![]() zaqāru, "to raise up," "elevate") was the central feature of the great temples which were built in all important Mesopotamian cities. Scholars agree that the edifice referred to in Genesis 11 is clearly a ziqqurat, or Mesopotamian temple tower. The unfinished tower was called Babel, a name which was explained by its resemblance to the Hebrew verb bll ("to confuse"), since here the Lord "confounded the speech of the whole earth." As a result, mankind was distributed over the face of the earth. However, their building project was frustrated by the Lord who confounded their language. At this site it was decided to build a "city and a tower with its top in the sky," so that the builders would be able to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered over the entire world. The story relates how, at the time when all men still spoke one language, there was a migration from the East to the plain of *Shinar (Babylonia). The story of Babel thus explains how the descendants of this one man came to be so widely scattered and divided into separate nations speaking so many different languages. According to the preceding narrative, mankind after the flood was descended from one common ancestor, *Noah. This story features a ‘confusion of tongues’ as well as the construction of temples at Eridu and Uruk, so parallels have been drawn between it and the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis.BABEL, TOWER OF, the edifice whose building is portrayed in Genesis 11:1–9 as the direct cause of the diversity of languages in the world and the dispersion of mankind over all the earth. Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta is a Sumerian text from around four thousand years ago, describing the conflicts between Enmerkar, king of Uruk, and the king of Aratta. Although it was barely 325 feet in height, this still made it the tallest structure in southwestern Asia, and it would retain that record for many centuries afterwards.Īnd curiously enough, the Tower of Babel story may well have grown out of an earlier Sumerian myth, much as the account of Noah and the Great Flood finds a precursor in the Epic of Gilgamesh. A tower in Babel was eventually completed, by Nebuchadnezzar. It remained half-finished for centuries, so it may well have served as the real-life inspiration for the mythic Tower of Babel. ![]() Such a structure is known as a ziggurat: a pyramidal tower.Ī Sumerian king began building a ziggurat in Babel, but this was left unfinished, perhaps because the Sumerians were too busy fending off the Akkadians. ![]() As Isaac Asimov notes in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament by Isaac Asimov, temples to the gods in these cities took the form of stepped pyramids which were ascended by inclined planes around the outside. Babylonia, the considerable region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was named for Babylon, which was itself the Greek version of Babel.īabel (or Babylon) did indeed have a real, historical tower, but then that needn’t surprise us, since most Sumerian and Babylonian cities boasted one. If its name sounds unfamiliar to us now, except in connection with the biblical Tower of Babel story, that’s because we know it better under its Greek name, which was Babylon. For the next two thousand years, Babel changed hands but remained an important city. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |