Nimrod, Pentecost, and What Islam Tells Instead

Genesis does not say who built the tower. Later Jewish tradition supplies Nimrod, the mighty hunter named two chapters earlier as a founder of cities in the same region, and develops him into a tyrant who compels the work and makes war on heaven; the identification appears in Josephus and in rabbinic midrash and passes from there into Christian and Islamic retellings, so that the phrase about Nimrod building the tower is now widely assumed to be scriptural when it is not. The tower also drew a great deal of later legendary elaboration about its height and about the fate of the builders, none of which is in the biblical text.

Christian reading has long set the confusion of tongues against the account of Pentecost, in which people from many nations each hear speech in their own language, and treats the second as the deliberate reversal of the first, an association carried in the liturgy rather than argued from the text. The Qur'an has no Babel narrative. It does contain a related scene in which Pharaoh instructs Haman to fire clay and build him a tower so that he may look upon the God of Musa, which is a story about a ruler's presumption rather than about the origin of languages, and the two should not be conflated. Islamic tradition knows Nimrod as an opponent of Ibrahim, again in a setting quite separate from the tower.