Bav-El (Babel)

M.C. Escher

בבל


Babylon, but also possibly Byblos (Ugarit) in northern Lebanon, the town which gave the world its first written alphabet, thereby solving the problem of communication caused by the gods (Ha Elohim) when they interfered in the building of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

Genesis 10:10 names it as Nimrod's kingdom.

Bav-El is taken to be Bavel, which itself is taken to mean "confusion", but this is a case of confusion within confusion; the verb "to confuse" in Yehudit is actually LEBALBEL (לבלבל) and not LEBAVEL (לבבל אותך): the extra LAMED (ל) makes all the difference, and the root is much more likely Byblos than Babylon.

Scholars who are reluctant to accept this ancient error, generally try to claim that the Yehudit word Bavel (בבל) "was in fact derived from the root Balal (בלל)", and therefore really does mean "confusion"; however this is simply implausible, especially as people of the region already used the name before the Beney Yisra-El came along, and the word is not Yehudit anyway. We can take it as apocryphal and merely convenient to a story of the confusion of tongues.

Much more likely Bavel was Bav-El, "the gateway of the god", much like Beit-El in the later Yehudit: the latter a standing stone known as a baetyl, the former probably one of those many meteoric rocks found throughout the Middle East, and known in Arabic as ka'aba; the most famous of them, of course, at Mecca.

The original Bav-El was most likely an Akkadian or Sumerian name, whose meaning the later Yehudit writers either did not know, or, much more likely, chose to ignore. On this basis Bav-El in Yehudit should really be spelled בבאל, but this leads to grammatical complications too complicated to deal with, and so, presumably, the Aleph was omitted.

The tower is generally believed to have been the ziggurat of Bav-El, one of the earliest constructed temples known. However, from the multiplicity of languages, it is much more likely to have been Byblos, where alphabetic writing was invented; the northern Lebanese city gives its name to the Bible, because it was famous for the manufacture of papyrus parchment on which the first known books were inscribed. The language of Byblos, known as Ugaritic, provides the earliest known alphabet, the root of the Phoenician alphabet which later diversified into Greek, Yehudit, Aramaic and the early written form of Arabic (Arabic later adopted the Persian alphabet).

The area called Babylonia covers southern Iraq from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf; its capital from the 11th century BCE was Babylon, though previously Nippur appears to have served. Southern Babylon was Sumer, northern Babylon was Akkad. The southern Akkadians spoke Babylonian, a dialect of Akkadian; the northern Akkadians spoke Assyrian, the language of Ashur, or Mesopotamia. Akkadian is a Semitic language, linked to Yehudit, Arabic etc. The root of Sumerian is unknown, but as it belongs to "the common source" it was probably Hittite.

Mythologically speaking, if Av-Ram did come from Babylon (Genesis 11:31), which is unlikely, he would probably have left at the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2170-2062 BCE) when a huge migration is known, caused by the conquest of the moon-worshipping tribes by a sun-worshipping invader. It is possible that memories of this migration are echoed in the Av-Ram story, but it is much more probable that it was Sarai, the moon-goddess, who left Babylon for Charan, and that she encountered Av-Ram, the sun-god, there on his journey from still further north in Anatolia - that is to say, the Akkadian cult of Ishtar spreading west merged with the Hittite-Aramaean cult of Bel travelling south. The Genesis version turns this into artificial history, bringing the ancestors from precisely the place in which the exiles had lived during the Babylonian exile (586 - 536 BCE), and allowing them to merge with the Shomronim (Samaritans) who had been taken to Yisra-El to replace them, themselves originating in the region of Charan, in Padan Aram.


For more background to the gods and cults of Babylon, click here.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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