The particular ziqqurat described here was formerly identified with the tower of Ezida, the temple of the god Nebo (Nabû) in Borsippa, a city southwest of Babylon. Clearly, the writer of the account in Genesis 11 was familiar with the building techniques of Mesopotamia, since he is at pains to point out that bricks and bitumen were used in the construction that is in contrast to the stone and clay which were the common building materials in Canaan. Rising in progressively smaller, steplike levels from a massive base, these towers ranged from three or four stories to as many as seven and were ordinarily constructed of crude sun-dried bricks covered with kiln-fired bricks. zaqāru, "to raise up," "elevate") was the central feature of the great temples which were built in all important Mesopotamian cities. Scholars agree that the edifice referred to in Genesis 11 is clearly a ziqqurat, or Mesopotamian temple tower. The unfinished tower was called Babel, a name which was explained by its resemblance to the Hebrew verb bll ("to confuse"), since here the Lord "confounded the speech of the whole earth." As a result, mankind was distributed over the face of the earth. However, their building project was frustrated by the Lord who confounded their language. At this site it was decided to build a "city and a tower with its top in the sky," so that the builders would be able to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered over the entire world. The story relates how, at the time when all men still spoke one language, there was a migration from the East to the plain of *Shinar (Babylonia). The story of Babel thus explains how the descendants of this one man came to be so widely scattered and divided into separate nations speaking so many different languages.
According to the preceding narrative, mankind after the flood was descended from one common ancestor, *Noah. Table of Contents| Pekod| Travelers and ExplorersīABEL, TOWER OF, the edifice whose building is portrayed in Genesis 11:1–9 as the direct cause of the diversity of languages in the world and the dispersion of mankind over all the earth.
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