Surf The Site
Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
THE TOWER OF BABEL
Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
THE TOWER OF BABEL
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| Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563, oil on panel, 114 × 155 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) |
only to YHVH.
11:1 VA YEHI CHOL HA ARETS SAPHAH ECHAT U DEVARIM ACHADIM
וַיְהִי כָל הָאָרֶץ שָׂפָה אֶחָת וּדְבָרִים אֲחָדִים
KJ (King James translation): And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
BN (BibleNet translation): And the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech.
ARETS: Which could as well mean "the whole land" as "the whole Earth".
11:2 VA YEHI BE NAS'AM MI KEDEM VA YIMTSE'U VIKAH BE ERETS SHIN'AR VA YESHVU SHAM
וַיְהִי בְּנָסְעָם מִקֶּדֶם וַיִּמְצְאוּ בִקְעָה בְּאֶרֶץ שִׁנְעָר וַיֵּשְׁבוּ שָׁם
KJ: 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.
BN: And it came to pass, as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
NAS'AM = "they": But who are they? No'ach's descendants? But if they were, and they travelled east from Ararat, it wouldn't bring them to Bavel; that would needa journey almost due south. Then from where? This seems to have started in the middle. There is a strong impression that, from some much more substantial book, these verses alone have been cut and pasted. Which book? What tale does it tell?
SHIN'AR (שנער): is the Yehudit word for Mesopotamia, and specifically for Sumer. Historically this has always been regarded as a Babylonian tale, because the Yehudit version sets it there. Why dispute it? The evidence of a Tower is there too – at least, we know that the Babylonians built step-temples, ziggurats by name, something like the ones the Mayans built in Mexico; the assumption is that the Tower of Babel reflects the ziggurat. Why dispute it? Because the Tower of Babel isn't a Temple to a god, but a human construction consecrated to the overthrow of the gods and the apotheosis of Humankind – so the ziggurat should actually be ruled out.
And then, there is no evidence of the development of sophisticated language in Babylonia until well after the obsolescence of cuneiform, and the local languages – Sag-giga, Akkadian, Chaldean, Sumerian, and many others – were already a great diversification of languages into dialects, but with a single common root, Beney Chet (Hittite). The tale does not therefore appear to apply. Whereas Byblos, also known as Ugarit, and today Ras Shamra in what is now northern Syria, most certainly does – for it was precisely in Ugarit-Byblos that the priests worked, for centuries, to develop a simplified alphabet that would enable all Humankind to communicate: the Babel notion.
What they came up with was the Ugaritic alphabet, which begat Phoenician, which begat pre-Yehudit as well as Yehudit, and which also begat both Greek and Arabic (though Arabic later adopted the Persian script instead); and Greek begat Latin (via the Etruscan), and Latin begat the Roman alphabet used throughout the western world today (including Russia, because Greek also begat Russian, through Saint Cyril). From Byblos also came the word "Bible", precisely from the idea of books, which were "published" there, in the form of papyrus scrolls. Byblos actually achieved the goal of the Tower, and that is why it merits the carrying of the name.This, however, is not how the Tanach tells it; let us return to the Tanach version:
11:3 VA YOMRU ISH EL RE'EHU HAVAH NILBENAH LEVENIM VE NISREPHAH LISREPHAH VA TEHI LAHEM HA LEVENAH LE AVEN VE HA CHEMAR HAYAH LAHEM LA CHOMER
וַיֹּאמְרוּ אִישׁ אֶל רֵעֵהוּ הָבָה נִלְבְּנָה לְבֵנִים וְנִשְׂרְפָה לִשְׂרֵפָה וַתְּהִי לָהֶם הַלְּבֵנָה לְאָבֶן וְהַחֵמָר הָיָה לָהֶם לַחֹמֶר
KJ: And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
BN: And each man said to his companion: "Come, let us bake bricks, and burn them thoroughly." So they had brick for building, and slime for mortar.
The end of nomadism, the beginning of the sedentary life.
Note in this the origins of clay-brick masonry; the slime suggests some kind of daub-and-wattle approach to mortaring; remember we are pre-Iron Age.
The continuous plays-on-words on LEVEN and NISREPHAH suggest that this was originally written as verse not prose.
11:4 VA YOMRU HAVAH NIVNEH LANU IR U MIGDAL VE RO'SHO VA SHAMAYIM VE NA'ASEH LANU SHEM PEN NAPHUTS AL PENEY CHOL HA ARETS
וַיֹּאמְרוּ הָבָה נִבְנֶה לָּנוּ עִיר וּמִגְדָּל וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם וְנַעֲשֶׂה לָּנוּ שֵׁם פֶּן נָפוּץ עַל פְּנֵי כָל הָאָרֶץ
KJ: And they said, Go to, 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.
BN: And they said: "Come, let us build a city, and a tower, with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole Earth."
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| From the Bedford Book of Hours |
And anyway, who exactly was Nimrod? Some scholars identify Nimrod with the Nebrod of Babylonian myth, who is identified with Nazimarattas, a Kassite (or Cassite) King of Babylon; which is to say, of an Indo-European people who invaded from Kashshu (now Kurdistan) and defeated the Emorite kings of Babylon around 1300 BCE. Their god was called Kashshu, whence the tribe called itself Beney Kashshu (whence perhaps Kasdim/Kessed as in Ur Kasdim/Ur of the Chaldees?). Another of their principal gods was Murudash, identified with Ninurta, which may also be a root of Nimrod. Kashshu should not be confused with either Ethiopian or Arabian Kush, though it is entirely possible that Kashshu is the reason for the confusion - back then even, not just now.
The Yehudit for Nimrod roots in MARAD (מרד) = "to rebel", and various Midrashim connect him with the revolt of Sama-El (סמאל), which may well be the source of the Christian story of Lucifer's fall from Heaven. Sama-El was variously regarded as "the angel of death" who passed over the homes of the Beney Yisra-El in Exodus 12:23, one of the seven archangels, the ruler over the Fifth Heaven, and the senior commander of the heavenly host, which comprises two million angels, though none of these readings appear until well into Talmudic times and so must be counted as Jewish rather than Yehudit let alone Yisra-Eli. Yalkut Shimoni (I, 110), for example, presents Sama-El as Esav's (Esau's) "guardian angel", a concept that Biblical Esav would not have understood.
Sama-El is sometimes known, and again only in the later writings, as Shem-Chazah (שמ-חזה) or Shemhazai, an Aramaic name which appears in the writings of other nations as Semihazah, Shemyazaz, Shemyaza, Sêmîazâz, Semjâzâ, Samjâzâ, Semyaza, and Σεμιαζά in the Greek.
Genesis 14:19, as noted above, identifies Amraphel as the King of Shin'ar; in the Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Tanach, he is called the King of Babylon; and in Josephus' "Antiquities" he is specifically Amara Psides, King of Shin'ar. Others, as also noted above, have identified him with Hammurabi of Babylon (1728-1686 BCE), the law-maker on whom Mosheh drew so much, and also a city-builder, though this is speculation of the "famous-name" variety and has no substance.
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| The tower of Babel (1595) Lucas van Valckenborch 1535 – 1597 |
Bav-El, or Bavel, as you prefer, is nevertheless the authentic name of what we call Babylon. Innumerable Midrashim surround the Tower, which, if it was from Babylonian rather than Ugaritic Bav-El, would have had to have been a ziggurat, a terrace-temple. A tower known as Birs Nimrud has been excavated at Borsippa, known already from cuneiform manuscripts. The "original" Tower of Babel, the ziggurat of Babylon, was called by the Sumerians Etemenenanki = "House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth", and its terraced form and immense height clearly hints at Ya'akov's (Jacob's) Ladder (Genesis 28:12 ff) - and begs the question: if we understand the myth of Ya'akov's Ladder as an allegorical parable to explain the Milky Way, does this same interpretation also apply to the Tower of Babel; I am not aware that any scholar has yet addressed that question, mostly because they are stuck in Babylon, and stuck in ziggurats, rather than moving to Byblos, and dealing in literature. The tower formed the central column of the temple-complex known overall as the Esagila or "The House That Lifts Up The Head". Bab-Ili, in the Akkadian, meant , as I have already pointed out from its Yehudit rendering, "gate of god", whence my conviction that it should be Bav-El, and not Bavel, and thence a need to restore the Aleph in the Yehudit version (בב-אל).
We should also remember that the man who led the Beney Yisra-El back from exile at the time of Koresh (Cyrus) and rebuilt the Temple (itself the Yisra-Eli "gateway of god") was properly called Zeru Bav-El (זְרֻבָּבֶ֤ל), and claimed royal descent from David.
As to the specifics of language in this verse:
HAVAH: As in Havah Nagilah, the much loved folk-dance song of Russian chasidism. Literally "come, let us".
RO'SHO VA SHAMAYIM: Literally this might be translated "with its head in the clouds"; and I do wonder if that idiom wasn't intentional.
NA'ASEH LANU SHEM: Yet one more play-on-words; because they are already named "Shem", as in the sons of that son of No'ach. "Let us make us a name" is the usual translation, which fails to convey the intended meaning: "let us give our tribe a name", or "let us give our city a name"; it does not mean name in the sense of reputation, though this is what the translation infers.
PEN NAPHUTS: In what way does building this, or acquiring this name, stop them from being spread out? The statement is really: time to stop this nomadic life and start to live a sedentary one.
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| The Fall of the Tower of Babel Cornelis Anthonisz 1505 – 1553 |
11:5 VA YERED YHVH LIROT ET HA IR VE ET HA MIGDAL ASHER BANU BENEY HA ADAM
וַיֵּרֶד יְהוָה לִרְאֹת אֶת הָעִיר וְאֶת הַמִּגְדָּל אֲשֶׁר בָּנוּ בְּנֵי הָאָדָם
KJ: And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
BN: And YHVH came down to see the city and the tower which the men had built.
YHVH: Clearly not YHVH in any Babylonian original; either Enki or En-Lil is rather more likely. Whereas self-evidently El, if this is indeed a Ugaritic tale.
YERED (ירד): actually came down to Earth? But of course the god in question here, in the pre-Yehudit original at least, was a different god, not YHVH at all, but probably Marduk or some earlier deity (several are named above), only late Bible redactors had achieved universal monotheism and could not admit as much.
BENEY HA ADAM: Should not be translated as "the children of men", but simply as "humankind" - this became, and remains in modern Ivrit, the standard idiom. The sense here is of the deity looking down and seeing what "humans" had built, as a generality, rather than whoever these specific humans may have been.
Isn't it weird to discover that the bad habit of all three of the great western religions, the desire to prevent their followers from getting too much education outside the realm of the approved catechism, should have its roots in two of the starting-point mythologies of the sacred scriptures to which all three adhere: the denial of access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Eden, and now a determination to limit literacy and communication skills: keep 'em ignorant and you retain control.
11:6 VA YOMER YHVH HEN AM ECHAD VE SAPHAH ACHAT LE CHULAM VE ZEH HA CHILAM LA'ASOT VE ATAH LO YIBATSER ME HEM KOL ASHER YAZMU LA'ASOT
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה הֵן עַם אֶחָד וְשָׂפָה אַחַת לְכֻלָּם וְזֶה הַחִלָּם לַעֲשׂוֹת וְעַתָּה לֹא יִבָּצֵר מֵהֶם כֹּל אֲשֶׁר יָזְמוּ לַעֲשׂוֹת
KJ: And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and 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.
BN: And YHVH said: "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they purpose to do.
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| The Confusion of Tongues, Gustave Doré,1832 – 1883 |
The significance lies in the Logos, the means by which the deity "in the beginning" brought the world into existence; a rather special attribute of a deity, but now reduced to the twaddle tweeted, and the facile on Facebook; but the truth is, it is only through language that human beings are finally able to articulate the universe, let alone their personal experience of it, and so, through this universal variety of language (don't tell that to the Esperanto-advocates), human beings acquire the same capacity for creative expression as the deity.
"For YHVH your god is a jealous god"…clearly, from this passage, a deeply jealous one. But we misunderstand the word "jealous", mistaking it for "envy". Jealousy is wanting to keep what you have; envy is wanting what someone else has. The god of the Beney Yisra-El is a jealous god; the Tower of Babel threatens what he has.
The divine antipathy to human unity is anyway bewildering. Does he want strife and confusion? It contradicts the ethos of the Shema. Something else is going on in this.
One last thought on this verse: has any scholar or theologian ever undertaken a comparison of the Tower with the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden? Both Babylonian-Persian tales assimilated by the Beney Yisra-El. Both tales in which the god or gods become alarmed that the artificial intelligence robots they have created to manage the planet are threatening to become self-willed and self-mastering, and that IBM will turn into HAL before they can do anything to prevent it (my double-analogy of our own contemporary fear of robots is intentional; the allusion is to 2001: A Space Odyssey).
11:7 HAVAH NERDAH VE NAVLAH SHAM SEPHATAM ASHER LO YISHME'U ISH SEPHAT RE'EHU
הָבָה נֵרְדָה וְנָבְלָה שָׁם שְׂפָתָם אֲשֶׁר לֹא יִשְׁמְעוּ אִישׁ שְׂפַת רֵעֵהוּ
KJ: Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
BN: "Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other's speech."
HAVAH NERDAH: parallels HAVAH NIVNEH in verse 4. HAVAH NERDAH (הבה נרדה): "Let us..." The sense of this makes YHVH just one of a pantheon of gods; which rather confirms the observation in verse 5. At no other point in the entire Tanach is YHVH used in the plural; on such occasions it is always Elohim.
VE NAVLAH (ונבלה): meaning "confuse", whence the confusion of BAVEL (בבל), in the Yehudit anyway. But the meaning "confusion" almost certainly came afterwards, and the story was then adapted to fit the aetiology. Nevertheless there is a grain of truth in this, for as William Jones pointed out at the end of the 19th century, the Sanskrit root of the Aryan-Semitic languages produced the full range of Indo-European languages, including Greek and its later dialect Latin, Yehudit and Arabic, Celtic, Germanic, all the Romanesque languages out of Latin obviously, as well as those other now lost Semitic languages such as Aramaic, Chaldean, Assyriac, Phoenician etc. The only things Jones got wrong were, first, thinking that Sanskrit was the source; it wasn't; Sanskrit too derives from the earlier Beney Chet (Hittite); and second, thinking that this only applied to language; it doesn't, it also applies to mythology, fable, legend and the many other ways in which people expressed their understanding of the cosmos (epistemology).
11:8 VA YAPHETS YHVH OTAM MI SHAM AL PENEY CHOL HA ARETS, VA YACHDELU LIVNOT HA IR
וַיָּפֶץ יְהוָה אֹתָם מִשָּׁם עַל פְּנֵי כָל הָאָרֶץ וַיַּחְדְּלוּ לִבְנֹת הָעִיר
KJ: So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
BN: So YHVH scattered them abroad from there, over the whole face of the Earth; and they abandoned the building of the city.
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| "The Tower of Babel", M.C. Escher |
What connection if any is there between the new-found knowledge of brick-making, as explained here, and the multiplicity of languages? Some precocious 8-year-old of the third millennium BCE no doubt asked: mummy why are there so many languages; or daddy, where did all the different people come from? And this was produced as a sort of answer.
Ambiguity in that one part of the tale appears to explain the end of nomadism, and the other its origins; but in the wrong order.
11:9 AL KEN KARA SHEMAH BAVEL KI SHAM BALAL YHVH SEPHAT KOL HA ARETS U MI SHAM HEPHIYTSAM YHVH AL PENEY KOL HA ARETS
עַל כֵּן קָרָא שְׁמָהּ בָּבֶל כִּי שָׁם בָּלַל יְהוָה שְׂפַת כָּל הָאָרֶץ וּמִשָּׁם הֱפִיצָם יְהוָה עַל פְּנֵי כָּל הָאָרֶץ
KJ: 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.
BN: This is why the city was named Bavel; because there YHVH confused all the languages of the Earth; and from there YHVH scattered the people abroad across the whole face of the Earth.
BAVEL...BALAL: Does this explanation hold water? As alreadt explained, it is a very long way etymologically from Balal to Bavel. This is where the confusion myth really does fall apart and we can see that the Redactor has been looking to expunge or replace.
Note that the name Babel, or Bavel, or even Bav-El, has not appeared until now, at the end, and as the end, of the story.
HEPHIYTSAM: We [think we] know today that the starting-point for the dispersal of Humankind across the globe was Africa, not Mesopotamia; but maybe the Babylonians believed they were the starting-point.
Why is it placed here? Because immediately afterwards we are to meet Av-Ram, and at least one of the legends has him originating in Ur Kasdim, which is to say the very next town along the river from Bavel (Babylon); and many Midrashim connect him with Nimrod. If verse 9 says all the peoples of the Earth scattered from that point, then Av-Ram has to have come from there, even if he didn't.
Surf The Site
Surf The Site
Genesis: 1a 1b 1c 1d 2a 2b 2c 2d 3 4a 4b 4c/5 6a 6b 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25a 25b 26a 26b 27 28a 28b 29 30a 30b 31a 31b/32a 32b 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44a 44b 45 46 47a 47b 48 49 50
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