BABEL, TOWER OF. The name given to the structure reared in the Valley of Shinar, at which, according to biblical tradition, the con fusion of the tongues takes place (Gen. xi.). The story of the building of the tower is told in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. According to this chapter, mankind, constituting a single unit ed body and possessing the same speech, came in the course of their wanderings to a valley in the land of Shinar, where they devised a plan of using clay as building material and bitumen as cement. They are represented as the first city builders; but in addition are fired with the am bition to erect a tower which shall reach tobeaven, and whieh, being visible everywhere, will pre vent them from being dispersed over the face of the globe. This plan arouses the jealousy of Je hovah. who, in anthropomorphic fashion, is por trayed as 'coming down' to see the city and the tower. Jehovah fears the power of united man kind and brings about a confusion of tongues. so that those working together shall no longer understand one another. As a consequence, men desist. from building the city, and they are scattered in all directions. The name of the place where the confusion takes place is palled Babel, which is explained as though from a stem (halal) meaning 'to ecmfn whereas in reality Babel signifies 'gate of El' (i.e. God). This nar rative. according to the b'rn Oriental view. belongs to the Yahwistic stratum in Genesis, and is by the same writer (or school of writers) as the story of Paradise. It is probably based on an old myth, such as is found amongvariouspeoples, intended to account. for the curious phenomenon of the multiplicity of speech. which islookedupon by pious Hebrew writers as a curse ( in Dent. xxviii. 49; Jer. v. 15) ; but the story has been reshaped and made the medium of casting dis credit upon Babylonian culture, which was dis tasteful to Hebrew writers, whose ideals were hound up with agricultural life, and who, like the pious Mohammedans of to-day, looked upon great structures as evidence sf power, and the various ambitious designs of a progressive civili zation as flying in the face of Providence.
Since the narrative implies not only the dis persion. which it is intended to explain, but the existence of Babylon as a great centre, we are brought down to the period of the New Babylo nian Monarchy. when Babylon assumed the posi tion of mistress of the world (Dan. iii). But more than this, the story also assumes a check to ambitious designs. The tower is not completed; and this statement implies that Babylon's glory has reached its limit, so that we may pass still farther down to the period of the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus as the time when the story received its present shape. The tower is a reference to the high constructions which are a characteristic feature of religious architecture in Babylon. The city of Babylon had, as one of the edifices sacred to Marduk. a tower of seven stages,built of brick, and known as E-temen-an•i, 'house of the foundation-stone of heaven and earth,' which was restored and finished by Nebu chadnezzar. It is here that there was also a seven-staged tower, sacred to Nebo in Borsippa, opposite Babylon, the ruins of which the later Jewish tradition identified with the Tower of Babel, but it is credible that the writer of the Genesis story had in mind the Tower of Zik kurat,' as the Babylonians called the towers which were in the city of Babylon itself. With the advent of Cyrus, Babylon lost much of its significance; and it could well be said. in a description of this period of decline, that people ceased building the city (Gen. xi. 8). For the significance of the Tower of Zikkurat, in Baby lonia, the reader may he referred to Jastrow', Re/igioa of Babylonia and Assyria, chapter xxvi. (Boston. MS).