A short narrative in Genesis in which the whole earth has one language, settles on a plain in the land of Shinar, learns to make fired brick, and begins to build a city with a tower whose top is in the heavens, so as to make a name for itself and not be scattered. God comes down to look, confuses the speech of the builders so that they cannot understand one another, and scatters them over the face of the earth, leaving the unfinished city named for the confusion. The story is at once an explanation of why humanity speaks many languages and a comment on a Mesopotamian building form, the stepped temple tower, that the writers knew at first hand. Later Jewish tradition attaches Nimrod to the building as its instigator, a figure the Genesis account itself never places there.
Facts
History
Historical NoteJosephus's first century Antiquities of the Jews already reads the story as an explanation for linguistic diversity and names Nimrod as the tower's instigator, a detail not given in the Genesis text itself. 2 Historical NoteThe name Babel is explained in the text itself as coming from the Hebrew verb meaning to confuse, a wordplay etymology that runs directly against the Akkadian Bab-ili the name actually derives from, which means gate of the god, so that the city's own proud self-naming is turned into the very word for its punishment. 1 Meaning
Central MotifA single language divided, and a tower left unfinished 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteLater Jewish tradition in works such as the Book of Jubilees elaborates the tower's height into specific, exaggerated measurements and has God's confusion of language happen gradually over years rather than in a single moment, expanding the terse biblical account of nine verses into a much longer narrative of the city's construction and fall. 1 Scholarly NoteNimrod is named as the builder in Josephus and in rabbinic midrash and is absent from the Genesis account itself 2 Controversy
Point in DisputeScholars read the tower's building material, fired brick used in place of stone, and the reference to bitumen for mortar, as details drawn from direct Mesopotamian observation rather than from an Israelite architectural tradition of its own, though whether one specific ziggurat, most often proposed as Babylon's own Etemenanki, stands behind the account remains unsettled. 1 Sources
Primary SourceThe account survives complete in the Masoretic Hebrew Torah and, with some variation, among the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments of Genesis recovered at Qumran, copied centuries before the Masoretic tradition was fixed. 1 Learn More
One Language, and the Scattering
The episode occupies nine verses. The whole earth has one language and the same words; people migrate eastward, settle on a plain in Shinar, and discover a technology, saying to one another that they should make brick and burn it hard, so that brick serves them for stone and bitumen for mortar. The stated purpose of the building is twofold: to make a name for themselves, and not to be scattered over the face of the earth. God comes down to see the city and the tower that the humans are building, observes that this is only the beginning of what they will attempt if nothing is done, and confuses their language so that no one understands his neighbour. The building stops, the people are scattered, and the place is named for the confusion.
The narrative is doing at least two things at once. It is an account of why the world speaks many languages, placed immediately before the call of Abraham and after a chapter listing the nations by their tongues. It is also a description of a Mesopotamian stepped temple tower, the ziggurat, built of the fired brick and bitumen the text specifies rather than the stone of the Levantine highlands, and the name it plays on is that of Babylon. Whether the scattering is read as a punishment for pride, as an undoing of a dangerous uniformity, or as the fulfilment of the earlier instruction to fill the earth is left open by a text that never states which, and all three readings have long histories.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Myth's own Description: later Jewish tradition attaches Nimrod to the tower's construction, a figure the Genesis account itself never places there.
Belongs to Tradition
Originated In
Set on a plain in Shinar and describing a Mesopotamian stepped tower
Sources
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