The Tower of Babel in its historical context

The story of the Tower of Babel is nine verses long (Genesis 11:1–9). It is the last story in the part of Genesis that tells of the whole human race, before the narrative narrows to Abraham and his family, and "babel" has passed into English as a word for a confusion of voices. It is also one of the most historically rooted stories in Genesis 1–11. The city, the building materials and the tower all point to a real place.

This guide follows STRATA's free reading of Genesis 11, which sets the history beneath each scene before asking what it means.

The land of Shinar

"Now the whole world had one language and a common form of speech" (Genesis 11:1). People journey east and settle on "a plain in the land of Shinar" (Genesis 11:2), the Bible's name for Babylonia, in southern Mesopotamia. The previous chapter has already put Babylon there, as the first city of Nimrod's kingdom: "His kingdom began in Babylon, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar" (Genesis 10:10).

Brick and bitumen

"Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly." So they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar (Genesis 11:3). The narrator explains the materials as if to listeners who build with stone, as people did in the rocky hill country of Israel. Mesopotamia, a land of river clay with little stone, built in mud brick, and its grandest buildings used fired brick set in bitumen, a natural tar. The detail is accurate, and it marks this as a story about a foreign land.

A tower with its top in the heavens

The builders say, "let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth" (Genesis 11:4). The tower is almost certainly a ziggurat, one of the stepped temple-towers that rose over Mesopotamian cities for well over a thousand years. A ziggurat was understood as a link between heaven and earth, with a shrine at its summit.

Babylon's own ziggurat was called Etemenanki, a Sumerian name meaning "house of the foundation of heaven and earth." It stood beside the temple of Marduk, the city's god, and it was rebuilt on a grand scale by the Babylonian kings Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar II, the same Nebuchadnezzar whose army destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described a tower of stacked stages in Babylon. Whenever the Babel story was first told, it took on a sharp meaning for the Judeans carried off to Babylon, some of whom lived in the city that tower dominated.

A name, and a refusal

Notice what the builders want: a name, and not to be scattered. Both run against what came before. At creation and again after the flood, God told humanity to "fill the earth" (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). The builders gather in one place instead and set out to secure a name for themselves. The very next chapter answers them, when God says to Abram, "I will make your name great" (Genesis 12:2). In the shape of Genesis, a name grasped by building high is set against a name received as a gift.

The LORD came down

"Then the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building" (Genesis 11:5). The tower was meant to reach the heavens, and God has to come down to see it. Readers ancient and modern have heard a quiet irony here. God then says, "If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech" (Genesis 11:6–7). The "let Us" echoes "Let Us make man" in Genesis 1:26.

How to read God's concern has long been debated. Many interpreters take it as judgment on pride, a reading that runs through much of Jewish and Christian tradition. The first-century historian Josephus connected the project with Nimrod and cast it as rebellion against God. Others read it as restraint, God setting a limit on unified human power before it runs to its worst end, much as Genesis 6 set a limit on the human lifespan. STRATA's reading leans toward the second view, and finds a hidden mercy in the scattering.

Babel and Babylon

"That is why it is called Babel, for there the LORD confused the language of the whole world, and from that place the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth" (Genesis 11:9). Babel is simply the Hebrew name for Babylon. The verse explains it through a pun on the Hebrew verb balal, to confuse or to mix. In Akkadian, the language of Babylon itself, the name was understood as Bab-ili, "gate of the god." The story takes the proudest name of the greatest city in its world and hears in it the sound of confusion.

Babel and the table of nations

Read in order, Genesis 10 and 11 seem to tell the spread of languages twice. Genesis 10 already describes Noah's descendants spreading out "according to their languages" (Genesis 10:5), and Genesis 11 then opens with one language for the whole world. Most scholars see two traditions placed side by side, as elsewhere in these chapters. Together they offer two views of human diversity. In Genesis 10 it unfolds naturally as families grow, and in Genesis 11 it comes as a check on a single overreaching project.

There is an older Mesopotamian echo as well. A Sumerian epic, Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, contains a passage about a time when all people spoke one tongue, and the god Enki changed the speech in their mouths. Scholars debate exactly how to read it, but it shows that the question of why people speak different languages was being asked long before Genesis.

Where the primeval history ends

Babel is the last story of Genesis 1–11, and it ends without the mercy that followed each earlier breakdown. Adam and Eve were clothed, Cain was protected, Noah was carried through the flood. At Babel the people are scattered, "and they stopped building the city" (Genesis 11:8). The answer comes in the next chapter, when God calls Abram and promises that "all the families of the earth will be blessed through you" (Genesis 12:3). Christian readers have also long paired Babel with Pentecost in Acts 2, where people of many languages each hear the apostles speaking in their own tongue.

For the exiles who shaped Genesis, the story held one more meaning. Genesis opens by answering Babylon's creation story, and its first movement closes at Babylon itself, named for confusion and left unfinished. The empire that had conquered them was, in this telling, one more human project under God's judgment, and it would not last forever. STRATA's free reading of Genesis 11 closes the free readings of Genesis 1–11. It follows the table of nations and looks back to where the whole movement began, in Genesis 1.