Tower of Babel

Tower of Babel, in biblical literature, construction project in the land of Shinar (Babylon) that, according to the account in the Book of Genesis, is thwarted by God and results in the confusion of languages among peoples. The story is often understood as an attempt to explain the diversity of human languages. In its biblical context the story of building the Tower of Babel has often been understood as a project of pride against which God’s intervention serves as a lesson in humility.

Biblical account

The story of constructing the Tower of Babel appears in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 11:1–9. The account follows the stories of Noah and the Flood and concerns the subsequent peopling of the earth. As the story commences, the people travel eastward to the land of Shinar (Babylon), where they decide to begin construction of a city and lofty tower.

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. (Genesis 11:4)

God, however, is not pleased with this initiative and remarks:

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. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech. (Genesis 11:6–7)

God disrupts the work by so confusing the language of the workers that they can no longer understand one another. The city and tower are never completed, and the people are dispersed over the face of the earth.

Historical and linguistic background

Some scholars suggest that the Tower of Babel story is derived from historical Babylonian monumental construction. Various ziggurats have been suggested, as have different accounts of grand architectural works in Mesopotamian religious traditions. It is often connected with the ziggurat Etemenanki in Babylon, which is said to have been completed by Nebuchadnezzar II—the same Babylonian king who destroyed Jerusalem in 586 bce and instigated the Babylonian Exile. The Mesopotamian creation story Enuma elish also tells of the god Marduk’s construction of a tall temple. Some scholars have read the biblical Tower of Babel’s story as a critique of Mesopotamian religion and culture.

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While the story explains language diversity, it is sometimes said to have its origins in language. The name of the tower may have been inspired by the name of Babylon (Akkadian: Bābilim, “gate of God”). The account in Genesis suggests that Babel comes from a play on the Hebrew word balal (“to confuse”): “Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused [balal] the language of all the earth.”

Interpretations

Interpretations of the Tower of Babel, much like the languages said to be spoken after its destruction, are manifold since different readers have understood the story’s significance in different ways. The construction of a tall tower reaching to the heavens is frequently interpreted as an act of human hubris. On other readings, the endeavor is deemed problematic because it is motivated by pride and a desire for fame, which are then met with divine punishment to maintain human humility. The construction of the tower and city has also been understood as a project that would keep people in one central location and prevent their migration and distribution. Some interpreters therefore read the project as defying the command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28).

As a mythological account, the Tower of Babel has often been read as an example of an etiological myth—a religious narrative that accounts for the origin of something in the world, in this case the diversity of languages. Variations of such a myth of language variation and of supernatural interference in tall-tower construction appear in many cultures around the world. A story in the ancient Hindu Shatapatha Brahmana (c. 900–700 bce) describes how the asuras (demon enemies of the gods) construct a giant fire-altar of bricks to reach heaven, but the god Indra, in disguise, puts in his own brick only to later remove it, making the whole tower crumble and kill the demons. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 ce) there is a story of giants who attempt to conquer heaven by building a large tower out of mountains until they are struck down by Jupiter. A myth recorded by Spanish missionaries about the Mesoamerican Tlachihualtepetl pyramid at Cholula (in modern-day Mexico) tells of its construction by a giant who survived a deluge, but the project was thwarted by the gods. A similar account appears in colonial-era Spanish descriptions of Toltec traditions. Recent scholarship, however, suspects these Mesoamerican stories are fusions of local legends with the Tower of Babel.

The story of the Tower of Babel has had a long interpretive history in Judaism, Christianity, and—to a lesser extent—Islam. In later Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions, the figure of Nimrod—mentioned earlier in Genesis as a powerful ruler—was often identified as the leader of the builders and a symbol of rebellion against God.

Beyond religious contexts, the tale has served in later literature and art as a symbol of a range of themes, including human ambition and its limits, division and diversity, linguistic confusion, and the power and complexity of language. The painting of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder (1563)—which fuses the Tower with the image of another ruin, the Roman Colosseum—and the emotionally charged engraving by Gustave Doré (c. 1866–70) are known as particularly iconic depictions (and can be seen in this article, above). In literature John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) depicts God’s confusion of human language as causing laughter in heaven. In Franz Kafka’s short story “Das Stadtwappen” (1931; “The City Coat of Arms”) the builders of Babel are beset by bureaucracy, procrastination, and rivalry. Jorge Luis Borges’s story “La biblioteca de Babel” (1941; “The Library of Babel”) imagines a towering library with every conceivable book. A.S. Byatt’s novel Babel Tower (1996) uses the biblical story to reflect upon the idealism and divisiveness of 1960s England. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams, something called a “Babel fish” can be implanted in one’s ear to translate extraterrestrial speech, undoing—at a galactic scale—linguistic divisiveness.

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