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[I want to be OCD]

The Tower of Babel Genesis 11 describes a time when humans rebelled against God via the Tower of Babel. Because of this, God confused their language, and groups of people separated and moved away from one another.

If this is true, then all races/cultures would know of god and all races should in theory at least have some people that believe in god. Especially after such a massive miracle by god changing their language?! How could they not believe...

Native Americans, and several other cultures did not know of god at all.. Until we spread the religion to them.

So there for how can the story of The Tower of Babel be true?

[jimwalton]

Oh my. Lots to say here. Many unresearched assumptions.

> The Tower of Babel Genesis 11 describes a time when humans rebelled against God via the Tower of Babel. Because of this, God confused their language, and groups of people separated and moved away from one another.

True. The story in a nutshell.

> If this is true, then all races/cultures would know of god and all races should in theory at least have some people that believe in god. Especially after such a massive miracle by god changing their language?! How could they not believe...

Whoa, Nelly. The story is a local one, not a global one. The Hebrew word translated in some Bibles as "world" (eretz) can also mean land—a limited geographic region. The locale being spoken of is the lower region of the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, known at the time as Sumer. One language was spoken in the Ur-Sumerian region. (We already know from Genesis 10.5, 20, 31 that humankind possessed more than one language.)

As far as historicity, many of the features of the story point to the end of the 4th to the end of the 3rd millennium (so from c. 3500-2000 BC) as the setting. It is the Ubaid period to the Late Uruk phase in Southern Mesopotamia. During this era the culture and technology of settlements suddenly starts showing up in archaeological and historical records: urbanization, ziggurat prototypes, and experimentation with kiln-baked brick fit the time period (Gn. 11.2). This is when the plain of Shinar was settled because the alluvial plain was drying out, so a population group could migrate there. But then according to Sumerian chronology, the Sumerian dynasty at Ur III in about 2110-2000 BC saw its demise and transition to the first Babylonian dynasty—the Sumerians were scattered and became part of different language groups.

Sumerian was an agglutinative language. What is most likely happening here is that the united cultures of the Sumerians are invaded by the Babylonians (Semitic language group) and dispersed, heightening an existing clash of languages, creating a disintegration and mixing of language as the Sumerian civilization collapsed and people groups were mixed by the permeation of foreign languages.

Then the Bible says, "From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth." But let's examine this rather than rush to conclusion. In Gn. 41.57 (same book, same author), we read that "all the countries came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph because the famine was severe in all the world." Was Brazil experiencing famine? Did the Australians come to Joseph? No. "All" means the countries of the immediate vicinity in the ancient Near East. "Scattered over the face of the whole earth" could easily mean around the entire region of the ancient Near East.

Also, Deut. 2.25 (same author again): "I will put the...fear of you on all the nations under heaven." Did that include the Mayans? The people of Madagascar? I don't think anyone would argue that this refers to more than the nations of Canaan, and perhaps a few others. So also here in Genesis 11. They were scattered among the nations of the Tigris/Euphrates River Valley—what we know as the Middle East.

There are plenty of other references like this throughout the Bible (Acts 17.6; 19.35; 24.5; Rom. 1.8). We have to give serious consideration that quite possibly "all the nations under heaven" doesn't mean "global".

[Flashy Yellow]

Why even build the tower in the first place? I get humans didn’t know heaven WASN’T in the clouds but why would God make that mistake?

[jimwalton]

You seem to misunderstand. God didn't instruct them to build the tower; it wasn't God's tower; there was no mistake on God's part.

Ziggurats were "popular" in that era and that region. It says in Genesis 11.4, "Come, let us build ourselves a city." What they were most likely constructing was an administrative center comprised of a number of buildings, rather than a whole city. It would be too expensive to build a whole city with those materials.

The tower, the ziggurat, was nothing more than a structure built to support a stairway that was believed by the Sumerians to be used by the gods to travel from the heavenly realm to the earthly realm—a "stairway to heaven," so to speak. They believed the gods descended the stairways to visit the town and bring blessing. There were no rooms, chambers, or passageways of any sort inside. At the top of the ziggurat the people would put a bed and some food in a small room so that the god could refresh himself along the way. At the top of the ziggurat was believed to be the gateway of the gods—the entrance to the divine home. There is no evidence that the ziggurat was used for any purpose. There were no festivals or rituals associated with it. It was a stairway for the gods.

Such towers were often connected to a temple, and the temple is where all the rituals and sacrifices took place.

So why did the build the tower in the first place? So the gods would come and bless them. But the text specifically says that they got big heads about it: "so that we may make a name for ourselves" (Gn. 11.4). Here is where they made their mistake. Instead of exalting the god, they were more interested in exalting themselves. The temples were designed to honor a deity, and the ziggurats were to provide for the deity, but it seems the motivation of this group was to bring prosperity and honor to themselves.

God was not pleased with their thinking they could manipulate deity and coerce God to serve them. That's when he disrupted their scheme.

I hope that helps.

[I want to be OCD]

If the bible clearly says ALL nations under heaven..... and it in fact does not really mean "all" (global), wouldn't that mean the bible is wrong?

[jimwalton]

Great question. Thanks for asking. One of the challenges in biblical studies is to understand what the author meant by what he said, as opposed to what wen our modern culture, might think it means. We must learn the language of the author and his times and culture if we are to understand what he was saying and meaning.

Let me put it this way. In front of our local grocery store there is a sign that says "No Standing". We all know what this means. It means you can't park your car there. Someone from another culture, however, would be totally confused, because it clearly says "No Standing," so presumably we must all sit in the vicinity of this sign. No, what WE mean it pertains to a car, not to people or their position.

In the building there is a door with a sign on it that reads, "This door must be kept closed at all times." We know what that means, and it doesn't mean that the door is never to be used. Otherwise we might as well just plaster over it. What it means is that for fire protection the door is never to be propped open; it certainly doesn't mean that people can't use the door, going in and out. But then it's not "closed at all times"! Precisely. In our culture we know what it means.

In the Mesopotamian world view of the ancient Near East, the known world was comprised a single continent fringed with mountains the ringed by the cosmic sea. An ancient Babylonian map has been found. They thought the world was a flat disk of about a few thousand miles in diameter. We don't assume Noah or the writer of Genesis is a liar. They are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth according to their geographic and scientific understanding. We do the same thing. It's possible that people a hundred years from now will laugh at some of our scientific understandings. Does that mean we're lying? Of course not.

But is GOD lying? Is the Bible wrong? Again, no. God accommodates their understanding of geography and the world in the genres and literary devices in which they speak. God's intent is not to school them in geography, but in morality. He accommodates their limited view of the earth, but that's incidental to the message. The message (God judges sin, he favors righteousness, and he is the sovereign God) comes through loud and clear. There's where the authority of the text lies. We are committed to the message, not to their faulty science. The Mesopotamians believed that was their whole world; we don't. We know better, but that doesn't mean the Bible is wrong. To set aside his culturally-bound words doesn't negate the authority of the message. So to understand Scripture properly we discern between the language and culture of 3000 BC and the message that is the intent of the text. We are committed to the message. In asking whether or not the entire planet was of one language we are dealing with how to read the terms, the figures of speech, and the hyperbole. But the text becomes authoritative as we deliberate over the truths the communicator intends to affirm through the language he has chosen. What cannot be negotiated, and where the text has punch, is in that God judged the blasphemy of the guilty parties before they destroyed the truth of God in a part of the world where God was going to reveal himself.

[Flashy Yellow]

I need more clarification. I meant why would God be displeased at the Babylonians and do what he did? You can’t reach heaven via the clouds. So building the ziggurat was pointless in the first place.

[jimwalton]

Ziggurats were part of their cultic practice during that era. It wasn't a practice that continued either there or in other cultures. Instead of just building a temple where the god could live, they chose to build a set of stairs to make it easier for him to get from heaven to earth—a convenience, to be thoughtful to the god. It think it's fair to say it was mythological anthropomorphic mumbo-jumbo. A real God wouldn't need stairs.

This one, apparently, was unusually tall ("that reaches to the heavens"). Interestingly, in the Summa Alu, an omen text thought to be from the 700s BC, there is an omen that "A city that rises like a mountain peak will become a ruin, and if it goes up like a cloud to heaven there will be calamity."

Why would God be displeased? The whole point of a temple is to honor the god who lives among them. The whole point of the ziggurat was to ease the process of God's presence. In this case, however, they got wrapped up in themselves, "so that we may make a name for ourselves" (Gn. 11.4). Their motivation was not to honor God, but only to bring prosperity and honor to themselves. His concern was that such a hubris-motivated scheme would become a precedent and stimulation for other schemes. It is a threat to His divine will and rule.

It wouldn't have accomplished anything to ban ziggurats, because they were only the symbol of hearts gone rogue. God wasn't trying to ban urbanization; there is no intrinsic problem with urbanization. But scattering them to the winds (into a variety of language groups) through military conquest would break up their groupthink worldview that was so destructive to the concept of what the true God was really like. Toppling the tower wouldn't accomplish anything; they would simply rebuild. But scattering them among language groups would bring an end to the cooperative effort.

So their offense is concocting a religious system in which the gods were given human natures, and then those human -like natures would be submissive to human wills, which is pure blasphemy. The people were no longer trying to honor God or to be like Him, but were trying to bring God down to their level, and even lower—degrading the nature of God in multiple ways. The character of God was being distorted and corrupted beyond recognition. That is why God was displeased.

[Cicero]

Again, we've debated this before, but just out of curiosity: what do you think the fact that Sumerian was agglutinative has to do with anything? I don't understand its relevance to your argument.

[jimwalton]

Only that some might think that Akkadian was the lingua franca of the ancient world, so dispersing the "Babelites" among the nations would not be a confusion of languages. By specifying that Sumerian was agglutinative and Babylonian was Semitic gives evidence that the Sumerian language group was unrelated to the inflected Semitic family of languages. It's just one more piece of evidence speaking to the possible historicity of the account.