Tower of Power

According to Virgil, Aeneas was a prince of Troy who escaped the sacking of the city and eventually founded the city of Lavinium; it would be the parent city of Rome. A different tradition recounted the story of Romulus, who after killing his twin brother Remus, founded the city of Rome. Because the Trojan War is dated to hundreds of years before the traditional founding of Rome in 753 BCE, a line of fictional kings were manufactured to close the gap between Aeneas and Romulus and reconcile the two founding myths.

We have two founding myths for Babylon in Gen 10 and 11. Gen 10:8-12 gave us the story of Nimrod and how he founded his kingdom in Babel in the land of Shinar. Gen 11:1-9 recounts the story of a group of people who, travelling eastwards, stop in a plain in the land of Shinar and decide to construct a city and tower. After YHWH intervenes, the people are dispersed, their language confused, and the city became known as Babel because that word is similar to the Hebrew word balal, “confuse.” (Actually, the name of the city comes from the Akkadian babilam, the gate of the gods.)

There are three motifs that run through the story: 1) construction of a city with a tower that can reach to the heavens, 2) one language that gets confused into a multiplicity of languages, and 3) dispersion of the human race across the earth. These motifs are found in many stories around the world, but never together except in Genesis. For example, there are many myths about the attempt to construct a tower that can reach heaven, but these tales end with the destruction of the tower (and sometimes the builders), not with a confusion of languages or a dispersion of peoples across the earth. Those motifs are more likely to be the conclusion of a flood story.

A traditional portrayal of "The Tower of Babel" (1563), by Pieter Brueghel

Although all three motifs appear in Gen 11:1-9, the threads don’t intertwine seamlessly. For example, YHWH spots the people constructing the city and decides to confuse their language (v. 7), but then ends up scattering the people across the earth (v. 8). Despite having been physically scattered across the face of the earth and no longer in the land of Shinar, the author feels it necessary to explain that the builders abandon construction of the city. This explanation would make more sense if only their language had been confused yet they had remained in the same place.

Because of the disjunctions in the narrative, biblical scholars speculate that we are dealing with two independent stories that were combined at a really early period. In each story, the people want to construct a tower that can reach heaven and thus make a name for themselves. This challenges the bounds the creator has placed on the people, so in one story, the deity disperses the people across the face of the earth. In another story, the deity confuses their language so they can no longer work together and they abandon the building project.

The story probably does not originate in Mesopotamia, but the author is aware of their building techniques. In Israel, buildings are constructed of stone and mortar. Therefore the author has to explain to his audience that in the land of Shinar, fired bricks are used for stone and asphalt for mortar. The mention of Shinar also continues the process begun in Gen 10 of shifting the setting of the stories from some distant primeval time to historical time. This story occurs in a real place, although at some far-off time when all of humanity spoke the same language.

The Etemenanki ziggurat in the temple area in Babylon may have inspired the tale of the Tower of Babel. This impressive model of the ziggurat was constructed entirely of Legos by Michal Herbolt.

Hearing this story as a kid, it seemed fantastical to me that people were foolish enough to think they could construct a tower that would reach heaven. There was obviously no way that was going to work. An adult reader could be tempted to say that builders’ intent for a tower “with its summit touching the heavens” is just metaphorical language for a magnificent structure, but in the story YHWH is concerned enough that he felt it necessary to take steps to prevent the builders from completing their project. If you recall the cosmology of the ANE with a vaulted dome over the earth, it may have seemed feasible millennia ago that if mountains could scrape the clouds, maybe a tower could be built tall enough to allow humans to ascend to heaven.

In summary, what we have here is another etiological tale to explain how a situation in the author’s present-day – namely, the multiplicity of languages – came about. Just like we saw in Gen 3 with the explanations of why snakes crawl on the ground, women have pain in childbirth and men have to toil and sweat to work the ground, the many human languages are a result of YHWH’s punishment for human misdeeds. In this case YHWH is making a pre-emptive strike to keep humanity in its place. At the end of the Eden story (3:22-24), concerned with what his humans would try next, YHWH stationed an angel at the entrance of Eden to prevent humans from eating of the tree of life. In this tale of the tower of Babel, YHWH has to disperse the human race and confuse their languages because humans are capable of anything once they put their minds to it.

And, with that, we have our moral for the story. Humans in the Genesis stories have this annoying habit of not knowing their place, whether it is thirsting after knowledge (Gen 3), cavorting with divine beings (Gen 6), or building a tower that can reach heaven. YHWH has to continually intervene to restrict them within the boundaries set for them. The author recognizes that human beings are capable of both great and terrible accomplishments and this has resonance for our own time because we realize that humanity has the power to either save the world or destroy it. It is anyone’s guess which path we will choose.