Babylon

Babylon's standing as a holy city rested on Marduk and on the temple complex of Esagila at its centre, beside the stepped tower Etemenanki, whose name means the foundation of heaven and earth. The Enuma Elish tells how Marduk alone agreed to fight the sea goddess Tiamat when the older gods would not, how he was granted supreme kingship in return, and how he made the world from her body and built Babylon as a resting place for the gods. The poem is a theology of empire as much as an account of creation: it explains why the god of one city should stand at the head of a pantheon he had not originally led.

The akitu festival at the start of the spring month of Nisan bound the king to that story. Ritual texts describe him brought before the statue of Marduk, stripped of his insignia, struck on the cheek by the high priest and made to declare that he had not neglected the city or its temple, before the regalia were returned to him. He then took the god's hand and led the statue in procession along the Processional Way and out through the Ishtar Gate to a festival house beyond the walls. Chronicles record years in which the festival could not be held as a failure of the whole order, and note that it lapsed for years together while Nabonidus was absent from the city.

Robert Koldewey's excavations from 1899 uncovered the walls, the gate and the processional street, and the reconstructed Ishtar Gate stands in Berlin. The site itself has been damaged repeatedly, most recently by military occupation, and was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2019.

The deportations of 597 and 586 BCE carried the Judean court, priesthood and skilled classes to Babylonia, and the literature produced there changed their religion permanently. Ezekiel receives his visions by the river Chebar, a canal in the countryside rather than a river in the city. Psalm 137 sets the refusal to sing beside the waters of Babylon. The prophet whose work stands in Isaiah 40 to 55, writing near the end of the exile, mocks the craftsman who fells a tree, burns half of it for warmth and worships what he carves from the rest, and states as flatly as any passage in the Hebrew Bible that there is no god besides one. Sabbath, circumcision and descent became the marks of a people who no longer had a temple, and much of the Torah reached its present shape in that setting.

Cyrus took the city in 539 BCE and permitted a return, but many stayed. Babylonia remained a centre of Jewish life for well over a thousand years and produced the Talmud that carries its name, compiled in the academies of Sura and Pumbedita.

Babylon then became a word. Genesis makes Babel the place where speech was confused, playing on the city's own name for itself, the gate of the god. Revelation calls Rome Babylon the great and announces its fall in the language Isaiah and Jeremiah had used for the original city. Rastafari speech applies the same word to a whole system of oppression, which makes it the oldest political metaphor in the Bible still in everyday religious use.