After the Flood - 5 – The Tower of Babel

"Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there" (Gen. 11.1-2 RSV).

This is the point at which the history of the "world that now is" really begins. In three centuries the population had grown to something like a quarter of a million people. What had started as a group of families closely knit by the bonds of common relationship was taking on the aspect of a company of tribes rapidly developing divergent interests. For the moment, though, there was no disunity. They had found this fertile plain, so much better adapted to their needs than the mountain terraces upon which they had been born and lived for anything up to three centuries and now by common consent they were on the move to a new home. They were all "of one language and one speech" says the narrative. That means they shared one common vocabulary of words and one pronunciation, almost certainly the language spoken by Noah and his sons when they entered the Ark. The human community was united; there was as yet little or no tendency to separate such as became inevitable later on when numbers increased. There was still no death; no one had died since the Flood. Likewise loyalty to the Lord was universal; there is evidence that it was to be quite a few centuries before men began to worship false gods and the dark shadow of godlessness fell across the race of mankind. It is probable that these people enjoyed what amounted to almost Eden-like conditions with less evidence of the power and practice of sin than had ever been known since the beginning. The sun shone warmly down, the summer was almost perpetual, the land brought forth its increase and death seemed something that belonged only to the old world that had passed away. The first two or three centuries after the Flood must have resembled in many respects the terrestrial conditions of the still future Millennial Age to be established when our Lord takes His great power and commences His promised reign over the nations. There are legends of old that appear to relate to this period. A thousand years later Sumerian scribes began to write histories of the early days of their nation. In one epic they spoke of a 'Golden Age' in which all peoples dwelt happily together in a land where there were no wild animals, the ground brought forth abundantly, there was no war or strife, and the whole world gave praise to God. Then came war and the harmony was shattered. In the "Pyramid Texts", a collection of records found in pyramids of the 5th and 6th Egyptian dynasties, dating to several centuries before the birth of Abraham, it is stated that at the first there was no death. One early Pharaoh was assured by his god that he had been born before death began to come upon men. The Persians had a similar legend about their early days. "In the reign of Yima the valiant, there was neither heat nor cold, neither old age or death, nor disease." It could well be that this recollection of those first three centuries of harmonious living together remained in the folklore of the nations after the separation. Their dispersal over the world ended that and when, a little later on, death began to make its appearance among the oldest of them it was almost like the end of an era.

So they "journeyed from the east". The word is expressive; 'journeyed' in this text means to pull up and move away, as the pulling up of tent-pegs when an encampment is being moved. Gesenius defines it as a verb of departure, a nomadic term for "breaking camp" and moving on. That was the position here, the abandonment of their mountain home for this much more desirable territory in the plain. It was probably over a term of years that the transfer took place, one village after another thrusting westward with their goods and chattels to take possession of unclaimed farmland in this rich alluvial well-watered plain where life could be easier and more pleasant.

The AV margin suggests a variant rendering "journeyed eastward", which has a precisely opposite meaning, that they came from the west. Geographically, that would be impossible; to the west lay what is now Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea, in the opposite direction altogether from the land of Ararat, which comprehended the Iranian mountains from which the settlers must perforce have come. Virtually every modern translation with the exception of Margolis and Leeser, maintain the accuracy of "from the east" and in fact the modern Hebrew Received Text has this; mini-gedem where min is the preposition "from" or 'out of'. 'Eastward' or "towards the east' would have been el-gedem, "towards". 'to' or 'for'.

Modern research has confirmed this statement of Gen. 11.2. It is very generally agreed now by archaeo1ogists that the earliest inhabitants of the Euphrates plains came from the east, from a source somewhere in the mountains of Iran. Frankfort in 'Birth of civilisation in the Near East' puts the source as the district marked by Tepe Khazineh near Susa, which is within a hundred miles of Anaran, where the Ark landed. Kramer in "Sumerian Mythology" speaks to the same effect; so does Seton Lloyd in "Foundations in the Dust", and many other leading authorities. Genesis said it originally, nearly five thousand years ago.

So they settled and established themselves, creating villages surrounded by farmlands, growing their crops and keeping their flocks and herds, fishing in the shallow waters of the Gulf and its surrounding marshes. Their numbers continued to increase, but not so rapidly as hitherto. There were several reasons for this. The basic one was that the climate was changing. The pleasantly warm and genial conditions of those first three centuries changed suddenly, and for the worse. Brooks has shown that at this time, about 3000 BC, there commenced a sudden period of abnormal volcanic activity all over the world which continued on and off for the next four hundred years. The effect was a steady climate deterioration to cold and wet conditions which of necessity had its repercussions on the emergent human race. The Paradise land they thought they had found began to change, as the years went by, to land of floods and storms and incessant rain, and life became more difficult. It is significant that the three patriarchs living during this period whose life spans are recorded, Cainan, Sala and Heber, show a sudden reduction of length of life to 400 to 460 years as contrasted with their predecessors' 530 to 600 (See the Septuagint). Successive periods of further climatic degeneration in later centuries are matched by similar corresponding reductions in the span of life, and it is impossible not to see a connection between climate and life-span during those early years. Hence the period of fatherhood was proportionately shortened and the adverse climate must have played its part in hindering the rate of population increase. There was still no death. Noah himself died about this time, three and a half centuries after the Flood, but his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, must have joined in the trek to Shinar, still hale and hearty. There was no war or violence, there may not have been any disease and it might well be that the only deaths were those due to accidents. Taking all these circumstances into consideration, it is possible that the estimated quarter of a million who had made the journey could have grown to seven millions in the next hundred years. In the emergence of this very considerable body of people spreading over the land and developing varied tastes and interests there reposed the seeds which blossomed into the situation described in the story of the Tower of Babel. "'Come', they said 'let us build a city and a tower whose top shall reach into the heavens, and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth.'" The motive has not always been properly understood. At a much later date a copyist added his comment which forms v 9, "therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound all the languages of the earth". The word translated "confound" is the Hebrew balbal, which means mingling or confusion. It is really a pun upon the word Babel and not a very good pun at that. It could not have been written at the time of the original story for there was no Hebrew language then nor yet for many centuries thereafter. But this set the stage for the later Jewish tradition, carried over into Christianity, that the Tower was built as an act of defiance against God. Josephus, improving upon the tradition, asserts that its builder was the Nimrod of Gen.10, and this name was identified with the Hebrew ni-marad, a form of the verb 'marad', 'to rebel', having the meaning "he was rebellious". On this somewhat flimsy foundation Nimrod was credited with being a rebel against God and leading the project of the Tower.

There is nothing in the Genesis narrative to associate Nimrod with the building of the Tower although there is plenty in Sumerian legend. That will be considered later on. The likelihood is that the motive for building the Tower was a good and praiseworthy one, but it went wrong. Nevertheless the project was contrary to the will of God. That is evident from the sequel; the Lord came down and frustrated it. The situation is not difficult to visualise. The Lord had instructed the three sons of Noah to be fruitful, and multiply, and bring forth abundantly in the earth. The fulfilment of that injunction implied a scattering over the face of the earth, to explore and discover its resources and use them for the common good. This idea of concentrating the whole human community in one given area, however praiseworthy it might have appeared to the originators, militated against the proper development of mankind. There are no minerals in the plain of Shinar, no metals and no useful stone or rocks, no forests, no soil of the kind that would grow many of the products men would need in future days, cotton, rubber, rice, maize, fruit trees, timber bearing trees and much besides. The Sumerians, lived on a staple diet of barley, pulse and dates, and little else. For men to exploit and put to good use the possibilities of this new post-Flood world they must scatter over the earth, and this they were refusing to do. So God came down to inspect the work they had undertaken.

Fifty miles south of the present city of Baghdad, on the eastern bank of the Euphrates, there is a level stretch of country that those settlers in that day found ideal for their purpose. Here they would build their Tower, and around it would rise a great city, the first city of this new earth. In that city they would concentrate all their activities and all their learning, and no matter how far away other men might ultimately penetrate, here would be the centre, and, perhaps, rulership. Here they would make themselves a name that should endure forever. Nevertheless it is not to be inferred that their motives were altogether to be condemned. As is so often the case with the works of man, motives are mixed, and the evidence in this case is that the building of the Tower of Babel was in considerable degree incited by a desire to retain and perpetuate the worship of God.

This fact is established by the names given by the builders to the Tower, the city, and the land in which they dwelt. It must be remembered that there was as yet no idolatry among mankind, no worship of false gods. That came later. At this time the God of Noah was still the One venerated. The people still counted themselves as faithful to Him. It has to be realised that Shem, Ham and Japheth, were still alive and their influence must have counted for much. These people would have known the story of the Flood and of the mountain where the Ark came to rest. Some of them might well have made the hundred miles journey from the mountainous area where they had been born to see the place for themselves and view the remains of the Ark in which their fathers had been saved ‑ there is nothing unlikely in that. That mountain became sacred to them and their descendants into future distant ages. It was never forgotten; it became a central feature in their myths and legends. And all the evidence is that the Tower of Babel had a direct connection with that mountain.

A distinguishing feature of all Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian cities, from their beginnings to their final end, was the "ziggurat". This was the original Sumerian name and this is the name by which these structures or their remains are known today. The ziggurat was a pyramid built in stages, or steps, each stage smaller than the one below so that a concourse ran round the building at each stage. Stairways ascending the sides of each stage gave ultimate access to the level platform at the top, where was always erected a temple facing towards the east. The entire structure was solid, built of brick, usually sun-dried brick in the interior and furnace-baked brick on the outside. The ziggurat was the focus of religious ceremonies and worship, in latter days of the idol gods of the land. It also provided a useful means of astronomical observations; but its primary purpose was religious.

The Tower of Babel was a ziggurat. Its remains are still there today and it is known to have been, in its heyday, one of the greatest and most magnificent of such buildings. According to Strabo, the Greek geographer of our Lord's day, it was six hundred feet high and its base platform was six hundred feet square. That is not to say it was that size when first built. Strabo and Herodotus both described it as it stood in the days of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar; it was common practice though for later kings to enlarge the ziggurats they inherited from earlier generations and archaeologists have found evidence of this in cities other than Babylon. Seton Lloyd in "Foundations in the Dust" (1955) says that the ziggurat of Babylon was about 250 feet high originally.

Now the word "ziggurat" in the Sumerian language means "mountain peak". The ziggurat in each city was built as an artificial mountain peak to remind the people of the Mountain of the Ark from which their ancestors had come. In later times, knowledge of the location of that mountain was forgotten and lost, only that in a general sort of way it was "in the east", for which reason they called it "the Mount of the East". So, in the main, they built their ziggurats, with the front side facing north-east because that was the direction from which their ancestors had come when "journeying from the east". But two noteworthy ziggurats are exceptions. One is at Babylon. The other was built not so very long afterwards by the Sumerians, after the dispersal, at their new holy city of Nippur, sixty miles south of Babylon. Both of these face directly to Anaran, the mountain of the Ark, so that a bearing taken from each intersects on the mountain itself. In no more convincing manner could these early settlers have demonstrated their regard for the salvation that came to their fathers at the hand of God on that mountain.

They called their Tower E-temen-anki which means "the house (or temple) of the foundation of heaven and earth". By that they seem to have referred to what was to them, a very real "new heavens and a new earth" founded or laid down by the Lord after the Flood had swept away the old heavens and earth. `The world that then was", says Peter in 2 Pet.3.6 "being overflowed with water, perished. The world that now is, is reserved to judgment; and we, according to his promise, look for a new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness". They perhaps thought that the new heavens and earth was here already, not realising that sin was shortly to enter their society again and create what Peter again calls "this present evil world". The city they called by a name which meant "the Gate of God". It is noteworthy that the word is, in the singular, not the plural, so supporting the evidence that as yet there was only one God known. In later times, when languages had differentiated, the sons of Shem, the Semites, from whom Abraham and Israel came, knew it as Bab-il, and the sons of Ham, the Sumerians. as Ka-dingir-ra, but both names mean the same, the Gate of God. At a symposium at Baghdad in 1979 organised by the Iraq government Department of Antiquities, dealing in part with the history of Babylon, it was stated that the original name was Bab-ila, given by a people before there was any distinction between Semites and Sumerians, whom the speaker named "proto-Euphrateans". This definition exactly fits these people who commenced to build the Tower before the races separated. Another name given to the city in association with Bab-il was Tin-tir-ki which means "the place of the forest (or trees) of life". Does this mean that those settlers believed that in this new world of theirs the way to the Tree of Life (in Genesis it is composite, grove, or group of trees of life) barred from man since the expulsion from Eden, was to be opened again to them? Is this an indication of their failure to realise that sin had not yet been finally overcome. Were they like Israel at Sinai twenty-six centuries later who thought they could keep the perfect law of God not realising that no man can do that without a Redeemer? If so, it becomes easier to see why the Lord had to put a stop to this project without delay.

They called the name of the country Shumir, the Semitic equivalent being Shumeru, from which we have the modern English Sumer for the land and Sumerians for the people. Langdon in his "Sumerian Grammar" says the meaning is "Place of the faithful lord". There is a note of reverence in this name; they apparently dedicated this new land of theirs to God and named it after him.

At a point of time which was probably about two centuries after the episode of the Tower two successive rulers of the country bore archaic names which Jacobsen in "The Sumerian King Lists" (1966) has interpreted as bearing the meanings "reign of righteousness" and "God listens with gladness". Here again, it seems there is a note of reverence for one God. Even then, five hundred years after the Flood, the shadow of idolatry had not yet fallen upon the human race.

But the Lord had to act. The presumption of men, however well-meaning, had to be halted and the Divine injunction to fill the earth obeyed. "The people is one," He said "they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them from thence upon the face of the earth; and they left off to build the city" (vv 6-8). It need not be thought that there was some kind of instantaneous bestowal of various languages. What is more likely is that differences of ideas, of wishes, of policies, of methods of working, arose among this great concourse of people which first hindered and frustrated the work and then brought it to a halt. It would be strange were it otherwise. There were by now far too many people to ensure unanimity. The obvious and natural result was that the grandiloquent scheme was abandoned and the various communities began to drift away and re-establish themselves in new surroundings with those of like mind. That separation in itself sparked off the development of variant languages, a process that has continued as men spread over the world.

Later on, the project was resumed by those who remained in the land. The Tower was built, and stood for more than two thousand years. The city was built, and became one of the greatest and most magnificent cities the world has ever known. But they are all gone now and the site is rubble and broken bricks, desolate and barren. It started out to point the way to the true God of creation, but it quickly became the haven of false gods and the Lord abandoned it to its fate. And the sons of men spread outwards to populate the waiting earth.