Tower of Babel

“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.” Genesis 11:4

The story of Babel serves as the lynch pin to understanding the life of Nimrod, coming directly from the Torah itself rather than any Rabbinic literature like his cloak, or even association with Amraphel. This story must have taken place during the “First Kingdom of Nimrod”, during a time when the world was gathered in one place. The text of Genesis implies this when it claims everyone spoke a singular language at the beginning of the chapter “Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words.” What does “the entire earth” mean? What was “one language”, and using which script were these uniform words written?

The actual text does give us a clue here, by mentioning the ‘uniform words’ it hints at a written language that everyone used, and understood. In fact, they may have had their own “spoken” languages, but the script itself would have been so universal that anyone was capable of reading the written instructions necessary to construct Babel and communicate with one another. The chart attached helps perfectly describe this theoretical unified written language, which again must have been written due to engineering demands of a communal project requiring standardization. Three of the world's primary written language groups all do appear to share early pictographs that could be called ‘uniform words’, and imply a theory of collective origin.

Turning toward a location, the text gives us the valley of Shinar, associated with Mesopotamia through the name Sumer “And it came to pass when they traveled from the east, that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” Assuming west of Shinar is Canaan, and early groups theoretically did come from there - even in a secular view the ‘out of africa’ theory would have people moving ‘east’ into Mesopotamia - then there is no reason to suspect anymore easternly directions for the valley of Shinar. There are attempts to connect Shinar to China along the Yellow River, or even on the Indus River Valley during early Harappan civilization, but neither of these locations have the depth of evidence that the Shinar-Mesopotamia theory holds.

Evidence for this actually comes from a correlation between the third line in the text “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.” which is positively a clear reference to the Sumerian baked-brick style of building common throughout the entire time frame of Nimrod’s supposed life. Many confuse this with mud-bricks, but baked-bricks are a further evolution in architectural style. In fact, Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer supports this saying “Because there are no stones in Babylon, which is a valley”¹ which squares away with our understanding of the region. However, contrarians would point to both China² and Harappa³ building extensively out of baked bricks by 3000 BCE.

It also appears that it wasn’t just the Tower that was built, but also the city was settled and founded in a similar fashion. From the next line “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.” We are therefore looking for mud/baked-brick architecture. This line also clues us into the basis for why these groups wanted a tower “to make a name for themselves” - interesting the term here for name is none other than “Shem”, the same as the name for Noah’s son. “Rabbi Yishmael taught: Shem is nothing other than idol worship” which is how we know this “Shem” is really a reference to “Men of Name” who mislead the world in their own favor.⁴

These groups also appear afraid that they are going to be scattered, but this already strikes us as odd given that the actual punishment for building it is the very scattering they fear. In some sense, there was an inevitability to the scattering and ultimately this was the necessary trigger for them building Babel: a deep fear.

Some interesting information about the actual builders comes down to us through Midrash, in the Sefer HaYashar - again, this is a tenuous source, it is hard to fully hold to anything it says, but nonetheless it is interesting - “And all these men, and ‎their families, divided themselves into three parties. And one party said, we will go up into ‎heaven and wage war against the Lord; and the second party said, we will go up into heaven ‎and there set up our own gods and worship them; and the third party said we will go up into ‎heaven and slay the Lord with spears, and with arrows.”⁵‎ We learn of three competing parties, possibly representing the three groups of Noah’s sons, who begin developing their own ‘ideology’ and reason for building. It appears these groups may not exactly get along due to the foundation of each belief stemming from entirely different world views. Broadly, those who want to wage war are like Japheth constantly struggling in combat with the Lord, those who set up idols are obviously like Shem, and his descendants such as Terah, and the final group is the warlike Ham obsessed with literally slaying God through physical means.

The Torah continues in line five with God coming down to simply see the tower, seemingly without expectations “And the Lord descended to see the city and the tower that the sons of man had built.” It appears like at first the tower itself was not problematic, but rather the reasons and methodology.

Line six and seven have God disturbed by what he sees, imploring his angels to descend with him to confound the speech of man “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? Come, let us descend and confuse their language, so that one will not understand the language of his companion.” Here, God actually does nothing to stop the building other than merely disturbing their uniform speech! Through a single act, the entire project begins to literally and metaphorically collapse.

Again from the Sefer HaYashar we learn details of God’s interference at Babel “And the Lord said to the seventy angels that stand first and nearest unto the ‎throne, saying: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not ‎understand one another's speech.” And the Lord did unto them accordingly. And they forgot at ‎once each other's speech, and they could no more speak nor understand the same language. ‎And when the builder would receive from the hands of the carrier the wrong bricks, or ‎something else he was not ordered to bring, the builder in his anger would fling it away, and ‎cast it upon someone and kill him. And this disorder continued for many days, and a great ‎number were killed in that way.”⁶

This is a very strange line, and references a supposed seventy angels that stand nearest to the throne who go down with God to confound the languages. From Legends of the Jews - yet another tenuous Midrashic source - we learn more about these angels and their involvement “Beside the chastisement of sin and sinners by the confounding of speech, another notable circumstance was connected with the descent of God upon earth--one of only ten such descents to occur between the creation of the world and the day of judgment. It was on this occasion that God and the seventy angels that surround His throne cast lots concerning the various nations. Each angel received a nation, and Israel fell to the lot of God. To every nation a peculiar language was assigned, Hebrew being reserved for Israel--the language made use of by God at the creation of the world.”⁷

To an untrained eye, this doesn’t seem important but we learn that each of these seventy angels represents one of the nations of the world, with Israel falling under the lot of God, and the “Lashon HaKodesh” (Holy Tongue) supposedly of Hebrew being reserved for the Israelites. Notable is also the fact this was one of ten occurrences where God directly intervenes in reality ascribing a grand mystical importance to this event beyond mere history. Despite our own intent to reason through these events historically, there are deeper secrets that cannot be explained through our understanding of the world giving God’s direct intervention.

The text returns to the three groups of varying ideologies, to deal with them in unique ways “And the three parties were punished by the Lord according to ‎what they have said and done. Those that said: We will go up into heaven and there enthrone ‎our gods and worship them, turned into apes and into elephants. Those that said: We will go ‎up and kill all those that are in heaven, with our spears and arrows, the Lord caused to perish ‎every man by the hand of his neighbor. And the third party that said: We will go up into ‎heaven and wage war against the Lord, the Lord dispersed through all the earth. And those ‎that belonged to neither of the parties remained there.”⁸ What a series of facts.

The first group is transformed into apes and elephants, bringing up intense theories regarding varying hominid groups and their connection to this event. That story is for another Book on Adam, and his associated antediluvian genealogies, but effectively this does give us complete Rabbinic precedent for an inverse-evolutionary effect of “humans into apes”, which would seemingly support the reverse of “apes into humans”. The elephants are personally lost on me, and I cannot come up with any explanation.

The second group simply is killed by their neighbor, in a similar fashion to the violence of the generations of Cain, but an even worse death than a Flood due to the personal nature of the extermination between friends, and family. The third group simply disperses, implying that actually there are groups “separate” from the seventy sons of Noah that seemingly become an even further detached group. Could this be the Harappans, or Chinese? Unclear.

There is even a fourth group that remains at the location, but eventually realizes it is cursed in some sense, and unsafe for settlement; eventually abandoning the site and moving elsewhere in Shinar. In line eight, the tower’s building ceases “And the Lord scattered them from there upon the face of the entire earth, and they ceased building the city.” Again, this is a reference to the direct intervening of God in the events of man having chosen to disperse man rather than wipe them out as He previously chose to do in the Flood.⁹

 As many readers will already know, the etymology of the term “babel” comes from the word for confusion, which the text directly states in line nine “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.” This is the end of the account of Babel from the primary source.

One final fact can be pulled from the account of the Tower within Midrash “And the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up one third of the ‎tower, and fire came down from heaven and consumed another third thereof, and one-third ‎remains unto this day, hanging in the air of the heaven; and its length is the distance of three ‎day's journey.”¹⁰ One-third of the tower seemingly remains, but it has somewhat mystical proportions beyond anything known to man. Another third is swallowed up by the earth, which squares away with our understanding of most ancient Tells and mounds of archeological importance. Likewise, a final third was taken out by a fire which again makes sense given the prevalence of fire destruction across early Sumerian sites. Water is not present as a cause, which is important for geographically locating this complex ‘outside’ of the Euphrates and Tigris river paths.

In the Talmud we learn about the Tower not actually being fully abandoned, and losing its status as a site of idol worship! “Gemara: Rabbi Yirmeya bar Abba says that Rav says: The temple of Nimrod, i.e., the remnants of the tower, is considered [a place of] idol worship whose worshippers abandoned it in peacetime, and [it is therefore] permitted. [This is] despite that when the Merciful One scattered [the builders of the tower, the situation] resembled wartime, [as they were compelled to leave. Nevertheless], if they had desired to return, they [could have] returned. Since they did not return, [they evidently chose to abandon the place of idol worship and thereby] revoked [its status].”¹¹ While the place is not technically one of idol worship any longer, the Gemara helpfully supports the theory that the builders left, even the remnants, and the site becomes abandoned soon after giving us helpful clues for historical identifications. Babylon is never abandoned, making it unlikely the location of the “Tower of Babel”.

Ovid’s Metamorphosis contains what appears to be an allusion to these events, but it is unclear if he got them from the already extant bible, or from an earlier Greek myth “Rendering the heights of heaven no safer than the earth, they say the giants attempted to take the Celestial kingdom, piling mountains up to the distant stars. Then the all-powerful father of the gods hurled his bolt of lightning, fractured Olympus and threw Mount Pelion down from Ossa below.”¹² Other than a few thematic parallels this myth fails to provide any evidence for the story.

Within Sumerian mythology dating to the Neo-Sumerian period circa 2100 BCE there is a story quite similar to that of the Tower of Babel called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta which describes the conflicts between Enmerkar, king of Unug-Kulaba (Uruk/Warka), and the unnamed king of Aratta. The location of Aratta is unclear, and not critical for our purposes, but appears to be east of Sumeria through the city of Anshan, and a source of importing Lapis-Lazuli. The most probable identity is the Jiroft culture which is still poorly understood, and it will take further archaeology to understand where Aratta is located.

In the story the goddess Inanna seems unpleased with her temple in Uruk, and Enmerkar seeks to build her a grander temple from the tribute of the Aratta people to construct an Abzu temple for Enki at Eridu - as well as renovating Inanna’s temple. Enmerkar recites the Incantation of Nudimmud to implore Enki to restore the linguistic unity of the lands named in the text as Shubur, Hamazi, Sumur, Uri-ki (around Akkad), and Martu land. In a series of diplomatic back and forths requesting (demanding) tribute from Aratta we see progressively complicated messages that the envoy has trouble relaying properly. Eventually, the invention of writing on tablets is actually purported to come from Enmerkar, alluding to these themes of linguistic unity and early pictographic writing.

This is the end of the first text, but there are actually four texts dealing with Enmerkar and Aratta. Most of the similarities to the Babel story appear in the first text, but it is in the third and fourth texts we shift to the important heroic figure named Lugalbanda. The stories are called Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave and Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird, but contain very little information that parallels the topic of Nimrod. However, what is critical is that Lugalbanda and his consort Ninsun appear as the father and mother of the famous King Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh even deifies Lugalbanda as a personal god, showing this transition from kingship to direct idol worship.¹³

There is a tendency to associate the Tower of Babel to a structure we briefly mentioned called the Etemenanki located in Babylon. The problem with this identification is that the structure was mostly expanded in the 14th century¹⁴, and as the location implies is at the “later” Babel rather than the original Babel at Eridu. The Etemenanki actually did end up standing well into the second temple period, with Alexander the Great coming across the ruins and beginning a renovation himself. However, later returning and seeing no progress he orders the structure leveled and rebuilt from the ground up.¹⁵ The Seleucid attempted one final reconstruction but after a stroke of bad luck when the crown prince Antiochus I tripped and fell over, demanding the construction to be demolished.¹⁶

What is highly probable is that all of these later Midrashim about the Tower of Babel mixed up some of the facts with the Etemenanki, but it’s unclear to what degree given even that structure is shrouded in mystery. However, since the Etemenanki fails to fit the bill for an earlier Tower construction by the First Kingdom of Nimrod at Eridu we should look toward Eridu rather than Babylon for alternative locations.

1. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer 24

2. Yoshinori Yasuda (2012). Water Civilization: From Yangtze to Khmer Civilizations. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 33–35.

3. Possehl, Gregory L. (1996). Mehrgarh in Oxford Companion to Archaeology, edited by Brian Fagan. Oxford University Press.

4. Bereshit Rabbah 38:8

5. Sefer HaYashar Noach 13

6. Sefer HaYashar Noach 14

7. Legends of the Jews 1:4:103

8. Sefer HaYashar Noach 14

9. Genesis Rabbah 38:6

10. Sefer HaYashar Noach 14

11. Talmud Avodah Zarah 53b:13

12. A.S. Kline translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses 1.151–155

13. For a discussion of parentage of Gilgamesh and further references see: George, Andrew (2003), Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Oxford. ISBN 0-19-814922-0, p. 107 ff. p. 629

14. George, Andrew (2007) "The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, history and cuneiform texts" Archiv für Orientforschung, 51 (2005/2006). pp. 75–95. pdf document

15. Diodorus Siculus, 2.9.9; Strabo, Geography, 16.1.5.

16. Bert van der Spek (2004). "BCHP 6 (Ruin of Esagila Chronicle)