Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel is an origin myth and parable in the Book of Genesis meant to explain the existence of different languages and cultures.
According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shinar, where they agree to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh, observing these efforts and remarking on humanity's power in unity, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other and scatters them around the world, leaving the city unfinished.
Some modern scholars have associated the Tower of Babel with known historical structures and accounts, particularly from ancient Mesopotamia. The most widely attributed inspiration is Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk in Babylon, which in Hebrew was called Babel. A similar story is also found in the ancient Sumerian legend, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which describes events and locations in southern Mesopotamia.
Etymology
The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in Genesis nor elsewhere in the Bible; it is always "the city and the tower" or just "the city". The original derivation of the name Babel, which is the Hebrew name for Babylon, is uncertain. The native Akkadian name of the city was, meaning 'gate of God'. However, that form and interpretation are now usually thought to derive from Akkadian folk etymology applied to an earlier form of the name,, of unknown meaning and probably non-Semitic origin.Per the story in Genesis, the city received the name "Babel" from the Hebrew verb, meaning to jumble or to confuse, after Yahweh distorted the common language of humankind. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, this reflects word play due to the Hebrew terms for Babylon and "to confuse" having similar pronunciation.
Analysis
Genre
The Tower of Babel is a type of myth known as an etiology, which is intended to explain the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other phenomenon—namely the origins of the multiplicity of languages. The confusion of tongues resulting from the construction of the Tower of Babel accounts for the fragmentation of human languages: God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood and so God brought into existence multiple languages, rendering humanity unable to understand each other.Prior to this event, humanity was stated to speak a single language, although the preceding Genesis 10:5 states that the descendants of Japheth, Gomer, and Javan dispersed "with their own tongues". Augustine of Hippo explained this apparent contradiction by arguing that the story "without mentioning it, goes back to tell how it came about that the one language common to all men was broken up into many tongues". Modern scholarship has traditionally held that the two chapters were written by different sources, the former by the Priestly source and the latter by the Jahwist. However, that theory has been debated among scholars in recent years.
Themes
The story's theme of competition between God and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod.There have been some contemporary challenges to this classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative ; this reading of the text sees God's actions not as a punishment for pride, but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization.
Height
The Book of Genesis does not specify the tower's height; the phrase "its top in the sky" was an idiom for impressive height, rather than implying arrogance. The Book of Jubilees 10:21 mentions the tower's height as being 5,433 cubits and 2 palms, about three times the height of Burj Khalifa.The apocryphal Third Apocalypse of Baruch mentions that the "tower of strife" reached a height of 463 cubits, taller than any structure built in human history until the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which is in height.
Gregory of Tours writing, quotes the earlier historian Orosius as saying the tower was "laid out foursquare on a very level plain. Its wall, made of baked brick cemented with pitch" is 50 cubits in width by 200 cubits in length, and 470 stades in circumference. A stade was an ancient Greek unit of length, based on the circumference of a typical sports stadium of the time which was about. The description continues, "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 tells many other tales of this city, and says: 'Although such was the glory of its building still it was conquered and destroyed.
A typical medieval account is given by Giovanni Villani : He relates that "it measured eighty miles round, and it was already 4,000 paces high and 1,000 paces thick, and each pace is three of our feet." The 14th-century traveler John Mandeville also included an account of the tower and reported that its height had been 64 furlongs, according to the local inhabitants.
The 17th-century historian Verstegan provides yet another figurequoting Isidore, he says that the tower was 5,164 paces high, 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, J. E. Gordon considers the height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, "brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot and the crushing strength of these materials is generally rather better than 6,000 lbs per square inch or 40 mega-pascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel walls could have been built to a height of 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."
Composition
Authorship
Jewish and Christian tradition attributes the composition of the whole Pentateuch, which includes the story of the Tower of Babel, to Moses. Modern biblical scholarship rejects Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch but is divided on the question of its authorship. Many scholars subscribe to some form of the documentary hypothesis, which argues that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple "sources" that were later merged. Scholars who favor this hypothesis, such as Richard Elliot Friedman, tend to see Genesis 11:1–9 as being composed by the J or Jahwist/Yahwist source.Michael Coogan suggests that the intentional word play regarding the city of Babel, and the noise of the people's "babbling" is found in the Hebrew words as easily as in English, is considered typical of the Yahwist source. John Van Seters, who has put forth substantial modifications to the hypothesis, suggests that these verses are part of what he calls a "Pre-Yahwistic stage". Other scholars reject the documentary hypothesis altogether. The "minimalist" scholars tend to see the books of Genesis through 2 Kings as written by a single, anonymous author during the Hellenistic period.
Historicity
Biblical scholars see the Book of Genesis as mythological and not as an historical account of events. Genesis is described as beginning with historicized myth and ending with mythicized history. Nevertheless, the story of Babel can be interpreted in terms of its context: Elsewhere in Genesis, it is stated that Babel formed part of Nimrod's kingdom, which is located in Lower Mesopotamia. The Bible does not specifically mention that Nimrod ordered the building of the tower, but many other sources have associated its construction with him. Genesis 11:9 attributes the Hebrew version of the name, Babel, to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The first century Roman-Jewish author Flavius Josephus similarly explained that the name was derived from the Hebrew word Babel , meaning "confusion".Possible origins
Etemenanki
Etemenanki was the name of a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon. It was famously rebuilt by the 6th-century BCE Neo-Babylonian rulers Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II, but had fallen into disrepair by the time of Alexander the Great's conquests. He managed to move the tiles of the tower to another location, but his death stopped the reconstruction, and it was demolished during the reign of his successor Antiochus Soter. Greek historian Herodotus wrote an account of the ziggurat in his Histories, which he called the "Temple of Zeus Belus".According to modern scholars, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was likely influenced by Etemenanki. Stephen L. Harris proposed this occurred during the Babylonian captivity. Isaac Asimov speculated that the authors of Genesis 11:1–9 were inspired by the existence of an apparently incomplete ziggurat at Babylon, and by the phonological similarity between Babylonian Bab-ilu, meaning "gate of God", and the Hebrew word, meaning "mixed", "confused", or "confounded".
Mesopotamian analogues
There are similar stories to the Tower of Babel. In the Sumerian myth Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, 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 the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions—named as Shubur, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki, and the Martu land, "the whole universe, the well-guarded people—may they all address Enlil together in a single language."The Eridu Genesis, an ancient Sumerian flood myth, includes a passage about the unity of human speech before the gods intervened. During the Neo-Assyrian period, a fragmentary text found in Nineveh, from the library of Ashurbanipal, which contains parts of the Eridu Genesis, along with the general interest Ashurbanipal's library had in preserving older traditions, suggest that these stories of language confusion and divine intervention were still relevant during this period.
This is further evidenced by the Neo-Assyrian divine punishment motif often found in royal inscriptions, which describe the gods punishing nations for their arrogance, particularly through destruction, scattering, or confusion—a theme seen in the Tower of Babel story.
In the annals of the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib, he describes how the gods "confused the plans" of his enemies and scattered their forces, resulting in his victory and the destruction of Babylon in 689 BCE. These events may have influenced later biblical writers during the period of Babylonian captivity, who viewed the city’s fall as a divine act, reinforcing the idea that Babylon’s pride led to its downfall.