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.

We are Family

Chapter 10 of Genesis has been called the “Table of Nations,” consists of almost nothing but a list of 70 names (some of them repeated), and is a strong contender for one of the most boring parts of the Bible. The purpose of Gen 10 is to list the descendants of Noah’s three sons – Shem, Ham and Japheth – to show how the tribes, nations and peoples surrounding Israel derive from them. It is a mixture of a monotonous enumeration of names from the Priestly (P) source along with more names and scraps of narration from the Yahwist (J) source.

While scholars cannot identify every single name mentioned in Gen 10, they have been able to identify enough to get a rough idea of the lay of the land. As you can see in the accompanying map, the descendants of Japheth are the peoples to the north of Israel in Europe and Asia Minor. Ham’s descendants populate the northern-most parts of Africa and the area immediately surrounding the land of Canaan. The peoples descending from Shem occupy the lands of Mesopotamia and Arabia. These far-flung areas encompassed the known world in Solomon’s day (10th century BCE) but, for the modern reader, fail to take into account the Indian subcontinent, China and other Far Eastern nations, and the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas. The great flood is dated by biblical literalists to 2350 BCE, so all of these migrations and racial diversity would have had to take place since that time.

A rough approximation of where the various peoples mentioned in Gen 11 would have been located in the ancient world.

The literary genre may be that of a genealogy, but the names are not really individuals; they are the names of tribes and regions. In some instances, the writer doesn’t even pretend to provide the name of an individual. In v. 15, J states that Canaan is the father of Sidon (one of the ancient cities of Phoenicia) and Heth (representing the Hittites), as well as the father of several Canaanite tribes (Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, and Hivites). And, as if that wasn’t enough, Canaan was also the ancestor of the inhabitants of five Phoenician cities (Arkites, Sinites, etc.).

As mentioned above, there is some duplication of names due to different traditions in the two sources. According to P Lud (assumed to be a reference to inhabitants of Lydia in Asia Minor) are descended from Shem (v. 22), but according to J the Ludites are descended from Ham (v. 13). According to P Havilah and Sheba are descended from Ham (v 7), but J has them descended from Shem (vv. 28-29). It’s all quite confusing.

Presented graphically, the mind-numbing list of names is a little easier to digest.

The backbone of the Table of Nations is provided by P. He lists the sons of Noah in reverse order, from youngest to oldest. P announces the sons of Japheth, Ham or Shem and then selectively names some grandsons. The passage citing the sons of Japheth (10:2-5) is pure P. P ends each genealogical list with a formulaic conclusion: “These are the descendants of Japheth/Ham/Seth in their lands, with their own language, by their families, in their nations.” A similar formula concludes the chapter.

The list of Ham’s sons (vv. 6-20) is longer because it includes a lengthy addition (vv. 8-19) from the J source. This insertion breaks the monotony by providing us with a few lines (vv. 8-12) describing Nimrod, a mighty warrior and hunter and also the founder of the kingdom of Babel in Shinar (Babylonia) which expanded into Assyria and led to the building of Nineveh. Scholars are not in agreement as to whether the figure of Nimrod can be identified with either a mythological god or hero (like Gilgamesh) or some historical figure. Perhaps he just stands as the representative of the Babylonian nation. It is a bit odd, though, that Nimrod is included in the Hamite list but is said to have established a kingdom in Babylonia which is a Sethite region.

Two brief verses (13-14) relate the origins of the Philistines and the rest of the first J insertion (vv. 15-19) lists various tribes in the land of Canaan and its vicinity. While the division of peoples and nations appears to be along ethnic lines, there are curiosities. The Philistines were of Aegean origins, so they should be listed with Japheth’s descendants, not Ham’s. And the Canaanites were ethnically Semitic, so by all rights they should be counted among the descendants of Shem. Scholars believe that because the Canaanites were under the political control Egypt, the P source listed them as sons of Ham.

Shem is introduced at the ancestor of Eber (v. 21), who we will later see in Gen 11 is the ancestor of Abraham. Without the link to Eber provided by J, we would not know from reading P’s genealogy where to place Israel among Noah’s sons. In a J insertion (v. 26) we further learn that Eber is the father of Peleg during whose lifetime “the earth was divided” (Hebrew palag). This would have been about a hundred years after the flood event and seems to be a reference to the confusion of languages and scattering of peoples across the earth in the following episode of the Tower of Babel (11:1-9). That the descendants of Shem are to be found in Mesopotamia is consistent with the Bible’s claim that Abraham’s home town is Haran (or Ur, depending on the source).

The purpose of the Table of Nations seems to be rather straightforward. The biblical authors are demonstrating that all the known tribes, nations and ethnicities derive from the family of Noah. Therefore, all people are part of an extended family. But the rest of the OT stands diametrically opposed to this notion. Canaanites are not considered “cousins” of Israel, but abominations that needed to be driven out of the Promised Land or exterminated. Perhaps the writer is recalling an older tradition that acknowledged the ties between Canaanite and Israelite civilizations. In fact, archeologists cannot distinguish between Canaanite and Israelite culture; the two blend seamlessly from one into the other. 

Either that or the writer is speaking to his audience, an audience that is returning from exile in Babylon to the Promised Land, much as Abraham made that journey. When Abraham arrived in Canaan, he peacefully co-existed with the tribes there. The returning exiles would also arrive to find the land occupied by descendants of the Canaanites. Perhaps the writer wanted to remind his audience that they, too, could peacefully co-exist with the inhabitants if they remembered that they are all descendants of Noah.