What Was the Tower of Babel?

Before reading this article, please read the articles, “The Constellations in the Scriptures,” “TWO Creation Stories in Genesis 1-3!” and “Studying Chronology – Reconstructing When Things Happened.”

Reading through Genesis 1-11, as we get closer to the time of Abraham, we start to encounter more historical episodes in the narrative of these chapters. Surprisingly, we DO find a “tower” in history which partly matches the description given in Genesis 11. Let’s read the story for context:

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 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. Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is of the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Firstly, the whole world simply didn’t have only one language and one speech at that time. Nevertheless, there was a “tower” built in the land of Shinar – the area that was later known as Babylon – which was intended to provide a means to spiritually ascend to heaven.

In order to determine the proper time setting of this story, we could attempt to reconstruct a chronology of events after the Tower of Babel, to allow us to “count back” to when the Tower of Babel story happened.

A lot of the work has already been done for us. Scholar and Egyptologist David Rohl studied the currently accepted chronology of ancient Egypt, and realized that a mistake had been made in what’s called the “Third Intermediate Period.” These so-called “intermediate periods” of Egyptian history are simply periods of instability, when one single pharaoh wasn’t ruling the entirety of the land of Egypt. The Third Intermediate Period (TIP) stretches from the 21st to the 26th dynasties of Egypt.

We have several records on the 30 dynasties of Egypt, stretching over roughly 3,000 years of time. Some are partially complete, and others have only come down to us through second-hand sources. What we DON’T have is a description of which dynasties overlapped with one another – because of these periods of instability. We have to make educated guesses.

Even though the 21st and 22nd dynasties of ancient Egypt are considered to be part of the Third Intermediate Period, they are conventionally believed to have been sequential. But, David Rohl discovered that the tomb of the 21st dynasty pharaoh Psusennes I, had been built around an earlier, pre-existing tomb of the 22nd dynasty pharaoh Osorkon II. In other words, these two dynasties had to overlap, with pharaohs from each dynasty ruling over different parts of Egypt.

With that chronological “fix,” suddenly previously discovered artifacts and events began to match up with biblical events. For instance, in the conventional chronology, the city of Jericho was destroyed about a hundred and fifty years too early to have been the result of the Israelites conquering the land of Canaan. Now, that destruction can be perfectly reconciled with the biblical account.

Rohl’s reconstructed chronology of ancient Egypt helps us to establish when events prior to the Exodus and the Sojourn in Egypt would have happened, but unfortunately the evidence for these events is rather “thinner on the ground,” as it were. We have to make more educated guesses and extrapolate backwards from events we can more securely date. Even so, we can make a reasonable guess as to when the Tower of Babel story would have happened.

The early history of Sumer (the precursor of Babylon) is mostly legendary. We do have a “Sumerian King List” that purports to record the reigns of various Sumerian kings, before and after the Flood. Unfortunately, the reign lengths simply don’t make sense. Some of them last for hundreds of thousands of years. Others are slightly less fantastic, ranging from 420 years for one king, to 1500 years for another.

At about the same that the reign lengths start looking a bit more reasonable, we start finding actual archaeological evidence for these Sumerian kings. We have archaeological evidence (albeit scant) that King Gilgamesh really existed. His father, on the other hand, was “Dumuzi” (called Tammuz in the bible) and Dumuzi’s father was “Lugal-banda” – both legendary figures that were worshipped as gods.

According to a legend, it was Nimrod, the mighty hunter, who built the Tower of Babel. Based on name alone, that could be Enmer-kar, or Enmer the hunter, one of the kings listed prior to Gilgamesh on the Sumerian King List, who was the ruler of the Sumerian city of Uruk. The consonants of the name are similar, and the suffix “kar” means hunter, so a case can be made that they’re the same person. On the other hand, we have no actual evidence that Enmer-kar existed, or that any “tower” (ziggurat) that he might have built, was left incomplete.

Much later in the Sumerian King List, we find a king towards the very end, who did indeed leave behind an unfinished ziggurat. His name was Amar-Sin, a ruler of the city of Uruk, and after a rebuilding program on the ziggurat in the ancient city of Eridu, Amar-Sin had to stop because crops wouldn’t grow any more in Eridu. Not long afterwards, Sumer itself fell to the invading Amorites, and Sumer as a country was no more.

Neither of these kings built a ziggurat in the city of Babylon, though. Babylon as a city, people, and nation didn’t exist until much later. But the term “Babel” in Akkadian simply meant “gate of god” – in other words, the way to ascend to heaven and achieve eternal life. All of the ziggurats were seen as gateways to heaven, though some were more important than others.

So, which one was the real builder of the Tower of Babel? The mythical Enmer-kar, or Amar-Sin? Or, perhaps the legends associated with Enmer-kar, are really about Amar-Sin?

The archaeological record shows that there were several distinct periods of occupation in Uruk, that can be roughly dated. The ones that might possibly concern us are:

  • Late Uruk Period – 3400-3100 BC
  • Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr period – 3100-2900 BC
  • Early Dynastic period – 2900-2350 BC
  • Ur III period – 2100-2000 BC

Amar-Sin was part of the Ur III period, his reign dating to about 2046-2038 BC. Enmer-kar, on the other hand, would have been potentially thousands of years earlier, if he was a real person at all.

To help us decide one way or the other, there are some very interesting legends concerning Enmer-kar, ruler of Uruk, and his battle with the legendary city of Aratta. According to one legend, Enmer-kar prayed that the many-tongued lands of Shubur and Hamazi would be united under the land of Sumer, and would, with a single language, all praise the god Enlil.

If these legends have any basis in reality, then the biblical account of the Tower of Babel would take place after the defeat of Aratta, once Enmer-kar had taken over and united the lands under the rule of Sumer. Hence, the reference to the whole earth “having one language and one speech” refers to being conquered by a tyrant, and made to worship the pagan god Enlil. But somehow, God caused this empire to fall, and its people to be scattered – whether by climate change or some other means.

On the other hand, beginning with Amar-Sin, Sumer saw a great renaissance. Formerly subjugated to the rulership of the city of Lagash, Sumer became independent once more. In fact, Sumer became so powerful that it was sending ships overseas all the way to America! Given its powerful renaissance, the wealth that Sumer accrued from such trading voyages must have been immense.

Sumer may have sent ships to America before, during the early dynastic period. Legends of Gilgamesh speak of him traveling across the sea to the distant land of “Anaku” – perhaps Tiahuanacu. Even so, such trans-Atlantic visits became commonplace during the reign of Amar-Sin. A clay tablet owned by a medicine man living in what is now Montana, which he claimed had been handed down from his distant ancestors, was found to have been written in Sumerian and dated to about 2042 BC, during the Ur III Sumerian renaissance period. Many other such tablets with Sumerian inscriptions were recovered from Georgia, Ohio and New York, all dating to the period between 2042 and 2030 BC.

Not long after this sudden renaissance, the Amorites invaded and conquered Sumer, signaling the end of these trans-Atlantic voyages. Many of Sumer’s inhabitants apparently fled overseas, ending up in South America.

Which of these is the proper setting of the Tower of Babel? Each candidate has its appeal, but perhaps Enmer-kar was really Amar-Sin, and the story of one was really the story of the other.

What of the “tower” or ziggurat, whose top was “of the heavens,” then? On the walls and ceiling of the ziggurat were likely inscribed signs of the zodiac, because they represented the path to ascend to heaven – a false promise of eternal life.

Why describe the fall of this empire as confusion of its language, though? Because of the practice of word-punning to interpret the heavenly signs, which was dependent on the relationship between the Sumerian logograms (word-pictures) representing various constellations, and their counterpart terms in Akkadian. When Sumer fell, the language of Sumerian fell out of general use. The practice of divination wasn’t possible in the same way, without a knowledge of Sumerian. Neither could the pagan diviners and astrologers among them, understand one another, to spread the knowledge of a false way of achieving eternal life.

In the future, we’ll study the biblical “gate of heaven” – the true means of achieving eternal life.

Rohl, David.  Pharaohs and Kings:  A Biblical Quest
Rohl, David.  Legend:  The Genesis of Civilization
Joseph, Frank.  The Lost Colonies of Ancient America
Wikipedia, Enmerkar
Wikipedia, Amar-Sin