The story of the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1–9, is an origin myth and parable that aims to clarify why people speak different languages throughout the world.
The narrative describes how a single language-speaking, unified human race migrates eastward to reach Shinar. There, they decide to construct a skyscraper for the top of a tower and a city. Seeing their city and tower, Yahweh scatters them throughout the planet, stopping the build, and confuses their speech so they can no longer understand one another.
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused (balal) the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
The Bible refers to "the city and the tower," or just "the city," rather than the "tower of Babel.". The city was formerly known as Bāb-ilim, which translates to "gate of God" in Akkadian. The biblical name "Babel" for the city comes from the Hebrew verb בָּלַל (bālal), which means to mix up or perplex.
The beginnings of the diversity of languages are explained by the tale of the Tower of Babel. God created several languages because he was worried that people had blasphemed by erecting the tower to prevent a second deluge. Humans become linguistically separated from one another as a result.
Flavius Josephus, a first-century Roman-Jewish historian, says that the tower's building was a hubristic act of defiance against God, authorised by the haughty tyrant Nimrod. However, there have been several modern interpretations that question this traditional understanding, emphasising the narrative's clear motivation of cultural and linguistic uniformity. This interpretation of the text presents Babel as the birthplace of civilisation and views God's acts as an etiology of cultural diversity rather than as a punishment for pride.
Biblical academics do not view the Book of Genesis as a historical record of events, but rather as mythical.
Although the Bible does not say in Genesis 10:10 that Nimrod gave the command to build the tower, several other sources have linked Nimrod to the project.
According to Genesis 11:9, the verb balal, which in Hebrew means "to confuse or confound," is the source of the Hebrew name Babel.
Flavius Josephus offered a similar explanation, stating that the name was taken from the Hebrew word Babel, which means confusion.
Mythological Context
Etemenanki is thought to have had an influence on the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, according to contemporary researchers.
Within Islamic tradition, the Quran has a story that bears resemblance to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, despite not being specifically mentioned: In order to ascend to heaven and confront the God of Moses, Pharaoh instructs Haman to construct a stone tower for him.
More detail regarding the story of Babil may be found in Yaqut's writings, albeit it does not include the tower. The story tells of how people was scattered anew after being allocated separate languages by God and being carried together by winds into the plain that came to be known as "Babil." By al-Tabari, a fuller version is given: Nimrod has the tower built in Babil, God destroys it, and the language of mankind, formerly Syriac, is then confused into 72 languages.
In the Book of Mormon, when the "great tower" arrives, a man named Jared and his family pray to God that their language not be confused. God reserves their language and guides them to the Valley of Nimrod as a result of their prayers. They then go on a sea voyage to the Americas.
According to Gnostic legend found in the Paraphrase of Shem, devils bring a tower—which is supposed to be the Tower of Babel—along with the great flood:
And he caused the flood, and he destroyed your (Shem's) race, to take the light and to take away from faith. But I proclaimed quickly by the mouth of the demon that a tower come up to be up to the particle of light, which was left in the demons and their race - which was water - that the demon might be protected from the turbulent chaos. And the womb planned these things according to my will, that she might pour forth completely. A tower came to be through the demons. The darkness was disturbed by his loss. He loosened the muscles of the womb. And the demon who was going to enter the tower was protected so that the races might continue to acquire coherence through him.
The origin story for the fragmentation of human languages is known as The Confusion of Tongues (confusio linguarum), which is another name related to the tower. This myth states that humanity spoke a single language before this incident.
These languages were regarded as "Japhetite" until the Indo-European language family was recognised. The putative Japhetic languages which were supposedly never corrupted, whose speakers were said to have not taken part in building the Tower of Babel, were said to have primacy over Hebrew starting in Renaissance Europe. Until the second half of the 18th century, when modern linguistics emerged, some writers continued to maintain that Hebrew was the primary language.
Linguistical Context
The concept of a single original language confounded historical linguistics for a very long time. Attempts to locate a living descendant of the Adamic language date back to the Middle Ages and the 17th century.
Pseudolinguistics holds that the literal notion that the world's linguistic diversity began with the construction of the Tower of Babel is at odds with the established knowledge regarding the genesis and development of languages.
Several global traditions have likewise described a supernatural confusion of the one original language into multiple, though tower-free, languages.
But how high was it?
The tower's height is not mentioned in the Book of Genesis. "Its top in the sky" was an idiom for stunning height that was used to describe the skyscraper; it didn't imply arrogance, only a cliché for height.
There are some parallels
Enmerkar of Uruk is building a massive ziggurat in Eridu and demands a tribute of precious materials from Aratta for its construction. At one point, he recite an incantation imploring the god Enki to restore the linguistic unity of the inhabited regions. This is depicted in the Sumerian parallel Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.
One of the myths included in everyone's favourite Greco-Roman parallel is the Gigantomachy. Jupiter's thunderbolts repel the Giants when they try to stack mountains to get to the gods in heaven.
Rendering the heights of heaven no safer than the earth, they say the giants attempted to take the Celestial kingdom, piling mountains up to the distant stars. Then the all-powerful father of the gods hurled his bolt of lightning, fractured Olympus and threw Mount Pelion down from Ossa below.