BABEL, TOWER of. « A construction erected at Babylon (Babel) for a politico-religious purpose, and left unfinished (Gen. 11:1-9). The fragmentation of humanity into discordant peoples derives from a collective "original sin" (cf. Ps. 2:4): it is a punishment from Yahweh, because the union of men was fomenting proud rebellion against God. The inhabitants of Shinar (Babylonia) resolved to build, of bricks and asphalt, a city dominated by a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name (šēm, as in II Sam. 8:13), lest we be scattered abroad." The tribes wished to build a tower of a temple "very high" (this means "up to heaven" in Sumerian and Akkadian), to symbolize the unity of their pagan kingdom. Indignant at such titanic pride (cf. Is. 14:13-15), God (Yahweh throughout the passage, which O. Happel, following H. Gunkel, wrongly wants to divide into two documents: J¹ and J²) confounds the languages, that is, the common agreement in thinking, of the builders, who, abandoning the ambitious enterprise, are scattered throughout the world. The name Babel evokes "confusion," according to the popular etymology (bal-bēl from the verb bālal; but in reality it is Bāb-ili: "gate of the god," as the Sumerian name Ka-dingir-ra³⁴ confirms).
The biblical event must be placed either in the Neolithic period (A. Bea, in Verbum Domini, 18 [1938], p. 15), or, as the use of bricks would suggest, in the Chalcolithic. The idioms were perhaps already differentiated at that time (Gen. 10:5, 20, 31); certainly languages branched out with the slow formation of peoples, as St. Gregory of Nyssa already noted (Adv. Eunom., XII: PG 45, 996 ff.). According to J. Chaine (p. 68), the biblical account would be "a response of Hebrew folklore to the question of the origin of languages."
No allusion, so far, to this or a similar account has been found in cuneiform documents. The text of Alexander Polyhistor (80-40 B.C.) in Eusebius (Chron., I, 4: PG 19, 123; Praep. Evang., IX, 14: PG 21, 701) depends on the Jewish Sibyl (III, 97 ff.), that is, on a haggadic legend. In the scanty hints contained in the primitive traditions of peoples (India, Persia, Greece), the attempt to reach heaven with a construction and the confusion of languages do not appear with a causal connection; the legends on the matter from Central America and Korea are due to Christian influences (P. Heinisch, Das Buch Genesis, Bonn 1930, p. 201). The Greek myth of the construction of the Titans rebelling against heaven (Virgil, Georg., I, 281) is adapted to the t. of B. by Dante (Inf., XXXI, 77 ff.; De Vulg. Eloq., I, 7-8), who always cites Nimrod as its author ("Nembrōt": Purg., XII, 34-36; Par., XXVI, 124-26). P. Della Valle calls it "Tower of Nimrod."
The biblical t. of B. perhaps adopted what would later be the usual form of the Babylonian zig-qurrut or tiered tower, similar to a pyramid with receding tiers connected on the outside by an inclined plane or by stairways, which symbolized the "mountain of the world." The very ancient towers of Ur and of Uruk (Enoch) had three tiers; those of the temple of Nabū at Borsippa (today Birs-Nimrūd, "Tower of Nimrod") and of the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad had seven tiers; at the summit was the "cella" of the deity and an astronomical observatory. They were at once temples and fortresses, built of bricks. A tradition (already in the Talmūd bab., Sanhedrin, 109) identified the tower of B. with the gigantic ruins of Birs-Nimrūd (today still 46 m. high), visited by Benjamin of Tudela (12th cent.) and, on 23 Nov. 1616, by Pietro Della Valle (Viaggio in levante, ed. L. Bianconi, Florence 1942, pp. 308-313): thus R. Ker Porter (1820), J. Oppert, A. H. Sayce, F. Vigouroux, Erd. Delitzsch, H. L. Strack, E. König, C. H. Kraeling, J. P. Peters. The building of Borsippa (which is about 15 km. southwest of Babel) is the Ē-ur-imin-an-ki "house of the 7 planets of heaven and earth" dedicated to the god Nabū and rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562).
BABEL, TOWER of - Reconstruction of the tower of B.
Today the "t. of B." brought to light by R. Koldewey is well known, and illustrated by B. Meissner, H. Gressmann, Th. Dombart, G. Martiny, H. Vincent. Within the sacred precinct of Babylon, north of the grandiose (quadrilateral of 409 x 400 m.) temple of Marduk (Bel) called Ē-sag-ila ("house of the head erected"), there rose the tall tower Ē-temen-an-ki ("house of the foundation of heaven and earth") with 5 tiers, above which was a terrace in whose center stood the sanctuary. The tower already existed in the 2nd millennium B.C. King Nabopolassar (7th cent. B.C.) declares that he "had received orders from Marduk to rebuild it... fixing its foundation down to the heart of Arallū and raising its summit up to heaven"; his son Nebuchadnezzar brought it to completion. Of this marvelous tower, described by Herodotus (I, 181; cf. Diodorus, II, 9; Strabo, XVI, 1, 5) and, with accurate indication of the measurements, by the tablet of Anu-bēl-šunu (3rd cent. B.C.), the square base measured about 95 m. per side and the height reached about 90 and perhaps 100 m., K. Galling, Biblisches Reallexikon, Tübingen 1937, cols. 73-75; H. Vincent, p. 408); its ruins are seen at the spot called 'Amrān ibn 'Alī.
But the Bible speaks of an older construction, of which nothing remains; thus, after J. Nikel, H. Zschokke-J. Döller, the most up-to-date exegetes think. The "critics" see in Gen. 11:1-9 a mere legend of an etiological character (H. Gunkel, in Die Religion in Gesch. u. Gegenwart, V, Tübingen 1931, col. 1325 ff.).