The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11 says that the whole earth once had one language. People on the move came to a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. They baked bricks, using brick in place of stone and tar in place of mortar (Genesis 11:1–3). Then they resolved to build a city and “a tower whose top reaches to the sky”, to make a name for themselves and to keep from being scattered over the earth (Genesis 11:4).

The Lord, the story continues, came down to see the city and the tower. He said that as one people with one language nothing they planned would be out of their reach, and he confused their language so that they could not understand one another (Genesis 11:5–7). They were scattered over the earth and stopped building. The city was called Babel, “because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8–9). Josephus, in the first century AD, explains the name in the same way: Babel, he says, means confusion in Hebrew, and the place is the one now called Babylon, in the plain of Shinar (Josephus, Antiquities 1.113–119).

Genesis has already named Babel, in the land of Shinar, as the first centre of Nimrod’s kingdom (Genesis 10:8–10). The story itself names no leader. Josephus makes Nimrod the one who urged the people to build (Josephus, Antiquities 1.113–119), and Augustine of Hippo likewise calls Nimrod the city’s founder (Augustine, City of God 16.4). The building materials fit the place. Herodotus, describing Babylon in the fifth century BC, reports walls of baked brick set in hot bitumen and, in the sanctuary of the city’s god, a tower of eight stages rising one on another (Herodotus, Histories 1.179–181). He does not mention the story told in Genesis.

In Genesis the story explains why the nations listed in the previous chapter are divided by language and land (Genesis 10:31–32). The narrative then narrows to one family, that of Abram, through whom “all the families of the earth” are to be blessed (Genesis 11:27–12:3). Christian writers have set Pentecost beside Babel. In Acts, people from many nations hear the apostles speaking in their own languages (Acts 2:5–11), and Cyril of Jerusalem, in the fourth century, calls this a second confusion of tongues that repaired the first one at Babylon (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 17.17).