Tower of Babel
- This article is about the Tower of Babel in the Torah. For the computer game, see Tower Of Babel (computer game).
The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:
- 1 Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words. 2 And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly"; so the bricks were to them for stones, and the clay was to them for mortar. 4 And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the entire earth". 5 And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built. 6 And The LORD said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do? 7 Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion". 8 And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 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.
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Historicity
Linguistic context
The name Babylon is from Akkadian Bāb-ilu, which means Gate of God. Its Hebrew version however, Babel, sounds similar to a word for "confusion".
According to the documentary hypothesis, the passage derives 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 may just be a folk etymology for the name Babel, attached to a more historic story of a collapsing tower.
Historical linguistics thoroughly rejects the idea of a single original language, certainly at least not before 10,000 BC, well before the existence of Babylon where the tale of Babel is set. Throughout history, several authors have claimed that some language was the original one and the rest were corruptions, and each time has been disputed by the academic community. This has been the case with Hebrew, and with Basque (as proposed by Larramendi).
A large construction project in the ancient world might have used pressed labour from a diverse set of conquered or subject populations, and the domain of the empires covering Babylon would have contained many non-Semitic languages, including Hurrian, Kassite, Sumerian, and Elamite, among others. There is a similar story to that of the Tower of Babel in Sumerian mythology called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, where the two rival gods, Enki and Enlil end up confusing the tongues of all humankind as collatoral damage arising from their argument.
The Tower
- 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 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 romanised by Herodotus to Jupiter 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 most academics to have inspired the story of the Tower of Babel.
In c. 670 BC Nebuchadnezzar, 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.
One recent theory claims that the actual remains of the Tower of Babel are the much older ruins of the Ziggurat of Eridu rather than of Babylon, just south of Ur. The main 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.
In other scripture
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 fact 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 heaven, 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
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.
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon records some information about the tower in the Book of Ether that agrees with the Bible. According to the book, a group called the Jaredites left without their language being confused and settled in North America. The Jaredites however, cannot be confirmed in any other literature found to date.
Popular culture and Modern influence
It has become a potent symbol of overambitious projects destined to end in confusion, and a potent motif generating images of unfinished buildings reaching towards the sky, throughout religious art. In mediaeval English culture, the motif of overambitious projects became referred to as castles in the sky, one of many references to the Tower of Babel.
In literature
The Babel legend has appeared regularly in western literature and art since the middle ages - for a chronology see The Virtual Babel Encyclopedia. The image of language multiplication as a curse instead of enriching has been used in the promotion of international auxiliary languages. However, in Douglas Adams' science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a "Babel fish" is a fictional fish that one can insert into one's ear, and thus be able to understand any language in the universe.
In the 1927 and 2001 film versions of Metropolis, the newly-rebuilt Tower of Babel (known in the 2001 anime film version as the Ziggurat) is the symbol of the titular grand city-state and the center of human imperial power. In the 2001 anime film version, the superhuman robot clone of Duke Red's daughter, Tima is to sit on her throne to activate the Ziggurat's revolutionary solar superweapon of mass destruction in order to achieve the goal of reaching the stars and domination of the entire Earth. Like the Tower of Babel, the new Tower/Ziggurat was destroyed.
Robert Sawyer's Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy alludes to the Tower of Babel when discussing the engineering difficulties of a space elevator. And it has been suggested in Neal Stephenson's science fiction book Snow Crash that the line, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven", (or "Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky", New JPS Translation) actually refers to the sky charts painted in the top of the ziggurats of ancient Babylon. Snow Crash also speculates much more on the Tower's real meanings: according to the book, the Tower of Babel was a metaphor. Following the spreading of the Asherah virus, which made evolution in the Sumerian society practically non-existent, the god Enki (portrayed as a priest who happens to be the first hacker in history), as a counter-measure, produces a nam-shub -- a spell that stops everyone from speaking the Sumerian language. This way, the Asherah virus, which used oral and verbal means of transmission, was stopped.
Some recent commentators (e.g. Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler) have claimed similarities between the materialistic stance of the "tower builders" and the dialectic materialism of communism.
In computer and video games
In the video game Xenogears a structure known as Babel Tower is a massive ruined tower that stretches miles and miles into air from an island in the southern world. The mysterious tower is actually a piece of a massive spaceship that crash landed on the planet which the game takes place on. The tower was sealed and no one was permitted to enter or go near it by the corrupt and false Ethos Church in order to keep people ignorant of their true origins on the planet.
In the video game Final Fantasy IV a structure known as Tower of Bab-il is the tallest building on the world-map. It streches from the underworld through a hole in the surface and far into the sky. The Tower of Bab-il uses the power of Eight Elemental Crystals to activate the Giant of Bab-il and open the way to the moon.
The Tower of Babel is the eighth and last mission of the second episode (The Shores of Hell) of the video game Doom and consists of a battle against the Cyberdemon.
In the upcoming Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, it has been confirmed that the Tower of Babel will make an appearance. The Prince must climb the tower from the outside.
In the Gorillaz music video for Feel Good, Inc. , it has been suggested that the Tower in the sky represents the Tower of Babel, symbolizing hedonism and excess arrogance, as the Gorillaz had felt that they experienced from immense success.
In the video game Doshin the Giant for Gamecube that was only released in Japan and Europe, the Tower of Babel is the last monument the villagers build for the Giant. It blocks out the sun, and causes the whole island to sink into the ocean, but not before the Giant tries to help the villagers in trying to stop the tower from falling on them.
In Serious Sam: Second Encounter, the Tower of Babel is the Home to the 2nd boss. It appears as an extremly tall ziggurat, but you are not allowed to climb it.
In MegaMan X: Command Mission, the location of the final boss battle is the Orbital Elevator Babel.
See also
- Babel
- confusion of tongues
- Babylon
- Babylonia
- Ziggurat
- Etemenanki
- Babel fish
- Haman (Islam), said to have been commissioned to build a tower to heaven
External links
- Genesis 11 (KJV)
- The Tower of Babel from the Brick Testament.
- A collection of translations of the Babel Text
- Babel In Biblia: The Tower in Ancient Literature by Jim Rovira
- Is there archaeological evidence of the Tower of Babel?
- Babelfish Translation Toolam:የባቢሎን ግንብ
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