The Tower of Babel

[Thomas]

This, the final tale in the Genesis 1-11 cycle, is another case of our thinking we know the story – of hubris, our ambition to build a tower up to heaven and invade the domain of God.

The text sits as a self-enclosed tale, just nine verses in length. It is a break from the end of Chapter 10 – it actually contradicts it – and Genesis 11:10 begins the line of Abram, with no apparent link to the prior tale.

As ever – look first at the bare text. A translation is offered by E. M. Good: "Genesis 1–11: Tales of the Earliest World" in which Good attempts a translation without any theological preconceptions.

The whole Earth had one language and few words. And it happened, as they were wandering in the east, and they found a valley in the land of Shin‘ar, and they settled there. And they said to one another, “Come on, let’s make bricks and burn them hard.” And they had bricks for stone and pitch served them as mortar. And they said, “Come on, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in Sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered all over Earth.” And Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which the humans had built. And Yahweh said, “Look, it’s one people and they all have one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And now nothing they intend to do will be impossible for them. Come on, let’s go down and ‘confuse’ their language there, so that no one will be able to understand what another says.” And Yahweh scattered them from there all across Earth, and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there Yahweh ‘confused’ the language of the whole Earth. And Yahweh scattered them from there all across Earth.

It's a classic etiology, a story of the First People and the First City. (Even though Cain had founded a city on in Genesis 4:17.)

The whole Earth had one language and few words.
Not according to Chapter 10, which tells of the 70 nations, and their different tongues (10:20, 31). and we have Nimrod, "a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord" and he founded "Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar" (10:8-10). Later exegetes, beginning with Philo and Josephus, will make Nimrod the villain of the Tower of Babel story, but that’s not in the text.

“Come on, let’s make bricks and burn them hard.”
The people make bricks, then decide to build a city, and then a tower. In the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the order is the same.

The contemporary common idea that they are trying (again) to make themselves equal to God (as per Philo) by building a tower all the way to heaven is unwarranted. The expression 'a tower with its top in the sky' is a stock phrase that just means 'very tall', as used in the Bible (eg. Deuteronomy 1:28). And those wishing to read some nefarious scheme into the text are doing just that – it's not evident in the text itself.

Nor, it's worth pointing out, is there anything intrinsically wrong in building cities, nor building structures.

And Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which the humans had built.
Here we're back among the ancient gods – noticeably not omniscient – if a god wants to know what's going on, they're obliged to go and find out. In Paradise, the god went looking for Adam, and later asked Cain where his brother was. Here the god comes down from the heights to see what these people are up to.

"And now nothing they intend to do will be impossible for them."
And this god doesn't like what he sees. It's not the people, nor the city, nor the tower. What unsettles him is the people are too competent. The city and its tower is just the first sign of what they might accomplish. Who knows where this will lead.

This, again, is the fear that they "become like one of us" (Genesis 3:22).

And that cannot be allowed.

(Contend referenced from this source)

 

[Thomas]

(continued from the same source)

The name of the city is Babel, because there Yahweh “confused” (Hebrew balel) the language of all the earth. Such etymologies are common throughout the Old Testament and obviously not literally true.

Babel (the Hebrew name for Babylon) comes from Akkadian Babilu, meaning “gate of the god”, a reference to the chief Babylonian deity Marduk (Bel).

Scholars agree that the tower in the story is a reference to the great Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki, which was devoted to Marduk and whose name means “House of the Foundation Platform of Heaven and Earth”.

The existence of the tower and its similarities to the biblical story were confirmed by later archaeological finds. No one knows exactly when it was first built, but the earliest reference to it comes from the Erra Epic, dated to 765BCE. Nabopolassar (658–605BCE) started restoration work on the tower after founding the Neo-Babylonian empire, and Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562BCE) undertook a major construction project to make Etemenanki the most magnificent structure in the empire.

It’s not known for certain what happened to Etemenanki. Current scholarship suggests it gradually fell into ruin, until the site was cleared by Alexander the Great, who intended to rebuild it.

Several cylinder inscriptions by Nebuchadnezzar II originally embedded in the tower’s foundation have been recovered by archaeologists. These describe the marshalling of multiethnic armies of corvée labour, the baking and glazing of bricks, and the import of bitumen (pitch). It is interesting that they focus on some of the same physical details the biblical story.

Also of interest is the so-called “Tower of Babel Stele”, which includes a diagram of the tower and text that reads:

Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon am I. In order to complete E-temen-anki and E-ur-me-imin-anki, I mobilized all countries everywhere, each and every ruler who had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world…The base I filled in to make a high terrace. I built their structures with bitumen and baked brick throughout. I completed it, raising its top to the Heaven, making it gleam bright as the sun.

The hyperbole of the stele is repeated in Genesis 11. Jews living in Babylon and may have even been employed in building the tower.

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The late Russell Gmirkin (died just last year) has noted the affinities between Genesis and the early-3rd-century BCE writings of Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Marduk who compiled a history of Babylon in Greek (the Babyloniaca), and whose work would have been available to Jewish scribes in Alexandria around the time Gmirkin proposes that Genesis was written. A difficulty lies in the fact that Babyloniaca has only been preserved in piecemeal quotations (and quotations of quotations) from later authors; the work does not survive in its entirety, making direct comparisons difficult. However, another scholar, Schnabel, reconstructed an outline of Berossus’s text on the founding of the Marduk temple based on citations and references in Pseudo-Eupolemus and Hyginus. This outline goes as follows:

1. Bel (Marduk) the creator god together with the first people constructed the wall of Babylon, its temple complex, and its temple-tower (Etemenanki).
2. Under Bel’s rule, the people were monolingual and united in one city.
3. The god Nabu, who invented writing, taught the people various languages — apparently out of jealousy toward Bel — and this resulted in conflict.

Genesis 11 obviously has key theological differences (particularly Yahweh’s motivation for introducing language, which is not the result of divine rivalry), yet most of the narrative ingredients are there. Babylon as the first city with a great tower, home of the first people with one language until the meddling of the gods introduces multiplicity of languages. (Schnabel, Berossus und die babylonisch-hellenistische Literatur, 1923, 92–93. See also Daniel I. Bock, “The Role of Language in Ancient Israelite Perceptions of National Identity”, JBL 103.3, Sept. 1984, 336.)

 

[Thomas]

(continued ...)

Like many, I was taught to draw a line between the Mythic History (Genesis 1-11) and regard what follows (Abram on) as closer to history.

Classic studies shows that any 'histories', right up until the Modern Era, contain elements of hagiography, myth, and so on. Nor are even those biographies written today absolutely guaranteed not to contain similar influences or impulses.

Genesis 10 details a lineage from the Flood. Chapter 11 takes us on an excursus to Babel, which ends abruptly, and continues with the lineage of Abram. What follows are folktales of Abram (Abraham).

Where is Abram, father of all the Israelites, from in the Genesis tradition? From Babylonia – Ur of the Chaldeans, to be exact, named for the Chaldean dynasty that rose to power in Babylonia around 600BCE.

In Genesis, Abram moves from Ur to Haran, and then to Canaan, to claim the Promised Land on behalf of all Israel. These places are not random. Abram’s father is named Terah, which seems to have been a city in Aram (Syria), and both Haran and Nahor (Abram’s brothers) double as place names from that region. Abram’s family tree is geographical in function.

What is the significance of these names? A common argument suggests Abram’s starting-point in Ur is the text calling on post-exilic Jews in Babylon to follow in Abram’s footsteps and return to Palestine.

Garbini (1986) notes that these names place Abram territorially and chronologically in Mesopotamia at the time of Nabonidus, the last Neo-Babylonian king, a "fervent adherent of the cult of the moon god Sin" whose most important sanctuaries were in Ur and Haran, and whose mixed ethnic background was Aramean and Chaldean. Placing references to Nabonidus in the Abram narrative was a way for the Judean exiles to establish a native claim to their new country and create a link with the king under whom they flourished. Nabonidus is portrayed favourably in other Jewish works, notably the Prayer of Nabonidus found at Qumran (and on which the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness in Daniel seems to be based). Similarly, many of the oracles of Ezekiel, written a bit earlier during the exile, explicitly support the political efforts of Nebuchadnezzar and condemn his opponents in Tyre and Egypt, while Second Isaiah promotes the ideology of the Persian kings it was written under.

A highly speculative suggestion is that the Tower of Babel story affirms an ancient Babylonian pedigree for the Jews, while gently mocking the great city and its ziggurat. Nabonidus and the Persian rulers who followed him were opposed to the Marduk cult in Babylon and ultimately destroyed the tower.

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Few interpret Genesis literally these days. In America, however, fierce debate is waged in Evengelical Christian pews and colleges between science and various flavours of creationism.

For some, the story of Noah’s Flood is also non-negotiable as a historical event. A pseudo-science called 'flood geology' is the invention of Seventh Day Adventist George McCready Price. Modern Young-Earth Creationism in part derives from the Adventist founder Ellen White.

The Babel story, taken literally, claims humanity emerged from post-diluvian Babylon around 2242BCE, and that the world’s languages are a result of divine intervention at that time.

The US’s most outspoken creationist outfit, Answers in Genesis, has just one article on their website promoting 'Babel linguistics' (based on little other than Genesis). An in-house publication, Answers Research Journal, also has an article about potential locations for Babel, which it insists would be the oldest ruins in the world. (The existence of earlier civilizations elsewhere would contradict the biblical story.)

The Institute for Creation Research also has a handful of articles affirming the Babel story but with no arguments of interest.

Reasons to Believe has one article on the subject; in keeping with their “old-earth” Creationist position, they think the Babel story happened about 35,000 years ago (which makes no sense within the biblical context).

The Discovery Institute has just one page discussing Babel and languages; as is typical of their rhetorical tactics, they pooh-pooh mainstream linguistics but refuse to provide their own ideas of how languages emerged.

The editors of Creation Wiki think that Eblaite is the oldest written language and was therefore the original pre-Babel tongue. (In fact, there are far older examples from around the world.)

So, the Myths lives on ...