Babel Tower
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The Tower of Babel (Hebrew, מגדל בבל Migdal Babel; in ancient Greek Πύργος τῆς Βαβέλ, Pirgos tēs Babel) is a building mentioned in the Bible. The story is aimed at explaining why the peoples of the world speak different languages.
The Tower of Babel is described in the book of Genesis whose authorship is traditionally attributed to Moses. According to these writings; humanity was almost extinct after the universal flood, it was thanks to Noah's Ark in which Noah and seven members of his family survived the catastrophe. The descendants of Noah, as the only human beings on the planet, moved to the plain of Senar (Babel), they all spoke a single language, and they decided to build a tower so high that it would reach heaven. The god of Noah (Yahweh), observing the construction and the rebellion, decides that the inhabitants should speak different languages and thus abandon the construction and spread throughout the Earth.
Extra-biblical opinions that support the founding myth, the tower was built in case another flood occurred, to be able to climb the tower, where the water could not reach. Being close to rivers, its inhabitants wanted to build a life preserver, in case a flash flood occurred and perhaps they did not have time to move to a nearby mountain to get safe. The most traditionalist opinions disagree and take the story literally.
The Etemenanki, a pyramidal temple dedicated to Marduk (local deity) in the 6th century BCE city of Babylon. C., of the Chaldean dynasty, attracted workers from different towns. Some modern scholars such as Stephen L. Harris, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was probably influenced by its construction during the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews. traditional Sumerian Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta tells a story with similarities to the biblical passage.
The Etemenanki temple originally had seven floors and was more than 90 meters high, but according to the Spanish historian Juan Luis Montero, from the University of La Coruña, in reality, it would not have exceeded 60 meters.
An inscription dating to the time of Nabopolassar states: "Marduk [the great god of Babylon] has ordered me to solidly lay the foundations of Etemenanki until it reaches the underworld and thus make its top reach up to heaven." In another inscription, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, it is specified that the decoration of the top was made of "bright blue enamel bricks", that is, decorated with the color of the sky.
Construction
The Tower of Babel is often associated with the Etemenanki temple, which today lies in ruins. The construction of that temple is uncertain, but it probably existed before the reign of Hammurabi (c. 1792-1750 BCE). The Babylonian creation poem Enûma Elish is thought to have been written during or shortly after the reign of Hammurabi; since the poem mentions the Esagila, the temple of Marduk, as created immediately after the creation of the world, and intuits the existence of Etemenanki, it is presumed that both existed for at least 100 years from the time this poem was written, but it must also have been written much earlier, since the authors also do not know exactly when they built it.
The approximate time of its construction can be deduced from the following information: Peleg (whose name was perpetuated in that of a city at the confluence of the Euphrates with the Khabor, mentioned in the tablets of the city of Mari, in the middle Euphrates, and which in Greco-Roman times bore the name Phaliga) would have lived from about 2269 to about 2030 BCE. C. his name means "Division", because "in his days the earth was divided", that is, "the population of the earth"; "from there Yahweh had scattered them over all the face of the earth". A cuneiform text of Sharkalisharri, king of Akkad (and successor to Sargon I of Akkad), who lived in the time of the patriarchs, mentions that he restored a tower-temple in Babilum (Babel or Babylon), which implies that such a building existed before his reign. In fact, in Sumerian records it is mentioned as Kadingira, which is the Sumerian equivalent of the Akkadian Babilum.
Archaeologists tried to locate the Tower of Babel mentioned in the Bible in the area of present-day Iraq. Among other sites, it was searched for in Akar Quf (west of Baghdad), where the city of Dur-Kurigalzu once existed (the ruins of a building were described as the tower of Babel by some travelers) and in Birs Nimrud, home to the ruins of the ancient city Borsippa, in Mesopotamia.
In 1913, archaeologist Robert Koldewey found a structure in the city of Babylon that he identified as the Tower of Babel (the Etemenanki temple). This tower would have been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, due to the changing fate of the area. It was destroyed by the Assyrians and also by the Arameans. And it was rebuilt on several occasions by the Chaldean princes, including Nabopolassar (625-605 BC). It is estimated that the oldest construction was carried out during the III millennium before our era.
Reference Description
Despite the images that exist, both in literature and in art, about the tower of Babel, no record without a basis in the Bible has been found that deals with its shape and appearance.
However, there are reference buildings of the time, and both the ancient documentation in cuneiform writing and the preserved images and archaeological remains allow us to reconstruct some of its characteristics; For example, the Etemenanki temple was a monument with a square or rectangular base, built in the form of a high terrace, staggered into several levels –three, four or seven–, on the last of which a chapel or a chapel was erected. temple. The nucleus was built with sun-dried adobes, covered with a thick layer of kiln-fired bricks. The temple at the top, which was accessed via stairs located perpendicular to the façade or attached to it, was made of glazed bricks.
One of the old accounts that talks about the construction of the Etemenanki is the account of Herodotus, when he passed through Babylon in the V a. C. Herodotus described the façade of the tower with a height of approximately 90 m, the building in the form of a staggered seven floors and made of walls with projections, undoubtedly vertical. The temple had a quadrangular plan divided into two sectors and delimited by a great wall. The ascent to each of the towers was done from the outside following a spiral staircase until reaching the end. The top floor had worship facilities, adorned with blue glazed bricks, imitating the color of the sky. He also points out that the blue sanctuary on the top was dedicated to the god Marduk and refers to the annual celebration of the renewal of the reign as a result of contact between Marduk and the king.
The Etemenanki was also described in a cuneiform tablet called "of the Esagil", written in 229 BC. C. in the city of Uruk. The oldest copy of the text is today in the Louvre Museum in Paris. This letter recorded the state of the tower and described the measurements of the first floor only, which reached 90 meters in length and width, while it was 33 meters high. Mention is made that the Tower of Babel was constituted with 7 floors in total, of smaller and smaller measurements. A similar mud-brick structure has now been identified and confirmed by excavations conducted by Robert Koldewey in 1913. Long stairways were discovered on the south of the building, where a triple corridor connected at the top to the upper temple of Marduk.. A longer corridor to the east connected the Etemenanki with the sacred processional path (reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin).
On the other hand, archaeological excavations have brought to light that there was a staircase in the shape of a «T» although it is unknown to what height it reached. At the moment it is not ruled out that there were two simultaneous communication systems, the “T” shaped staircase on one side and a spiral or zigzag staircase on the other as proposed by Herodotus. At the same time, it is known that there were niches richly decorated with motifs of the Babylonian New Year festival and the creation of the monument, a theme that refers to the meaning of the structure "gate of the sun, entrance to heaven", which surely came to be interpreted as a place of communication between the divine and the earthly.
Decline
The Genesis account makes no mention of any destruction of the tower. The people whose languages are confused simply stop building their city, and spread from there over the face of the Earth. However, in other sources, such as the Book of Jubilees (chap. 10 v.18-27), Alejandro Polihistor (frag. 10), Abideno (frags. 5 and 6), Flavio Josefo (Antiquities 1.4.3) and the Sibylline Oracles (iii 117-129), God brings down the tower with a great wind. In the Midrash, it is said that the upper part of the tower was burned, the lower part was swallowed up by the earth, and the middle was left to stand to erode over time.
Traditions and sources
Biblical story
According to the Bible, God, in order to prevent the development of the building, caused the builders to start speaking different languages (giving rise to the origin of the different languages) and to disperse all over the Earth.
The whole earth spoke the same language and used the same words. As men emigrated from the East, they found a plain in the Senaar region and settled there. And they said to one another, "Let us make bricks and lay them on fire." They used bricks instead of stones and bitumen instead of argamasa; and they said, "Let us build a city and a tower whose cusp reaches to the sky. Let us make ourselves famous and not be scattered on the face of the Earth." But the Lord went down to see the city and the tower that the men were building and said, "Behold, they all form one people and all speak one language; this being the beginning of their companies, nothing will prevent them from carrying out all that they propose. Well, we descend and there we confuse their language so that they do not understand each other."
Thus, the Lord dispersed them from there on the whole face of the earth and ceased in the construction of the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the tongue of all the inhabitants of the Earth and scattered them all over the surface.Genesis 11:1-9
Nimrod, who was the first to become king after the Flood, and whom the Bible identifies as a powerful hunter opposed to Yahveh, is pointed out as the true manager of the idea of carrying out this enormous undertaking. Some have tried to identify him with Sharrukin or Sargon I of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic (Akkadian) Empire in living memory. Others believe they see in this vigorous hunter the figure of the Assyrian god Ninurta, god of war and hunting who, like Nimrod, was pleased to hunt his enemies.
Book of Jubilees
The Book of Jubilees contains one of the most detailed stories found about the Tower.
They began to build and, in the september room, they caught bricks that then used as stones. The cement with which they were joined was asphalt that flowed from the sea and some water wells in the land of Sennaar. The builders took about forty-three years: the height was 5433 cubits and two palmos; the width, about two hundred three bricks, each one of a height of one third of itself; the extension of a wall, thirteen stadiums, and the other, thirty.(Jubilee 10:20-21)
Pseudo-Filo
According to the writings of the Pseudo-Philo of Alexandria in the year 70, the direction of the work of the Tower of Babel is attributed not only to Nimrod, who became chief of the descendants of Ham, but also to Joktan, as prince of the Semites, and Fenech the son of Dodanim as prince of the Japhethites. However, during the work twelve men were arrested for refusing to lay bricks, and these were Abraham, Lot, Nahor, and various sons of Prince Joktan himself. Eventually Joktan saves eleven of these men from the wrath of the other two princes and God ends up protecting Abraham.
Flavius Josephus
The Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus (~37 to ~100) in his Jewish Antiquities, published around the year 93, narrates the story found in the Hebrew texts and mentions the Tower of Babel. He describes Nimrod, a tyrannical king who tried to separate the state from religion and who had built the tower. In this story, Yahweh confuses the people instead of destroying them, because the annihilation by means of the flood had not taught them to be merciful.
And Nebrodes (Nimrond) gradually turned his government into a tyranny, seeing that the only way to remove men the fear of God was to increasingly tie them to their own domination. He claimed that if God intended to drown the world again, [Nemrod] would build a tower so high that the waters would never reach them. The crowd was willing to follow the dictates of Nebrodes and consider a cowardice to submit to God. And they lifted up the tower; they worked without pause, and as many arms intervened, they began to rise very quickly. But they were so thick and so strong, that by their great height it seemed less than it was. It was built by baked bricks joined by bitumen so that water would not pass. When God saw them working as madmen he decided not to destroy them completely, for they had learned nothing of the destruction of previous sinners; he provoked, instead, the confusion among them by making them speak in different languages so that they would not understand.Jewish Antiquities (chap. 4: 2-3)
Greek apocalypse of Baruc
Book III of Baruch or Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (II century) is one of the apocryphal writings that describes the just rewards of sinners and the righteous for eternal life. In the story of the book, in chapter 3:5, Baruc is taken by the angel Famael in a vision that passes through the first heaven. In the place he sees men whose face was that of an ox, who had the horns of a deer, the feet of a goat, and the loins of a lamb. He then, with surprise, asks the angel and he answers that «those are the ones who built the tower (the Tower of Babel) of the fight against Yahveh. The Lord has moved them from their place...».
Midrash
Rabbinic literature offers many different accounts of the causes for the building of the Tower of Babel, and of the intentions of its builders. According to the Midrash the builders of the tower, called in Jewish sources as "the generation of secession", said: "Yahveh has no right to choose the upper world for himself and leave the lower world for himself." for us, so we are going to build a tower, with a god on top holding a sword, so that it can reflect our intention to make war on Yahveh.
The construction of the tower was intended not only to defy Yahveh, but also Abraham, who exhorted the builders to turn in reverence. The passage mentions that the builders spoke harsh words against Yahveh, which are not mentioned in the Bible. They believed that Yahveh, from time to time, drained all the water from the sky, and therefore they raised several columns so that there would not be another flood.
Some among that generation still wanted war against Yahveh in heaven (Talmud Sanhedrin 109a). They were encouraged in this task with the idea that the arrows they shot upwards then fell dripping with blood, for which reason it was believed that (literal) war could be waged against the heavenly inhabitants (Sefer ha-Yashar, Noah, ed. Leghorn, 12b).
Islamic
The Tower of Babel is not mentioned in the Quran, but there are stories with similarities. In Egypt, Pharaoh asks to build a tower so high that he can climb up and confront the god of Moses.
A story set in Babylonia [Babil] but without a tower; The angels Harut and Marut taught some Babylonians magic and warned them that magic was a sin but it was a test of faith. An account of Babil appears more fully in the writings of Yaqut, humanity being blown by the winds towards the plain 'Babil', where Allah assigned them their separate languages, and then they were scattered again in the same way.
In the book History of the Prophets and Kings by the Muslim theologian Al-Tabari of the X span>, recounts; Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, Allah destroys it, and the language of humanity, Syriac, is confused in 72 languages. A Muslim historian from the 13th century, Abu ul-Fida, tells the same story, adding that the patriarch Eber (an ancestor of Abraham) was allowed to keep the original language, Hebrew in this case, because he had no part in the construction.
Although there are similarities to the biblical narrative, the concept of God separating humanity with languages is alien to Islamic tradition. Muslim author Yahiya Emerick says that in Islamic belief, God created the nations so that they would know each other and not separate.
Sumerian
There is a Sumerian myth similar to that of the Tower of Babel, called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, where Enmerkar, king of Uruk, builds a huge ziggurat in Eridu and demands a tribute of precious materials from Aratta for its construction. At one point in the story, Enmerkar recites an incantation imploring the god Enki to restore (or, in Kramer's translation, to interrupt) the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions in Shubur, Hamazi, Sumer, Uri-ki (Akkad), the land of Martu and the whole universe.
In a recent hypothesis, David Rohl associated Nimrod, the hunter and builder of Erech and Babel, with Enmerkar (Emer the Hunter), king of Uruk, who is also said to have been the first builder of temples in Eridu and which, in turn, is related to Amar-Sin (2046-2037 BC), the third monarch of the third dynasty of Ur, who also tried to finish the ziggurat of that southern city. This theory proposes that the remains of the historic building at Eridu would have inspired the Mesopotamian legend of the Tower of Babel. Among the reasons given are the larger size and older age of the ruins, and the fact that one title of Eridu was NUN.KI, meaning "mighty place," a title later to become Babylonian. On the other hand, both cities also had temples called Esagila dedicated to Marduk.
Finally, for travelers of the XVIII and XIX who visited Dur-Kurigalzu, the ziqqurat of Aqar Quf was considered as the tower of Babel.
Origin of languages according to ancient writings
The story of the Tower of Babel is related to one of the most universal themes of the founding mythical story. Religions and ethnic myths often provide answers to everything, including the origins and development of spoken language. Most mythologies do not believe that man is the inventor of languages, but they do believe in a single divine language that predates human languages. The mystical language used to communicate with animals or spirits, such as the language of birds, is also common in stories and was of special interest during the Renaissance.
In the story of the Tower of Babel, from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, Yahveh "punishes" humanity for its arrogance and hostility by exposing man to a great variety of languages. But this punishment can be seen at the same time as a divine gift, just like Adam and Eve, opening up possibilities for new options. Thus, confusion implies the possibility of relearning, overcoming differences and eliminating hatred. Only then will he be able to overcome the confusion and learn a new language that identifies him with others.
It can be observed that similar stories are repeated, as in the Sumerian tradition called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta that has already been explained in the previous point. A group of people from the island of Hao, in Polynesia, also tell a story similar to that of the Tower of Babel: "A god who, in anger, persecuted the builders of the city, destroyed a building and changed the language of the people, so they all spoke different languages.
In Mesoamerica there is a story about a man named Coxcox and a woman named Xochiquetzal, who after shipwrecking together on top of a piece of tree bark, reached the mainland and fathered many children. However, those children could not speak until one day a dove arrived that gave them the gift of speech, but in different languages and in the same way they could not understand each other. Among the Ticuna of the Alto Amazonas it is said that all the peoples were once a single and great tribe, all speaking the same language, until on one occasion, they ate two hummingbird eggs, it is not explained why, and later the tribe divided into many groups and dispersed because they could not communicate.
Another story, attributed by the native historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (c. 1565-1648) to the ancient Toltecs, states that men, after a great deluge, multiplied and then a great tower or Zacuali, to protect themselves in the event of a second deluge. However, the languages suddenly appear, get confused and the work stopped.
In ancient Greece there was a myth that said that for centuries men had lived lawlessly under the rule of Zeus and that they could all speak the same language endowed by the god and goddess of ingenuity, Philarios and Philarion. However, on one occasion, the god Hermes brought diversity in speech and with it the separation of nations, bringing with it discord. Zeus then relinquished his position and ceded his throne to the first human king, Phoroneus.
In Wa-Sania, a Bantu people in East Africa, they have a story about the beginning of the peoples of the earth. It is said that there was only one language, but during a severe famine madness struck the people, causing people to wander in all directions, muttering strange words and shaping different languages.
In his 1918 book, anthropologist James George Frazer documented similarities between Old Testament accounts, such as the Flood, and indigenous legends from around the world. He then identified a story told in the mythology of the Lozi people, where evil men built a large antenna tower to chase the creator god, Nyambe, who had fled to heaven in a web. The men are then lost as the tower's masts collapse and everyone is blown away. Frazer also cites the legends found among the people of the Congo region, as well as Tanzania, where men built great towers or climbed huge trees in a failed attempt to reach the Moon.
Finally, the New Testament ends by rounding off the story of the dispersion of languages made in Genesis with the story of the Tower of Babel. In the book of the Acts of the Apostles (2,1-41) mention is made of the descent of the Holy Spirit and the restoration of man. This restoration was manifested at Pentecost with the miracle of "speaking in tongues." If in the beginning the man ended up confused, now that confusion would be overcome in the mutual understanding that exists in the people who meet the Lord. The miracle of the "speaking in tongues" of Pentecost reflects that the love of Yahveh is the new language that allows men to understand each other.
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