The Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9)

The following article was obtained through BibleOdyssey.org and written by Jan Christian Gertz

Together with Solomon’s temple, the tower of Babel may be the best-known building in the Hebrew Bible. The notion of a tower reaching toward heaven is deeply inscribed in our cultural memory. As a result, readers often overlook the fact that Gen 11:1-9 reports little about the actual tower. For example, the story only implies that the workers stopped building the tower. The tower’s destruction, though often read into the story, is never stated. Instead of being the central interest of the story, the tower functions as a symbolic motif.

The people who built the tower of Babel were driven by fundamental human concerns. They preferred settlement to the uncertainties of dispersion, uniformity to diversity, fame and power to obscurity and weakness. But in the account in Gen 11:1-9, God denies their preferences. At the center of the story is humanity’s transition from speaking one language and living in one location to speaking several languages and living in multiple locations across the world.

What is God’s problem with the tower? 

The standard answer is that the project of building a tower reaching the heavens is a symbol of humanity’s arrogant pursuit of fame and power—ideas closely linked in the ancient Near East. It is true that God expresses some concern about safeguarding the line between the human and divine spheres, perhaps even suggesting that the people pose some kind of threat to the divine realm (Gen 11:6, Job 42:2). The tower, then, is a symbol of humanity’s ability and propensity to cross boundaries and of God’s endeavor to check such behavior.

The tower itself, however, is a minor motif—something mentioned twice and only in passing (see Gen 11:4-5). The narrative’s conclusion focuses on the real issue at hand: God’s dissolution of humanity’s linguistic unity, an act that results in dispersion and that reflects the historical experience of the Israelites in the exilic and postexilic periods. The story ends with an etiology (an origin story) connecting the name of the city with the confusion (balal) of languages and identifying the city as the origin point for the dispersion of humanity (Gen 11:9).

How and when was the tower of Babel story written? 
Scholars often assume that the story of the tower of Babel was stitched together from different sources or that it underwent stages of literary development. As evidence, they point to subtle tensions, apparent repetitions, and the seemingly large number of motifs. Since none of the individual elements are superfluous, however, such reconstructions are hardly convincing. Literary and historical analysis may suggest that a poem mocking Babel was the core tradition of the story.

The story of the tower of Babel concludes the biblical primeval narrative (Gen 1-11), whose origin is often explained by assuming a combination of two previously independent sources. Here, our story is generally attributed to the earlier source. But as the story meshes well with the genealogies of the second, later source, this argument is questionable. Additionally, the Babel story seems to have in view the stories about Abraham and Sarah, both of whom are from Mesopotamia (see Gen 11:31). All this would seem to suggest that Gen 11:1-9 was composed after the strands of the primeval history and the ancestral narrative were combined, which likely happened fairly late (sixth century B.C.E.). Even so, the age of a story whose author we do not know remains difficult to determine. Gen 11:1-9 is a myth set in primeval times, but this setting indicates neither that the text was written at the same time the “events” occurred nor that it is later.

Here, the tower can help us. Because the story mentions Babel and is also set in the land of Shinar (Gen 11:2), scholars argue that the text’s author was thinking of the ziggurat Etemenanki, which is located in ancient Babylon. The imagery of a building reaching the heavens supports this suggestion (Gen 11:4). If this is correct, then Gen 11:3 provides further evidence for the time of writing: the oldest ziggurat was originally built with mud bricks. Only at the latest building stage, in the seventh century B.C.E., did it receive a sheathing of fired bricks. It is also possible that the notion of an “unfinished” tower is connected with the extensive damage done by the Persian king Xerxes (518–465 B.C.E.) to religious buildings in Babylon. All things considered, the tower of Babel story is likely a postexilic addition to the primeval history.

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The tower of Babel, probably a postexilic addition to the primeval history, is a symbol of the human ability and propensity to cross boundaries and of God’s endeavor to halt such behavior.

Did you know…? 

The story of the tower of Babel describes the diversity of languages and people.

The tower of Babel is only mentioned in Gen 11:4-5.

Some scholars dispute the identification of the tower mentioned in Gen 11:1-9 with the ziggurat Etemenanki because the Hebrew word migdal can describe every form of tower and the expression “city and tower” could also refer to the city and its acropolis. However, as the story is located in Babylon, the identification with Etemenanki is reasonable.

The use of fired bricks and bitumen for mortar was unknown in ancient Israel and introduces local Babylonian building techniques and color into the story.

The literary and archaeological evidence suggests that the postexilic period is the most plausible setting for an author to write such a story.

How OLD Are the Religions?

The following article was posted by Reed Hall on Beliefnet.com

In a previous series of blog entries, I addressed a common basic question: How MANY religions are there?

In my immediately preceding blog entries, I addressed a follow-up question: How BIG are the religions?

In this blog entry, I’d like to round out this preliminary overview of the global religious landscape by addressing another follow-up question: How OLD are the religions?  

For the major world religions, the simple answer is: pretty old. Most of them are 2000+ years old.

This bar graph presents the relative ages (in years) of each of the major world faiths. Hinduism is the oldest, with roots stretching back some 4000 years, or more; Sikhism is the youngest, being only about 500 years old.

As the chart indicates, among the very oldest religions are Hinduism, Judaism, and (possibly) Zoroastrianism. The roots of Hinduism stretch back at least to India’s Vedic era, and perhaps even further back, into pre-Vedic times (2000 BC, or earlier). The roots of Judaism stretch back to the time of the patriarch Abraham, traditionally dated at around 1800 BC. The precise age of Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia, remains a matter of some controversy; conflicting dates suggested for the era of its founding prophet Zoroaster range from the 18th to the 6th centuries BC.

A number of major religions seem to have all gotten their start, in different places around the globe, at roughly the same time: the 6th century BC. Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zoroastrianism (if one favors a later rather than an earlier date for Zoroaster) were each born in that religiously creative century. The Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, is also traditionally attributed to a 6th-century-BC sage known as Lao Tzu, but more recently scholars have suggested a somewhat later date for its composition.

Christianity, of course, is right at about 2000 years old, having gotten started with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (and his apostles, such as Paul) during the 1st century AD. Indeed, our Western (Gregorian, Christian) calendar revolves around the presumed date of the birth of Christ as the axis point which divides all of time and history into two eras, referred to as B.C. (“Before Christ”) and A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “In the Year of the Lord”).

As religions go, then, Christianity (at only 2000 years of age) is one of the younger ones. And Islam is even younger still (by about 600 years). Although Muslims point out that the Arabic term islam merely means “submission” to the will of God, and further holds that Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses were among the first such “submitters,” Islam as a distinctive religious movement did not appear on the scene until the prophet Muhammad established it in Arabia in the 7th century AD, making Islam in this sense some 1400 years old.

The precise origin of Shinto, the indigenous traditional religion of Japan, is a bit hazy to date with precision; many place its origins at somewhere roughly around perhaps the 8th century AD (or at least that is when written records pertaining to Shinto beliefs and practices first appeared in Japan).

Sikhism, the youngest of the world’s major faiths, was founded in India by Guru Nanak right around 1500 AD.

So, that’s it, at least as far as the major religions are concerned. But what about some of the other, perhaps smaller but nevertheless well-known religions — religions such as Baha’i, Christian Science, Mormonism, Rastafarianism, Scientology, Wicca, or the Unification Church? How old are they?

For them, the simple answer is: not very old. All of those aforementioned faiths are not only far smaller than the major faiths, but also far younger, each of them having been born as recently as the 19th or 20th centuries.

Baha’i was founded by Baha’u’llah in Persia in the mid-to-late 1800s. Christian Science was founded in Boston by Mary Baker Eddy in the late 1800s. Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in the early 1800s. Rastafarianism was founded in Jamaica around 1930. Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard in New Jersey in 1953. Wicca is a modern revival or reconstruction of ancient European forms of indigenous paganism, whose varying traditions began to emerge in Britain in the early to mid-1900s. And the Unification Church was founded in South Korea by Sun Myung Moon in 1954.

Most of today’s well-known “alternative” religions are of far more recent vintage than the larger, longer-established faiths — which count their own ages in terms of many centuries, even millennia, rather than in mere decades (or at most a couple of centuries).

However, it is perhaps also wise to remember that even the largest and longest-enduring major religions of today must have also started out at one time as small, young “minority religions” themselves, during their own early formative eras.