Most scholars consider the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9) to be an etiological myth of theological significance explaining the diversity of language and how human beings came to inhabit different areas across the world. As such, answering questions of historicity, date, and location are challenged.

Part 1: Introduction to the Tower of Babel
Part 2: The Tower of Babel as a Common Myth
Part 4: Rebutting the ‘Localized Hypothesis’

Scholars have stressed the historical Babylonian background (Walton 1995; Kitchen 2003; Frahm 2011), focusing on the largeness and impressiveness of the city of Babylon (by ancient standards). This magnificent city contained a museum, palaces, royal gardens, and an array of colorful lions and dragon statues (Kitchen 2003, 69). It also contained the more ordinary structures like homes, bazaars, squares, streets, and temples in the older part of the city.

Unfortunately, for historians, the primary biblical descriptions help little, offering minimal information except for a description of a united humanity settling on a plain in Shinar, southern Mesopotamia (Walton 1995, 155). Several details do have a historical ring to them, such as the reference to the construction of the tower from baked “bricks” and “bitumen” (Gen. 11:3). The described location and details lead some to identify the Tower of Babel with Mesopotamian ziggurats, perhaps Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to the god Marduk. These are pyramidal structures of varying size that contained stairs on the sides and an altar on top (Enns 2019, 67). A wealth of archaeological evidence (Parrot 1955) shows that these were common locations of worship believed to be divine stairways for the deities to descend to earth, to travel from one realm to the other (Walton 1995, 162).

One response to identifying the Tower of Babel with a ziggurat is that the Hebrew term used for the tower in Genesis 11 is migdāl, which generally points to a military function, not a cultic one, in the Old Testament (e.g., Judg. 8: 9, 17; Ps. 48:13; Ezek. 26:9) (Engelmann 2010, 238; see Walton 1995, 155–156 and Seely 2001, 18–19 for responses to this criticism).

Nonetheless, identifying the Tower of Babel as a ziggurat helps little in narrowing the historical time frame for the composition of the biblical narrative or the period of events the Bible describes. After all, the ziggurat was a central aspect of ancient Mesopotamian culture for a significant swathe of time, dating back as early as 2900–2350 BCE, when the first staged towers were built (Walton 1995, 157).

Archaeology supports the claim that the construction of the tower involved mortar and sun-dried mud bricks (Walton 1995, 163). Unfortunately, this also does not help much for dating the events of the passage, as sun-dried bricks first emerged in Mesopotamia at Samarran sites, such as Sawwan and Choga Mami, in the mid-sixth millennium BCE (Oates and Oates 1976, 104).

Turning to the detail of God confusing human language, the church historically understood this to mean that all humans on the earth once spoke the same language. Leading theologians spoke universally: St. John Chrysostom (347–407) declared “all mankind,” (1990, 222) Saint Augustine (354–430), the “whole human race,” (2009, 482) and John Calvin (1509–1564) “the human race” (1948, 1:332). Today, however, a range of scholars (e.g., linguists, historians, zoologists, biologists, anthropologists) have examined various factors to learn where and when human language originated, and how it evolved through time (Arensburg 1989; Diamond 1992; Botha and Knight 2009; Greenhill et. al., 2011; Clark and Henneberg 2017).

Analyses of primate communication, archaeology (e.g., the fossil record, traces of symbolic and ritualistic human behavior), contemporary language diversity, and the development of sign language have fed into various hypotheses, although consensus is yet to be reached (Yule 2022). Language is a complex phenomenon involving phonetics (sounds), syntax (grammar), semantics (meanings), and physiological aspects (e.g., facial expressions, eye movements, and gestures), which can make an answer even harder to come by. This may explain the diversity of hypotheses.

Several views trace to the German philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900). According to the pooh-pooh hypothesis, language emerged from cries and moans, which were supposedly the earliest vocalizations, whereas the bow-wow hypothesis sees early words as imitations of the animal and bird cries (Müller 1899, ix, 494–497). The sing-song view states that language emerged from play, laughter, cooing, courtship, emotional mutterings, and so on (Boeree 2023). According to the mama hypothesis, language originated when Homo sapiens first attached the easiest syllables to the most significant objects (Boeree 2023).

These are just some of the views, and their diversity stresses the fact that an agreed-upon historic-scientific answer to the question of language’s origin has proven elusive. These hypotheses “have serious flaws, and none can withstand the scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our species” (Farb 2015, 235). The historical-scientific pursuit continues.

It is nonetheless agreed the origin of language must go back into pre-history (before the time of writing’s emergence around 5,500 years ago) and that, in terms of “language’s” evolution, one is dealing with a timeframe of millions of years, which no doubt exceeds the several thousand suggested by the biblical Tower of Babel story. According to theologian Paul H. Seely, “we discover from archaeological data that the event [God’s confusion of human language] occurs too late in history to be the origin of all languages on earth” (2001, 15). Not only did the components of language and anatomy necessary for its articulation (e.g., the mouth, tongue, and larynx) evolve over millions of years, but the diversification of a spoken language itself developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago (Yule 2022, 1).

For some, am indelible, definite answer is provided by biblical scripture itself, which, on the basis of a literal historical interpretation of the text, traces back to God’s confusing of the language of a unified humanity at the Tower of Babel. But in light of the aforementioned considerations, the biblical story “does not give a historical account of where languages came from” (Enns 2019, 68).

But what could be the source of inspiration for the Tower of Babel story? Earlier, we observed interest in the Babylonian background and historical context. Although hypotheses are debated, Assyriologist and Babylonian history scholar Eckart Frahm views the biblical Tower of Babel story as counter-text (2011, 364–368). He compares it to the Enuma Elish, in which the Anunna gods work for a year making bricks to “raise the head” of Esagil, the temple at Babylon, and its ziggurat, Etemenanki (6.59–73). The Tower of Babel story is a counter-text from an exilic context as a reflection of Israel’s animosity toward its captors, Babylon (the Babylonians captured and exiled the Jews from Jerusalem c. 598 BCE). This ideological reversal gives a negative reading of the founding of Babylon and its ziggurat through a polemical tone.

References

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