Day: September 19, 2020

Like many stories in Genesis, the tale of the Tower of Babel seems to have drawn inspiration from older ancient Near Eastern stories and culture. One example is the story of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta. In this story, Enmerkar forces the people of Aratta to erect a palace or temple that resembles a mountain. One of his ambitions is to unite the diverse peoples of Sumer in the worship of Enlil. “May they all address Enlil together in a single language!” To achieve this monolingualism, he plans to enlist the help of the god Enki. He “shall change the speech in their mouths, as many as he had placed there, and so the speech of mankind is truly one.”

É.TEMEN.AN.KI-The Foundation House of Heaven and Earth

But the more proximate source of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel is surely É.TEMEN.AN.KI, “the foundation house of heaven and earth”. This was a massive ziggurat, 90 feet tall, likely built centuries before Saul or David reigned in Israel, maybe even by the great Hammurabi, c. 1790 BC.

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This temple is probably mentioned in Enûma Eliš, the Babylonian creation myth. Tablet VI 63 mentions “ziqqurrat apsî elite,” the “upper ziggurat of Apsu.” It seems as though there was a fresh water lake (“apsu” in Akkadian) dedicated to Enki (believed to dwell in the cosmic well of freshwater beneath the earth’s surface) in the vicinity of É.TEMEN.AN.KI. The ziggurat was destroyed in 689 BC by Sennacherib. But it was rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II as part of his series of impressive construction projects. É.TEMEN.AN.KI was surely a centerpiece of Nebuchadnezzar’s ideological architecture, because of what it represented for the Babylonians.

Here is a stele that Nebuchadnezzar probably had placed around the ziggurat’s foundation:

Here’s a clearer view of it:

That’s a portrait of Nebuchadnezzar you’re looking at there. This is the same Nebuchadnezzar that, according to the Bible, burned down the Temple in Jerusalem, threw the three Hebrew children into the fiery furnace, and spent seven years of his life in madness, behaving like a beast of the field. And there beside him is the É.TEMEN.AN.KI.

“I Mobilized All Countries Everywhere”

This is what part of the cuneiform text on the stele says:

“Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon am I. In order to complete E-TEMEN-ANKI and E-UR-ME-IMIN-ANKI I mobilized all countries everywhere, each and every ruler who had been raised to prominence over all the people of the world–loved by Marduk, from the upper sea to the lower sea, the distant nations, the teeming people of the world, kings of remote mountains and far-flung islands. The base I filled in to make a high terrace. I built their structures with bitumen and baked brick throughout. I completed it, raising its top to the heaven, making it gleam bright as the sun” (translation from https://www.schoyencollection.com/history-collection-introduction/babylonian-history-collection/tower-babel-stele-ms-2063).

Nebuchadnezzar and Enmerkar

Nebuchadnezzar sounds very much like his ancient, Sumerian counterpart, Enmerkar. He is boastful and determined to unite all of the peoples in his empire in the construction of this ziggurat. He certainly emulates Enmerkar’s prideful attitude. Perhaps Nebuchadnezzar knew of Enmerkar, and was intentionally imitating him. But if you are familiar with Genesis 11, you should be drawing all kinds of parallels to this short text. Of course the most explicit link to be drawn is the mention of “bitumen and baked brick” on the stele with the “brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar” in Genesis 11:3.

Ziggurats and Mesopotamian Religion

The purpose of ziggurats, and Babylonian religion in general, was primarily to maintain order and hold chaos at bay. The year revolved around the Akitu festival in the Spring. That is when Enûma Eliš was read in a liturgical ceremony.

Enûma Eliš is the story of how Marduk became the lord of Babylon by conquering his ancestress, Tiamat the chaos-dragon. It also tells of how he constructed the cosmos out of her corpse. The story concludes with Marduk creating human beings as slaves to serve the gods. Their first task is to build a city with shrines that the gods will inhabit. These slaves are to provide the gods with sacrifices for their sustenance. This city is Bab-ilani, the “gate of the gods.” É.TEMEN.AN.KI was the most important and impressive of Babylon’s ziggurats. At every Akitu festival, as a result of the sacrifices and liturgical reading of Enûma Eliš, Tiamat was kept in the grave for another year. It was also when the annual destinies for Babylon were decreed by the gods.

The Tower of Babel

Sometimes I come across a commentary or journal article on Genesis 11 with a snarky tone. It might say something like this: “This is an etiological narrative explaining how Babylon came to have its name. Since the author did not know Akkadian, he has supplied his own interpretation of ‘Babel,’ based on a Hebrew root meaning ‘confusion’.”

I don’t think that’s what is going on in this story at all. In fact, I think that the author of this text, at least in its current form, knew Akkadian quite well. He was probably living in Babylon as part of the Jewish community in exile there. If he was an author, he had surely been pressed into service for the government as a scribe. Maybe he had to write and copy texts similar to the one inscribed on Nebuchadnezzar’s stele.

What Genesis 11 Is Trying to Say

The author of Genesis 11 knew that Bab-ilani means “gate of the gods.” But he also knew that the gods referred to in the name of his new city were not the real lords of creation and order. So, he decided to compose a piece of protest literature. He synthesized the older traditions of the origin of languages, and maybe even an older text or two, with the residual memory of Enmerkar and his construction of the mountain of divine decrees. And then he intentionally drew verbal connections with the architectural propaganda of Nebuchadnezzar. The author knew that Nebuchadnezzar was styling himself as a new Enmerkar. But he remembered some things that Nebuchadnezzar had forgotten.

Nebuchadnezzar Will Go the Way of Enmerkar

Enmerkar’s building project had been powerful. His imperial reign once was overwhelming. By imposing a divine language, he had seemingly unified the peoples under his dominion. But all of that had disappeared. The winds of history eventually erased Enmerkar’s ziggurat. The same would happen to Nebuchadnezzar’s. (Alexander razed the ruins of É.TEMEN.AN.KI to the ground a few centuries later). The empire of Enmerkar disappeared. The same would happen to the Babylonian Empire. (Cyrus made sure of that in the space of half a century). All of the peoples forced to speak one language under Enmerkar eventually dispersed into their various ethnic groups and cherished their own mother-tongues. It wouldn’t be long before the peoples of the Babylonian empire would return to their own languages and literatures. (It has been a very, very long time since anyone ever spoke Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian dialect of Akkadian).

The Tower of Babel: A Monument to Chaos and Confusion

All of the efforts of these kings to secure order for their empires in opposition to the reign of the Creator God resulted, ultimately, in confusion. É.TEMEN.AN.KI, the “foundation house of heaven and earth,” is really nothing more than the Tower of Babel, a monument to chaos and confusion.

The Babylonians styled their capital city as Bab-ilani, the “gate of the gods.” They viewed it to be the geographical epitome of cosmic order. But the author of Genesis 11 knows that “Babel,” the Hebrew name for Babylon, sounds like the Hebrew word for confusion. So, he runs with it, and writes a divinely inspired joke. “Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9).