Tower of Babel

This article is about the Bible story. For other uses, see Tower of Babel (disambiguation). "Genesis 11" redirects here. For other uses, see Genesis 11 (disambiguation).

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an origin myth and parable found in Genesis 11, chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis. It was written to explain why the world has many different languages and cultures.

In the story, all of the human race speaks one language. The people move to Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia). There, they decide to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh sees what they are doing and remarks on how much people can achieve when they work together. Yahweh then mixes up their speech so they can no longer understand each other. The people spread out across the world, and the city is left unfinished.

Modern scholars have often connected the Tower of Babel to real buildings and stories from ancient Mesopotamia. The most common suggestion is Etemenanki, a ziggurat built for the god Marduk in Babylon. In Hebrew, Babylon was called Babel. A similar story appears in the ancient Sumerian legend Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, which describes events and places in southern Mesopotamia.

Etymology

The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in Genesis or anywhere else in the Bible. Instead, it is always called "the city and the tower" or just "the city". The name Babel comes from Babylon, the Hebrew name for the city. Its native Akkadian name was Bāb-ilim, meaning 'gate of God'. Today, this meaning is usually thought to be a case of folk etymology, where people made up a meaning for an older name, Babilla. The meaning of that older name is unknown, and it probably did not come from a Semitic language.

In the story in Genesis 11, the city got the name "Babel" from the Hebrew verb bālal, which means to jumble or to confuse. This happened after Yahweh mixed up the common language of all people. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, this is an example of word play, because the Hebrew words for Babylon and "to confuse" sound similar.

Analysis

The Tower of Babel is a kind of etiology, a story that explains where something comes from. In this case, it explains why there are many languages. God was worried that people had sinned by building the tower to avoid a second flood. So God caused people to speak many confused Latin tongues, and they could no longer understand one another. Before this, people all spoke one language. Genesis 10:5 says the descendants of Japheth, Gomer, and Javan spread out "with their own tongues," and Augustine of Hippo explained this as part of the same story. Scholars once thought the two chapters came from different sources, the Priestly source and the Jahwist, but this idea has been debated in recent years. A similar idea of a contest between God and humans appears in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The Jewish writer Flavius Josephus saw the tower as a hubristic act against God, ordered by the proud ruler Nimrod. Some modern readers instead see God's actions as an explanation of cultural differences, with Babel as the cradle of civilization. Ellen van Wolde argued that the builders' goals were not aimed against God. The story has also been compared to other Mesopotamian stories that explain the world.

Genesis 11:8 says the tower was unfinished when its builders were scattered. Verse 5 uses a perfect tense verb, which led Keil and Delitzsch to suggest it was finished only up to a certain point. Genesis does not say how tall the tower was. The phrase "its top in the sky" was a way of describing something very tall. Later writers gave many different heights. The Book of Jubilees gives a height about three times that of the Burj Khalifa. The apocryphal Third Apocalypse of Baruch gives a height that would have been taller than any structure in human history until the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Gregory of Tours, writing around 594, quoted Orosius, who described a tower about 470 stades around, with 100 gates made of bronze. Giovanni Villani (1300) gave a height of 4,000 paces. John Mandeville reported 64 furlongs, and Verstegan (17th century) mentioned a path wide enough for fields of grain. The engineer J. E. Gordon calculated how tall a tower with straight walls could be before the bricks at the bottom were crushed, using the weight of a cubic foot of brick and stone as a basis.

Composition

The story of the Tower of Babel is very short. It has only nine verses in the KJV Bible. In the story, the whole earth once spoke one language. People travelling from the east settled on a flat plain in the land of Shinar. They decided to make bricks and build a city with a tower that would reach heaven. The LORD saw what they were doing. He confused their language so they could no longer understand one another, and he scattered them across the earth. Then they stopped building the city. The name Babel (LXX) comes from a Hebrew word that means "to confuse."

Jewish and Christian tradition says Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch. Modern scholars do not agree with this, and they disagree about who wrote it. Many follow the documentary hypothesis, which says the Pentateuch was put together from several "sources" that were later combined. Scholars such as Richard Elliot Friedman connect Genesis 11:1–9 to the J or Jahwist/Yahwist source. Others, such as Michael Coogan and John Van Seters, have their own ideas. Some people use the supplementary or fragmentary models. Others hold the "minimalist" view that Genesis through 2 Kings was written by one unknown author in the Hellenistic period.

Biblical scholars see Genesis as mythological rather than as a true historical account. Still, the story can be understood through the place where it is set. Genesis says Babel was part of the kingdom of Nimrod, which was located in Lower Mesopotamia.

Possible origins

Main article: Etemenanki

Etemenanki, whose name means "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth," was a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon. The Neo-Babylonian rulers Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it in the 6th century BCE. By the time of Alexander the Great, it was in poor condition. He moved some of the tower's tiles to other places, but he died before the rebuilding could be finished. Later, under his successor Antiochus Soter, the tower was torn down. The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) described the ziggurat in his Histories, calling it the "Temple of Zeus Belus."

Modern scholars think the Tower of Babel story was probably inspired by Etemenanki. Stephen L. Harris suggested this happened during the Babylonian captivity. Isaac Asimov thought the writers may have been inspired by an unfinished-looking ziggurat at Babylon, and by how the Babylonian words for "gate of God" sounded like the Hebrew word for "confused." Other ideas include the ziggurats of Borsippa, Dur-Kurigazlu, and Dur-Sharrukin, or the Tower of Esagil, which has a mythical counterpart in the Enuma Elish. So the story may be a criticism of the way temples to Marduk were dedicated.

There are similar stories from Mesopotamia. In the Sumerian myth Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar of Uruk builds a huge ziggurat in Eridu and asks the god Enki to change the shared language of the lands, so people no longer speak together in one language. The Eridu Genesis, an ancient Sumerian flood myth, also describes human speech as united before the gods stepped in. A damaged text from Nineveh, in the library of Ashurbanipal (r. 668–627 BCE), suggests these stories about confused language were still important in the Neo-Assyrian period. Royal inscriptions from that time often describe gods punishing nations for their pride by destroying them, scattering them, or confusing them. In the annals of Sennacherib (r. 705–681 BCE), the gods "confused the plans" of his enemies and scattered their armies, which led to 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 saw the city's fall as God's doing.

Later literature

The Book of Jubilees gives one of the most detailed accounts of the Tower. It describes the tower's size using measures called cubits and stades. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish-Roman historian, retold history from the Hebrew Bible in his book Antiquities of the Jews around 94 CE. He described Nimrod as a leader who brought in tyranny and tried to turn people away from God. Josephus said God mixed up their languages instead of destroying them, because the Flood had not made people wiser. The bricks were held together with bitumen, and the Sibyl also mentions the tower. In Pseudo-Philo, Nimrod leads the Hamites, Joktan leads the Semites, and Phenech, son of Dodanim, leads the Japhetites. Twelve men, including Abraham, Lot, Nahor, and several sons of Joktan, are stopped for refusing to bring bricks. Joktan saves them from the other two princes.

The Third Apocalypse of Baruch, one of the pseudepigrapha, lists the builders of the tower among the wrongdoers. It says they tried to pierce the sky with a gimlet. Rabbinic literature gives many other reasons for building the tower. One account says the builders wanted to challenge God, and Abraham urged them to show respect. The Quran has no story of the Tower of Babel, but similar stories appear in the Qisas al-Anbiya. The author Yahiya Emerick says that God separating people by language is not part of Islamic belief. In the History of the Prophets and Kings, the 9th-century theologian al-Tabari says Nimrod built the tower in Babil, God destroyed it, and the language of people, which was once Syriac, was split into 72 languages. Writers such as Yaqut, the Lisān al-ʿArab, and Abu al-Fida tell a version without the tower. In Abu al-Fida's account, Eber, an ancestor of Abraham, kept the original language because he did not help build. In the Book of Mormon, a man named Jared and his family pray that their language not be confused at the time of the "great tower." God keeps their language the same, and they travel to the Valley of Nimrod and then across the sea to the Americas. Some leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) say this tower was the Tower of Babel, though the original text does not mention it. The timeline of the Book of Ether fits more closely with an ancient Sumerian story from the 21st century BC about Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, in which a tower temple was built for the goddess Innana. In Gnostic tradition recorded in the Paraphrase of Shem, a tower, seen as the Tower of Babel, is brought by demons along with the great flood.

Linguistics

Further information: Origin of language and Mythical origins of language

For a long time, historical linguistics had trouble with the idea of a single original language. In the Middle Ages, scholars tried to find a living form of the Adamic language. Many thought Hebrew language was the language God used with Adam. Dante Alighieri wrote about this in his De vulgari eloquentia and later in his Divine Comedy. From the Renaissance onward, writers in several countries said their own languages were the original. These included Gaelic, Tuscan, Dutch, Swedish, and German. Today, the idea that the world's languages began at the tower of Babel is pseudolinguistics. It does not match what we know about the history of languages.

The Bible says in Genesis 11:1 that everyone on Earth spoke one language. But Genesis 10:5 describes nations that each had their own language. Thomas L. Thompson notes that the table of nations in Genesis 10 and the Tower of Babel story are two parallel stories. Many peoples around the world have stories about languages being split apart. One Ancient Greek myth says Hermes confused the languages, which led Zeus to give his throne to Phoroneus. Similar stories come from peoples in Kenya, the Naga people of Assam, Encounter Bay in Australia, the Maidu of California, the Tlingit of Alaska, the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala, and the Estonian myth of "the Cooking of Languages." Early writers, including Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome, counted 72 languages from the descendants of Noah. Later writers such as Isidore of Seville and St. Augustine repeated this number. Even later, José de Acosta and António Vieira were amazed that there were hundreds of languages in Peru and Brazil that speakers of other languages could not understand.

Many old stories from other cultures share ideas with the Tower of Babel. In Greek mythology, which the Romans also adopted, the Gigantomachy tells of a battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods. In Ovid's version, the Giants pile up mountains to reach the gods in heaven, but Jupiter stops them with his thunderbolts. In Latin America, James Frazer connected the Great Pyramid of Cholula to the Tower of Babel. The Dominican friar Diego Durán (1537–1588) heard a story about the pyramid from a hundred-year-old priest at Cholula, shortly after the conquest of the Aztec Empire. In that story, giants built a tower to reach the sky after failing to find the Sun. An angry God of the Heavens then had it destroyed. Another story, which the native historian Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl (c. 1565–1648) linked to the ancient Toltecs, tells of people who built a tall tower to protect themselves from a second flood. Then their languages were confused, and they scattered.

Similar stories appear in many other places. The Tohono O'odham people told of Montezuma, who escaped a great flood. Later he tried to build a house reaching to heaven, but the Great Spirit destroyed it with thunderbolts. Traces of a similar story have also been reported among the Tharu of Nepal and northern India. David Livingstone reported that people he met near Lake Ngami in 1849 had such a tradition. In his 1918 book, Folklore in the Old Testament, Scottish social anthropologist Sir James George Frazer compared Old Testament stories with legends from around the world. For example, in Lozi mythology, wicked men build a tower of masts to chase the Creator-God, Nyambe, but the masts collapse. Similar tales were found among the Ashanti, the Kongo people, and in Tanzania. The Karbi and Kuki people of Assam also had a similar story. The Karen people of Myanmar tell of their ancestors moving after a great pagoda in the land of the Karenni was abandoned and their languages were confused. Another version comes from the Admiralty Islands, where human languages are confused after a failed attempt to build houses reaching to heaven.

In popular culture

The "Babel fish" is an imaginary fish in Douglas Adams' novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you put it in your ear, you can instantly understand any language. Yahoo used this idea for its online translation service, Yahoo! Babel Fish. Pieter Brueghel's well-known painting is based on the Colosseum in Rome. Later drawings of the tower look like the Minaret of Samarra, a tower that explorers saw in the area in the 1800s. M.C. Escher drew a simpler, geometric tower in his woodcut. The composer Anton Rubinstein wrote an opera called Der Thurm zu Babel. In 1993, American choreographer Adam Darius staged a version of The Tower of Babel with many languages at the ICA in London. In Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, a flashback shows the tower. It was designed to look like Brueghel's 1563 painting. The story is also retold in the 1966 epic film The Bible: In the Beginning....

The political thinker Michael Oakeshott wrote his own modern version of the story in his 1983 book On History. He pointed out that people sometimes give up their individuality, culture, and quality of life for big group projects. A. S. Byatt's novel Babel Tower (1996) asks whether people can truly share a language. Science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote "Tower of Babylon," about a miner who climbs the tower up to the vault of heaven. The story is shown in the Indian television series Bible Ki Kahaniyan, which began airing on DD National in 1992. Chris Huelsbeck wrote an orchestral piece called "Tower of Babel" for Turrican II: The Final Fight. The tower also appears in the 47th episode of Arabian Nights: Sinbad's Adventures. In the 1990 anime Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, the tower is used as a way to communicate. It looks like Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting. Jorge Luis Borges wrote "The Library of Babel." The 2017 comic La tour de Bab-El-Oued from Sfar's The Rabbi's Cat series also mentions the tower. In the video game Doshin the Giant, the final monument is called the Tower of Babel. The 2023 video game Chants of Sennaar is largely inspired by the tower. The tower is mentioned in the 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse by the character En Sabah Nur (Apocalypse). Finally, the word "Babel" has been used to name language tools, such as the popular LaTeX package "babel" and the language learning platform "Babbel.com."