The Tower of Babel
Ancient Near East Subjects. A page
dedicated to difficult to find historical
subjects about ancient civilizations in the
Near East, such as the Hebrews, Arabs, Islam,
and early Christianity.
Genesis tells a story of God becoming angry when the people
started to build a huge tower for themselves, on the premise that they could
reach Heaven. God wanted his people to populate the whole earth, the story explains,
not just the small area where they had clustered themselves. The oddest part of the story
is how God got them to stop building. He "confused their language", so that
most people couldn't understand one other. Those that now spoke the same
language left together to create communities in different parts
of the world.
The world "babel" in Hebrew means "confusion". Speaking a different language
all of the sudden is reminiscent of the Apostles "speaking in tongues" in the New
Testement.
The depiction in the Bible of the "Tower of Babel" is a very accurate
description of a Sumerian ziggrat, huge obelisks similar to the
Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. The Sumerians built one in each of
their cities, for worship and a central place of administration for the city. This story could be explained
as the tale the conquring Semitic tribes told of the fallen Sumerians as to why God punished them. A good
deal of the first 5 books of Moses are Sumerian legends incorperated into the culture of the conquering Seminites.
Main Menu
