The Tower of Babel: (history, biblical, fact)

  The Tower of Babel 

source of picture: Pieter Bruegel Senior1563

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-tower-of-babel-pieter-bruegel-the-elder/bAGKOdJfvfAhYQ?hl=id

 caption: 

• Title: The Tower of Babel
• made of: Pieter Bruegel the Elder
• date created: 1563
• Style: flemish Mannerism
• Provenance: Collection of Emperor Rudolf II.
• Inventory Number: GG 1026
• physical dimension: w155 x h114 cm
• Type: painting
• Medium: Oil on Wood

    “[…] Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven;and let us make us a name […]. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower […]. And he said: […] let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one nother’s speech. […] and they left off to build the city.” (Gen. 11:4–8.)
King Nimrod, who appears as builder
along with his entourage at the bottom left of the painting, is not mentioned in the biblical text. Only the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who collaborated with the Romans, combined records from different sources to create the legend that became accepted (Antiquitates Judaica I,4; 93–94 AD).
    In the book illumination of the Early and High Middle Ages, local buildings that were less than monumental were used as models for the architecture of the Tower of Babel. Starring in the 16th century, artists orientated themselves on the Mesopotamian type of step-shaped ziggurat (temple tower), which, however, was rectangular rather than round. Bruegel’s monumental composition had several forerunners in Netherlandish painting, but his work became the most famous classic among the Tower of Babel depictions and was frequently copied in many different variations. The sense of scale is provided by the flemish-style port city, which is impressively tiny in comparison to the tower. With meticulous precision and encyclopaedic interest Bruegel depicts an abundance of technical and mechanical details, from the supply of the building materials in the busy harbour to the various cranes and the scaffolding on the unfinished brick foundation. He sets the workers’ dwellings into the stone outer structure, which blends elements of classical with Romanesque architecture, and they appear to be more than merely temporary. By anchoring the building on the rocky slope, Bruegel creates the impression of static equilibrium. Reaching up to the clouds, the building, however, is optically distorted and appears to have slightly sunk into the ground on the left side. This is an artistic gesture, on the one hand enhancing the impression of the building’s monumentality, and on the other hand alluding to human hubris and the impossibility of completing the tower because “the Lord confused the language of all the earth”. (Gen. 11:9.)

© Cäcilia Bischoff, Masterpieces of the Picture Gallery. A Brief Guide to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 2010

Etymology

The phrase "Tower of Babel" does not appear in the Bible; it is always "the city and the tower" (אֶת-הָעִיר וְאֶת-הַמִּגְדָּל‎) or just "the city" (הָעִיר‎). The original derivation of the name Babel (also the Hebrew name for Babylon) is uncertain. The native, Akkadian name of the city was Bāb-ilim, meaning "gate of God". However, that form and interpretation itself are now usually thought to be the result of an Akkadian folk etymology applied to an earlier form of the name, Babilla, of unknown meaning and probably non-Semitic origin.(Day, John (2014). From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 179–180. ISBN 978-0-567-37030-3 ); (Day, John (2014). From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 179–180. ISBN 978-0-567-37030-3.) According to the Bible, the city received the name "Babel" from the Hebrew verb בָּלַ֥ל (bālal), meaning to jumble or to confuse (John L. Mckenzie (1995). The Dictionary of the Bible. Simon and Schuster. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-684-81913-6.)

Composition

Genre

The narrative of the tower of Babel Genesis 11:1–9 is an etiology or explanation of a phenomenon. Etiologies are narratives that explain the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other phenomenon (Coogan, Michael D. (2009). A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: the Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195332728.)^:426 The story of the Tower of Babel explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood so God brought into existence multiple languages.(Coogan, Michael D. (2009). A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: the Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195332728.)^:51 Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another.

Themes

The story's theme of competition between God and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Harris, Stephen L. (1985). Understanding the Bible: A Reader's Introduction. Palo Alto: Mayfield. ISBN 9780874846966.). The 1st-century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod. There have, however, been some contemporary challenges to this classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative (v. 1, 4, 6) (Hiebert, Theodore (2007). "The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World's Cultures". Journal of Biblical Literature. 126 (1): 29–58. doi:10.2307/27638419. JSTOR 27638419). This reading of the text sees God's actions not as a punishment for pride, but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization.

Authorship and source criticism

Jewish and Christian tradition attributes the composition of the whole Pentateuch, which includes the story of the Tower of Babel, to Moses. Modern Biblical scholarship rejects Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, but is divided on the question of its authorship. Many scholars subscribe to some form of the documentary hypothesis, which argues that the Pentateuch is composed of multiple "sources" that were later merged. Scholars who favor this hypothesis, such as Richard Elliot Friedman, tend to see the Genesis 11:1-9 as being composed by the J or Jahwist/Yahwist source (Friedman, Richard Elliot (1997). Who Wrote the Bible?. Simon & Schuster. p. 247. ISBN 0-06-063035-3.). Michael Coogan suggests the intentional word play regarding the city of Babel, and the noise of the people's "babbling" is found in the Hebrew words as easily as in English, is considered typical of the Yahwist source (Coogan, Michael D. (2009). A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: the Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195332728.)^:51 . John Van Seters, who has put forth substantial modifications to the hypothesis, suggests that these verses are part of what he calls a "Pre-Yahwistic stage" (Coogan, Michael D. (2009). A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament: the Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195332728.). Other scholars reject the documentary hypothesis all together. The "minimalist" scholars tend to see the books of Genesis through 2 Kings as written by a single, anonymous author during the Hellenistic period. Philippe Wajdenbaum suggests that the Tower of Babel story is evidence that this author was familiar with the works of both Herodotus and Plato (Wajdenbaum, Philippe (2014). Argonauts of the Desert: Structural Analysis of the Hebrew Bible (Copenhagen International Seminar). Routledge. pp. 110–112. ISBN 978-1845539245).

10 facts you might not know about the story of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis (Brennan Mcpherson

1. The entire account of the Tower of Babel is in Genesis 11:1-9, but additional details and references are found from Genesis 9 through Genesis 11:26. There’s WAY too much here for just one point, so suffice it to say that to get a true understanding of the events in Genesis 11:1-9, you have to dig deep and cross-reference the surrounding Scripture text heavily. Because Genesis is written as what seems to be a poetic historical account, the events of the flood in Genesis 6-9 directly impact the events of the Tower of Babel. As do the troubles between Noah and his children, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In addition, the text of Genesis 9 through Genesis 11 is not perfectly chronological. Noah’s death is talked about in Genesis 9, and yet Noah was alive during the events of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11. This is part of the reason why we have to read carefully, and cross-reference often, to make sense of the nuanced details in the story.

2. The story of the Tower of Babel wouldn’t have happened without Noah getting drunk in Genesis 9. In Genesis 9:18-29, we are given a general overview of the breakdown of Noah’s family, and the end of Noah’s life. Noah plants a vineyard, gets drunk, then gets naked (that’s weird), and his son Ham sees him naked and ridicules him to the family. Noah wakes up, hears what happened, and curses Ham’s lineage instead of directly cursing Ham, because as a prophet of God, Noah doesn’t presume to curse whom God has blessed (Genesis 9:1). This curse splits the family, and Noah’s failure to be a spiritual leader in his family is part of what allows the events of the tower of Babel to happen, because the Tower was most likely a religious structure made to aid in the worship of the celestial bodies (i.e. sun, stars, moon, and stuff). If Noah had not allowed a schism in his family, he would have been more capable of speaking against occurrences of idolatry. Seeing this connection, along with the next point, was what gave rise to the plot for my full-length novelization of the story titled, BABEL: The Story of the Tower and the Rebellion of Man.

3. Noah was almost certainly alive during the events of the tower of Babel. This blew my mind. In Genesis 9:28-29, we’re told that Noah lived 350 years after the flood, and died when he was 950 years old (his bunions must have been downright epic). If we flip ahead to Genesis 11:10, we find several VERY interesting clues that help us piece together a reasonably accurate timeline. Shem’s son Arpachshad (what a mouthful) was born two years after the flood. If we assume that every descendant afterward is a father-son relationship (meaning that there’s no skipping generations—which we see evidence of in other genealogies in Scripture), we end up finding out that a guy named Peleg was born 101 years after the flood. We’re also told Peleg lived 239 years, so he died 340 years after the flood (ten years before Noah died). We’re also told in the mirrored genealogy in Genesis 10 that the earth was “divided” in Peleg’s lifetime. We know that this doesn’t refer to a continental divide, or the flood, because the flood happened 101 years before Peleg was born, and a continental divide would have caused worldwide flooding again (which God promised to never do). The only other divide we’re told about in Scripture is the divide in languages and countries from the events at the Tower of Babel. Thus, we can safely assume Noah was alive during the events of the tower of Babel.

4. Abram could have been alive during the events of the tower of Babel, and was definitely alive during Noah’s lifetime. Following the timeline given in Genesis 11 (along with the assumption we already talked about in point 3 above), we see that Abram was born 292 years after the flood. This is 58 years before Noah died, and 48 years before Peleg died. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that Abram could have both known about (or been present at) the Tower of Babel event, and that he could have been directly discipled by Noah himself, learning about the beginning of the universe and the world’s greatest cataclysm from someone who had experienced the violent baptism of the world first-hand. In addition, Noah’s father, Lamech, could have known Seth (Adam’s son), and gotten a second-hand account of the garden of Eden. Not hard to see how an accurate oral tradition about the beginnings of the universe could have been passed down to Abram’s lineage and written in some form in his day (because they definitely had Semitic cuneiform writing back during the Tower of Babel days).

5. The Tower of Babel story could have happened anywhere from 101 years after the flood, to 340 years after the flood. This is interesting for several reasons. The closer the events were to the timing of the flood, the more we question what in the world Noah was doing during the events of the Tower of Babel. Why wasn’t the prophet of God stopping the world from gathering in rebellion against God with blatant idolatry? This was the provocative “What-if” question that gave rise to my novel, BABEL: The Story of the Tower and the Rebellion of Man, which is (you guessed it) largely about Noah’s involvement (and failure) in the events at the Tower of Babel. But in addition to that, we can also see that the population size could have varied widely, from a thousand or so people, to tens of thousands of people.

6. Just like the hundreds of flood myths in myriad cultures around the world, there are countless myths about the confusion of the world’s languages. Many of these language myths arose through oral tradition in areas that were untouched by the biblical text, which strongly indicates that there was a real event that spawned the disparate accounts. Some of the accounts include an Australian myth that attributes the language split to cannibalism, an African tale where madness struck people during a famine and they all spoke different languages and scattered, and a Polynesian tale that talks of a God who, in his fury, scattered the builders of a tower, broke its foundation, and made the builders speak in many different languages. Pretty crazy, right?

7. It’s likely Nimrod didn’t build Babel OR the Tower. In fact, it’s almost certain that Nimrod didn’t build either, though he was likely involved in the process. We’re told in Genesis 10:9 that Nimrod was primarily a hunter (a man of violence), and that the “beginning of his kingdom” was Babel, among other cities, before he went and built Nineveh, among others. If he built Babel, it likely would’ve said so there. In addition, the actual account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 cites that the people communally said to one another, “let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” There was no one person who was commanding the building, but rather a group deciding in unison. Again, Nimrod could have been involved in this process. Or, he could have come to power afterward.

8. The trinity was involved at the events of the Tower of Babel. Traditional interpretation of Genesis 11, and God’s words saying, “Let us go down and see the tower” that mankind had built, is that Jesus, God (Yahweh), and the Holy Spirit were present and involved in the event. This makes sense with our New Testament understanding of the trinity for several reasons. First, Jesus is the Word, and his relation to God’s spoken revelation is inseparable throughout Scripture. Second, the world was created through Jesus (John 1:3), so he and the Holy Spirit are shown as involved in everything God has done from the beginning (“Spirit hovered over the face of the waters”). We also know the Holy Spirit’s involvement in human speech is profound from the account at Pentecost in the Book of Acts, which seems to be a sort of divine symbolic reversal of the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. Furthermore, if God was speaking in the plural to beings unified with him and who needed to be involved at the Tower, he would have been speaking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. If God took a physical form in some way, traditional interpretation says that it would likely have been as a humanoid prefigurement of the Christ. Now we’re getting kinda “out there,” but this is important because we can then see Christ and the Holy Spirit at work in this ancient, Old Testament story, along with links to their work in the New Testament church and the covenant we have with God under Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Because Noah was a type of Adam. The world began anew with him through the baptism of the world. And we know that Christ is the last Adam, the undoing of Adam’s mistakes, and that his baptism is by the Spirit, not by water, which only pointed ahead to the baptism we experience through Christ’s blood. Baptism came to represent the death of the old world because of the literal destruction of the old world through water at the almighty hand of God. In this way, we see powerful symbolic connections and importance layered into the Tower of Babel story, and the lives of those involved.

9. The tower of Babel was likely finished when the languages were confused. In Genesis 11:5, it says God went down to see the city and the tower which the children of man “had built.” In addition, In Genesis 11:8, it claims God spread them out from there over the face of the earth, and that the people left off building the city (but not the tower, which implies the tower was already finished).

10. For the last time, the Tower of Babel story is NOT about technological advancement. Baked bricks were no new technology. In fact, though modern sociologists who don’t hold the Bible to be trustworthy often say that iron-working didn’t exist until much later, the Bible claims that in the first couple generations of humanity’s existence (long before the flood), humanity was building cities, creating pipe and stringed instruments, forging bronze and iron, and cultivating livestock (Genesis 4:19-22). So, we know that brick-making and using mortar were no great technological advancements. Especially after reminding ourselves that Noah (who was still alive) built the world’s largest wooden boat, waterproofed it with pitch, and survived the greatest cataclysm to ever strike the earth. The point of the story of the Tower of Babel is to illustrate man’s pride (wanting to make a name for themselves separate from their identity as children of God – i.e. “children of man”), along with man’s tendency toward idolatry, and God’s unlimited power coupled with his mercy and gentleness. The confusion of languages was a brilliant, non-violent way of disrupting their prideful plans. All in all, however, this story is a fascinating view into human nature, family dynamics, mankind’s purpose and ambition, and God’s personhood. If you want a more detailed historical study on the Tower of Babel, check out Bodie Hodge’s book, Tower of Babel, which is a careful study of the historical details, and which is endorsed by Answers in Genesis. 

Source:https://brennanmcpherson.com/blog/10-facts-you-might-not-know-about-the-story-of-the-tower-of-babel/#comment-2615.

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