Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [34]
PLOT SUMMARY: THE TOWER OF BABEL
Men migrate “from the east” and settle in the plain in the land of “Shinar.” They all speak the same language and decide to build a tower that glorifies themselves. God comes down to take a look and doesn’t like the scene of men making their way heavenward. Threatened by these men, God confuses their speech so the tower-builders cannot understand one another. For good measure, God scatters people over the face of the earth and they quit construction of the tower—or city—which is then named Babel.
Do they “babble” in Babylon?
There are several points of interest in this very brief but famous story of man trying to overreach his earthly bounds. First of all, it provides an ancient mythological explanation for the many languages spoken by humankind. Second, it offers an explanation for the existence of the large towers found throughout the ancient Near East. Called ziggurats, from an ancient Akkadian word for “high,” these stepped towers built of sun-baked bricks were found throughout Mesopotamia. First the historical background. The “plains of Shinar” mentioned throughout Genesis is the plain beyond the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, or ancient Mesopotamia (Greek for “between two rivers”). Today the region is identified as southern Iraq.
This was part of the “Fertile Crescent” of your schoolbook history, the arc of land that stretched from Egypt, along the Mediterranean coastline of modern Israel and Lebanon, and then into modern Syria and Iraq. Watered by the key river systems—the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates in Mesopotamia—the area was the birthplace of much of what the Western world calls “civilization” and “history.” The first wheel is supposed to have been used in ancient Mesopotamia, home to the Sumerians, in about 6500 BCE. By about 5000 BCE, the earliest cities were rising, and cattle were domesticated. Villagers began to cooperate on irrigation projects at about the time people were doing the same thing on the banks of the Nile. Over the next fifteen hundred years, the Sumerians gradually harnessed animals to plows, drained marshlands, and irrigated the desert to extend areas of cultivation. The increase in agricultural efficiency eventually led to the first “leisure class,” allowing the development of priests, artisans, scholars, and merchants. By 3500 BCE, the Sumerians had developed bronze metalworking, sexagesimal counting—based on the number sixty, the reason we still have sixty minutes in an hour—and a written alphabet. Their myths and history had an unmistakable influence on the early sections of Genesis, and the “Sumerian King List” bears a striking resemblance to the biblical genealogies of Cain and Seth.
Part of a temple complex in these early cities, the towers—very similar to the stepped pyramids of Mexico and Central America—were topped by a chapel. The earliest of these ziggurats dates to around 2100 BCE, and they may have been influenced by the Egyptian pyramids, which were older by a few hundred years. The grandest of these ziggurats was the temple complex in the city of Babylon, a seven-staged pyramid that may have been built around 1900 BCE.
The Babel story had great significance for the early Israelites, because it provided an explanation for the name of the city of Babylon, which in the native Sumerian language meant “gate of the gods” but in Hebrew was related to the word for “to confuse.” In other words, the composer of Genesis was using a bilingual pun to disparage the people who later captured the people of Israel and held them captive in the city of Babylon.
In another context, the story once again shows men trying to 0be “like gods” and how unfavorably God views that idea. It was an idea opposed not only by the God of the Israelites but by the gods of many mythologies. In other words, it just may be part of human nature to strive for the heavens,