The Tower to Heaven and the Confusion of Tongues
Genesis 11 opens with the whole earth speaking one language. Migrating east, the people find a plain in the land of Shinar and settle there, saying to one another: come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly — brick served them for stone, and bitumen for mortar — and then: come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the earth. The Lord comes down to see the city and the tower, observes that as one people with one language 'nothing they propose will now be impossible for them,' confuses their speech so that they cannot understand one another, and scatters them abroad. The building stops; the city is called Babel.
The story turns on a bilingual pun: the Akkadian name of Babylon, Bab-ili, means 'gate of the god,' but the Hebrew narrator hears in it the verb balal, 'to confuse.' The tower's model is generally taken to be Etemenanki, 'House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth,' the great stepped ziggurat of Marduk at Babylon, its base roughly ninety-one meters on a side, rebuilt to full height under Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century BCE. Herodotus, in the first book of his Histories, describes the eight-staged tower he heard of at Babylon. The outline of the base and a waterlogged foundation pit survive at the site near modern Hillah, Iraq.
The tower became Western art's standing image of overreach. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1563 painting renders it as a spiraling, forever-unfinished shell, now among the most famous holdings of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; 'babel' itself passed into many languages as a word for an unintelligible din, and lends its name to studies of language and translation to this day.
