Not all the holy mountains in the history of the world are natural, formed by the shifting
of tectonic plates or the sudden, catastrophic opening of “the fountains of the great deep.”
The Tower of Babel was one such artificial mountain.
Babel was humanity’s attempt to force its way back into the divine council.
At Babel, mankind tried to storm the castle of God.
For generations, well-meaning Bible teachers have presented the story of Babel as an object
lesson on the dangers of pride.
Those foolish people were so arrogant they thought they could build a tower high enough
to reach heaven!
With all due respect to those teachers, that’s an insult to the intelligence of our ancestors,
if you think about it.
And it’s a disservice to people in church who want to know why Yahweh was so offended
by this project.
Really?
God is that insecure?
Look, if big egos were enough to bring God to Earth, He’d never leave.
Babel was not a matter of God taking down some people who’d gotten too big for their
britches.
The clue to the sin of Babel is in the name.
Remember, the Hebrew prophets loved to play with language.
We often find words in the Bible that sound like the original but make a statement—for
example, Beelzebub (“lord of the flies”) instead of Beelzebul (“Ba`al the prince”),
or Ish-bosheth (“man of a shameful thing”) instead of Ishbaal (“man of Ba`al”).
Likewise, the original Akkadian words bāb ilu, which means “gate of god” or “gate
of the gods,” is replaced in the Bible with Babel, which is based on the Hebrew word meaning
“confusion.”
Now, there’s a bit of misinformation that must be corrected about the Tower of Babel:
Babel was not in Babylon.
It’s an easy mistake to make.
The names sound alike, and Babylon is easily the most famous city of the ancient world.
It’s also got a bad reputation, especially to Jews and Christians.
Babylon, under the megalomaniacal king Nebuchadnezzar, sacked the Temple in Jerusalem and carried
off the hardware for temple service.
It makes sense to assume that a building project so offensive that God personally intervened
must have been built at Babylon.
But there’s a problem with linking Babylon to the Tower of Babel: Babylon didn’t exist
when the tower was built.
It didn’t even become a city until about a thousand years after the tower incident,
and even then it was an unimportant village for about another 500 years.
Traditions and sources outside the Bible identify the builder of the tower as the shadowy figure
named Nimrod.
Our best guess is he lived sometime between 3500 and 3100 B.C., a period of history called
the Uruk Expansion.
This tracks with what little the Bible tells us about Nimrod.
In Genesis 10:10, we read “the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and
Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”
The land of Shinar is Sumer and Erech is Uruk.
Uruk was so important to human history that Nimrod’s homeland is still called Uruk,
five thousand years later!
We just spell it differently—Iraq.
Accad was the capital city of the Akkadians, which still hasn’t been found, but was somewhere
between Babylon and ancient Assyria.
Babylon itself was northwest of Uruk, roughly three hundred miles from the Persian Gulf
in what is today central Iraq.
But it wasn’t founded until around 2300 B.C., at least 700 years after Nimrod, and
it wasn’t Babylon as we think about it until the old Babylonian empire emerged in the early
part of the 2ndmillennium B.C.
So where should we look for the Tower of Babel?
The oldest and largest ziggurat in Mesopotamia was at Eridu, the first city built in Mesopotamia.
Scholars put its founding at around 5400 B.C.
In recent years, scholars have learned that the name Babylon was interchangeable with
other city names, including Eridu.
So “Babylon” didn’t always refer to the city of Babylon in ancient texts.
Artist’s conception of how the never-completed ziggurat at Eridu might have looked
Eridu never dominated the political situation in Sumer after the reigns of its first two
kings, Alulim and Alalgar.
But as the home city of Enki, god of fresh water, wisdom, and magic, Eridu was so important
to Mesopotamian culture that more than three thousand years after Alalgar, Hammurabi the
Great was crowned not in Babylon, but in Eridu—even though it had ceased to be a city about three
hundred years earlier.
Even as late as the time of Nebuchadnezzar, 1,100 years after Hammurabi, the kings of
Babylon still sometimes called themselves LUGAL.NUNki—King of Eridu.
Why?
What was the deal with Eridu?
Archaeologists have uncovered eighteen levels of the temple to Enki at Eridu.
The oldest levels of the E-abzu, a small structure less than ten feet square, date to the founding
of the city.
And consider that the spot remained sacred to Enki long after the city was deserted around
2000 B.C.
The temple remained in use until the 5th century B.C., nearly five thousand years after the
first crude altar was built to accept offerings of fish to Enki, the god of the subterranean
aquifer, the abzu.
Now, this is where we tell you that abzu (ab = water + zu = deep) is very likely where
we get our English word “abyss.”
And the name Enki is a compound word.
En is Sumerian for “lord,” and ki is the word for “earth.”
Thus, Enki, god of the abzu, was “lord of the earth.”
Do you remember Jesus calling someone “the ruler of this world”?
Or Paul referring to “the god of this world”?
Who were they talking about?
Yeah.
Satan.
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Here’s another piece to our puzzle: Nimrod was of the second generation after the flood.
His father was Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah.
In Sumerian history, the second king of Uruk after the flood was named Enmerkar, son of
Mesh-ki-ang-gasher.
Now, get this: An epic poem from about 2000 B.C. called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta
preserves the basic details of the Tower of Babel story, including the confusion of language
among the people of Sumer.
We don’t know exactly where Aratta was, but guesses range from northern Iran to Armenia.
(Which would be interesting.
Not only is Armenia located near the center of an ancient kingdom called Urartu, which
may be a cognate for Aratta, it’s where Noah landed his boat—the mountains of Ararat.
So it’s possible Nimrod/Enmerkar was trying to intimidate the people—his cousins, basically—who
settled near where his great-grandfather landed the ark.
But we just don’t know.)
Wherever it was, Enmerkar muscled this neighboring kingdom to compel them to send building materials
for a couple of projects near and dear to his heart.
Besides building a fabulous temple for Inanna, the goddess of, well, prostitutes, Enmerkar/Nimrod
also wanted to expand and upgrade Enki’s abzu—the abyss.
“Let the people of Aratta bring down for me the mountain stones from their mountain,
build the great shrine for me, erect the great abode for me, make the great abode, the abode
of the gods, famous for me, make my me prosper in Kulaba, make the abzu grow for me like
a holy mountain, make Eridug (Eridu) gleam for me like the mountain range, cause the
abzu shrine to shine forth for me like the silver in the lode.
When in the abzu I utter praise, when I bring the me from Eridug, when, in lordship, I am
adorned with the crown like a purified shrine, when I place on my head the holy crown in
Unug Kulaba, then may the …… of the great shrine bring me into the jipar, and may the
…… of the jipar bring me into the great shrine.
May the people marvel admiringly, and may Utu (the sun god) witness it in joy.”1 (Emphasis
added)
That’s the issue Yahweh had with it right there.
This tower project wasn’t about hubris or pride; it was to build the “abode of the
gods” right on top of the abzu.
Could Nimrod have succeeded?
Ask yourself: Why did Yahweh find it necessary to personally put a stop to it?
A lot of magnificent pagan temples were built in the ancient world, many of them copying
the pyramid-like shape of the ziggurats, from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica.
Why did God stop this one?
We can only speculate, of course, but God had a good reason or we wouldn’t have a
record of it in the Bible.
Calling Babel a sin of pride is easy, but it drains the story of its spiritual and supernatural
context.
In the view of this author, the evidence is compelling.
It’s time to correct the history we’ve been taught since Sunday School: Babel was
not at Babylon, it was at Eridu.
The tower was the temple of the god Enki, Lord of the Earth, the god of the abyss.
Its purpose was to create an artificial mount of assembly, the abode of the gods, to which
humans had access.
That was something that Yahweh could not allow.
ANCIENT TABLET DESCRIBES MESOPOTAMIAN STRUCTURE BUILT BY ‘MULTITUDES’
An ancient tablet believed to depict the Biblical Tower of Babel has been deciphered 100 years
after its discovery and may represent the first-ever image of the real tower when it
stood in Babylon during Biblical times.
The amazing tale of the tablet is told in a series produced by the Smithsonian.
For scholars, the tablet offers proof that the Tower of Babel wasn’t just a work of
fiction, the series argues, but “an actual building from antiquity.”
The sixth-century BCE tablet, found a century ago but, as part of a private collection,
never studied or exhibited until now, depicts a Babylonian tower known as a ziggurat.
After deciphering the tablet, Dr. Andrew George, an expert on ancient Babylon, became convinced
it shows the true source of the famed Biblical story.
The amazing tale of the tablet is told in a series produced by the Smithsonian.
For scholars, the tablet offers proof that the Tower of Babel wasn’t just a work of
fiction, the series argues, but “an actual building from antiquity.”
In the first installment of the series, Dr. George, a professor of Babylonian at the University
of London, examines the tablet, showing an image of the ziggurat, a massive stepped structure,
and a figure holding a staff.
The professor translates the inscription, which identifies the structure as the “Tower
of Temple of Babylon”.
The inscription confirms the building was a Mesopotamian-style tower and illustrates
the seven tiers of the ancient megastructure.
Significantly, it also identifies the man behind it, depicted next to the tower – Mesopotamia’s
most famous ruler, King Nebuchadnezzar II.
Dr. George’s translation of the tablet reveals a detailed account of the tower’s construction
by the Babylonian king.
“It reads, ‘from the Upper Sea, which is the Mediterranean, to the Lower Sea, which
is the Persian Gulf, the far-flung lands and the teeming people of the habitations, I mobilized
in order to construct this building.’”
The inscription was one of the keys to identifying the ziggurat described in the tablet as the
Biblical tower.
Dr. George believes that its builders, hailing from all over the region, could represent
the Biblical ‘multitudes’ of languages which led to the tower’s destruction.
“The myth about the multitude of tongues comes from the context described in the stele
about the multitude of peoples enlisted in the construction of the tower,” Professor
George told Breaking Israel News in an interview.
“There were many languages spoken on the construction site.
From that it may be that the Bible got the idea of the confusion of tongues.”
Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one
another’s speech.
Genesis 11:7
“As an Assyriologist, I don’t deal in the Bible, and I am not a religious person,
but in this case, I can say there is an actual building which does seem to be the inspiration
for the Biblical narrative,” Dr. George acknowledged to Breaking Israel News.
More and more, archaeologists are finding proof that Biblical stories relate to historical
events.
Dr. George sees no contradiction between science and the Bible.
The professor described how this schism between science and religion is gradually being reconciled
in his field.
“After Darwin cast a doubt on the story of a six-day creation, people began to ask
what else in the Bible might not be true,” Dr. George said.
“In the 19th century there was a discovery that the Assyrian kings described in the Bible
were real and corroborated by archaeological evidence, making us ask now, how much more
in the Bible is true?”
Archaeologists generally agree that the site of the tower is in the ancient city of Babylonia,
an area known today as Al Qasr, approximately 80 miles south of Baghdad.
The original city, believed to have been built in 2300 BCE, was sacked in 1595 BCE by the
Hittites.
In 612 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt the city, turning it into his capital.
He constructed a large ziggurat around the original ancient tower.
Nebuchadnezzar’s ziggurat, referred to by archaeologists as the Etemenanki, is believed
to have been almost 300 feet tall, with a square base measuring 300 feet on each side.
It encased the earlier structure, made of sunbaked bricks, inside a 49-foot -thick wall
of oven-baked brick.
Until the US incursion into Iraq in 2003, the site was neglected, due to local people
stealing the ancient bricks for construction.
Saddam Hussein reconstructed part of ancient Babylon in 1985, destroying sections of the
ancient ruins.
Hearkening back to the ancient practice, he added his own inscription, stamping into its
bricks, “This was built by Saddam Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq”,
and installing a huge portrait of himself alongside the Biblical king.