What was the tower of babel?

Question

say anything you think may be helpfull!!!

Answer 1

a long time ago in the bible days, people wanted to meet God and so they thought that they will build the tallest tower ever, but then God got angry and he made everyone speak in a different language (before everyone was speaking in the same language) and thats how japanese people speak japanese and american people speak english and yeah...

oh and the tower got destroyed, i forgot how cuz i heard this story when i was like 6yrs old...

Answer 2

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל‎ Migdal Bavel Arabic: برج بابل‎ Burj Babil) is a structure featured in chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis, an enormous tower intended as the crowning achievement of the city of Babilu, the Akkadian name for Babylon. Babel was a city that united humanity, all speaking a single language and migrating from the east; it was the home city of the great king Nimrod, and the first city to be built after the Great Flood. The people decided their city should have a tower so immense that it would have "its top in the heavens." (וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם). However, the Tower of Babel was not built for the worship and praise of God, but was dedicated to false man-made religion, with a motive of making a 'celebrated name' for the builders. - Genesis 11:4. However God, (written in the Hebrew as YHWH; translated into English as either Yahweh, Jehovah, or most commonly, the LORD), seeing what the people were doing and sinning against him, confused their languages and scattered the people throughout the earth.

"Babel" is the Hebrew equivalent of Akkadian Babilu (Greek Babylon), a cosmopolitan city typified by a confusion of languages.[1] The Tower of Babel has often been associated with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, the ziggurat to Marduk, by Nabopolassar (610s BC). A Sumerian view of this story is preserved in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.

Biblical narrative and themes

Narrative



The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 (KJV) as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." 7 Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The phrase Tower of Babel does not actually appear in the Bible; it is always, "the city and its tower" (אֶת-הָעִיר וְאֶת-הַמִּגְדָּל) or just "the city" (הָעִיר).



German Late Medieval (ca. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.

[edit] Themes

The story explains the origin of nations, of their languages, and of Babylon (Babel). The story's theme of competition between the Lord and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.[1] The story displays the Lord's contempt for human ambition.[1]

The traditional Judaeo-Christian interpretation, as found for example in Flavius Josephus, explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God, ordered by the arrogant tyrant, Nimrod.

Historical context



The Tower of Babel in the background of a depiction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon by Martin Heemskerck.The Greek form of the name is from the native Akkadian Bāb-ilim, which means "Gate of the god". This correctly summarizes the religious purpose of the great temple towers (the ziggurats) of ancient Sumer (Biblical Shinar). In Genesis 10, Babel is said to have formed part of Nimrod's kingdom. It is not specifically mentioned in the Bible that he ordered the tower to be built, but Nimrod is often associated with its construction in other sources. The Hebrew version of the name of the city and the tower, Babel, is attributed in Gen. 11:9 to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The ruins of the city of Babylon are near Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq.

Traditionally, the peoples listed in Chapter 10 of Genesis (the Table of Nations) are understood to have been scattered over the face of the earth from Shinar only after the abandonment of The Tower, which follows as an explanation of this cultural diversity. Some, however, see an internal contradiction between the mention already in Genesis 10:5 that "From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with his own language" and the subsequent Babel story, which begins "Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words" (Genesis 11:1). Others answer this claim with the fact Genesis is listing the descendants of Noah's son Japheth, not stating a time period as much as referring to separate cultures. They claim that there is no reason to presuppose these descendants had gotten their own languages prior to the Tower's construction. In fact, the maritime peoples and Nimrod are both listed as being three generations from Noah.

In other sources

Destruction

The account in Genesis makes no mention of any destruction of the tower. The people whose languages are confounded simply stop building their city, and are scattered from there over the face of the Earth. However, in other sources such as the Book of Jubilees, Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10), Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6), Josephus (Antiquities 1.4.3), and the Sibylline Oracles (iii. 117-129), God overturns the tower with a great wind.

Etemenanki, the ziggurat at Babylon



Reconstruction of the Etemenanki (total height 91 m)Main article: Etemenanki

Etemenanki (Sumerian: "temple of the foundation of heaven and earth") was the name of a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk in the city of Babylon. It was famously rebuilt by the 6th century BC Neo-Babylonian dynasty rulers Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. According to modern scholars such as Stephen L. Harris, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel was likely influenced by Etemenanki during the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews.

Nebuchadnezzar wrote that the original tower had been built in antiquity: "A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps."

The Greek historian Herodotus (440 BC) later wrote of this ziggurat, which he called the "Temple of Zeus Belus", giving an account of its vast dimensions.

Book of Jubilees

The Book of Jubilees contains one of the most detailed accounts found anywhere of the Tower.

And they began to build, and in the fourth week they made brick with fire, and the bricks served them for stone, and the clay with which they cemented them together was asphalt which comes out of the sea, and out of the fountains of water in the land of Shinar. And they built it: forty and three years were they building it; its breadth was 203 bricks, and the height [of a brick] was the third of one; its height amounted to 5433 cubits and 2 palms, and [the extent of one wall was] thirteen stades [and of the other thirty stades].(Jubilees 10:20-21, Charles' 1913 translation)

The Book of Jubilees recounts Genesis and the first twelve chapters of Exodus, elaborating on the text (similar to a Midrash). It is often categorized as one of the Pseudepigrapha and dated to the late 2nd century BC[1], but it is still in the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church[2].

Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews

The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (c 94 AD), recounted history as found in the Hebrew Bible and mentioned the Tower of Babel. He wrote that it was Nimrod who had the tower built and that Nimrod was a tyrant who tried to turn the people away from God. In this account, God confused the people rather than destroying them because destroying people with a Flood hadn't taught them to be godly.[3]

Greek Apocalypse of Baruch

Third Apocalypse of Baruch (or 3 Baruch, c 2nd century), one of the pseudepigrapha, describes the just rewards of sinners and the righteous in the afterlife.[1] Among the sinners are those who instigated the Tower of Babel. In the account, Baruch is first taken (in a vision) to see the resting place of the souls of "those who built the tower of strife against God, and the Lord banished them." Next he is shown another place, and there, occupying the form of dogs,

Those who gave counsel to build the tower, for they whom thou seest drove forth multitudes of both men and women, to make bricks; among whom, a woman making bricks was not allowed to be released in the hour of child-birth, but brought forth while she was making bricks, and carried her child in her apron, and continued to make bricks. And the Lord appeared to them and confused their speech, when they had built the tower to the height of four hundred and sixty-three cubits. And they took a gimlet, and sought to pierce the heavens, saying, Let us see (whether) the heaven is made of clay, or of brass, or of iron. When God saw this He did not permit them, but smote them with blindness and confusion of speech, and rendered them as thou seest. (Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, 3:5-8)

Midrash

Rabbinic literature offers many different accou