The Tower of Babel...and more Genealogy

Construction of the Tower of Babel, painted by Lucas van Valckenborch, 1594.

Genesis 11

The Tower of Babel, in Genesis 11, has been used by religious conservatives, both Jewish and Christian, to explain the myriad number of languages that have existed on Earth. I believed in this story, up until I started taking anthropology classes in college and began to learn about how languages evolve from each other over extended periods of time. Linguistic evidence does not support the idea that humanity was ever united by a single language, or that the world’s languages suddenly appeared at the same time.

Genesis 11:1-8, NIV “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

In the Old Testament, Babel is synonymous with Babylon…and Babylon is part of the Babylonian empire that would wreak havoc on Israel and the Israelites in the 6^th century BCE. Considering the way Israelites were treated by the Babylonians, it is not surprising that the city becomes the centerpiece of a story about greed and having too much ambition.

Another problematic part of this story is the use of the word “us”. Let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. In my opinion, this is another snippet that shows that ancient Israelites, before they formalized monotheistic Judaism, believed in multiple gods.

Genesis 11 concludes with more detailed genealogy, ending with Abram, his wife Sarai, Abram’s brother Nahor, and his wife Milcah. A little bit of incest going on in this family tree, since Milcah is actually married to her uncle; her father is Abram and Nahor’s brother Haran. Terah, Abram’s father, took him, Sarai, and Lot and left Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. However, they decided to settle in Haran, for a reason not specified.

The writers of Genesis refer to Abram’s birthplace as “Ur of the Chaldees”, but the Chaldeans did not appear in Mesopotamia until early in the first millennium BCE. This is long after the estimates of when Abram lived (if he was a real person), which place him in the historical record between 2000 and 1500 BCE.