; Nebuchadnezzar II; ziggurat