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BABEL
Translation of a Hebrew word in Genesis 10:10 and 11:9. Elsewhere it is translated “Babylonia” or “Babylon” (see 2 Kgs 17:24). The rendering “Babel” in the Genesis passages is intended to relate the name to the early cultural setting reflected by Genesis 11:1-9, especially to the attempt to build a “tower.” The translation “Babel” is also intended to associate the Tower of Babel incident with the popular understanding that Babel is derived from a root meaning “to confuse” (v 9).
Archaeological excavations have provided information about the building of towers for temples called ziggurats. The excavation of a number of such towers has made it clear they were structures consisting of several platforms, each of lesser dimensions than the one immediately below it. The top platform served as the location for a small temple dedicated to the particular deity of the builder or of the city in which it was built.
The first ziggurat at Babylon was built by Shar-kali-sharri, king of Akkad in the latter part of the 23d century BC. Archaeologists understand that this ziggurat was destroyed and rebuilt several times across the centuries. It apparently lay in ruins from sometime around 2000 BC to around 1830 BC, at which time a forebear of Hammurabi (1728–1636 BC) founded or rebuilt the city named Bab-ilu, or Babel.
The Babylonian Creation Epic gives details concerning the construction of a “celestial city” as the proper abode of Marduk. It was with this theological understanding that the name Babel, “gate of god,” was a significant term. Other terminology associated with the temple built for Marduk and with the ziggurat suggests that Babel, for the early Babylonians, was the on-earth entrance into the heavenly or celestial realm.
Jewish and Arab traditions associate the Tower of Babel of Genesis with a large temple ruin dedicated originally to Nabu in the city of Borsippa, or Birs-Nimrod.
See also Babylon, Babylonia.
Babel or Babble
The Genesis narrative about the construction of the tower recounts how God intervened and confused the builders so that they could no longer communicate with each other. The word translated “confuse” is balal; it means also “to babble.” A preposition combined with a form of this root, ba-bal, meaning “in confusion” or “in babbling,” became the name for the location of the tower-building project. A popular etymology replaced the original meaning of the name.