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.
Lyaschuchenko / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
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).
I am not an expert, and can only inspect the scholarship of others. I understand that the majority of biblical scholars assume that the Torah was written just before, during, or perhaps just after the Babylonian captivity.
Main reasons for this seem to be:
1. The language of most of the Torah seems to be of a later age. Evidence includes spelling, use of the article and accusative marker.
2. Similarities between O.T. cosmologies and Babylonian mythology.
3. Later Commentary in the text that had to have been written after the events took place (or Interpolations from marginal notes???)
1. F. F. Bruce and other “fundamentalists,” in contrast, uses the first case (linguistic markers) as evidence that the majority of Gen. 1-11 is intended as prose, as compared to the Song of Moses or song of Deborah. I understand that Bruce suggests that the “archaic” form is a poetical form (just as thee, thy, and thou lasted much longer in English poetry). If I understand the progression of Hebrew, the style of the Torah is the same or similar to the language of the United Kingdom period, not showing the Aramaic influence of the later prophets and writings.
2. Abraham was from the land of the Sumerians/Chaldeans and lived for some years in Northern Mesopotamia. Why would it be assumed that the Genesis cosmologies developed or were first written down in the diaspora rather than that they were written, if not by Moses and/or his scribes or those of Joshua, at least in the time of David or Solomon?
3. If there are texts which seem like interpolations, would this not suggest that the core of the text came from an earlier source?
When I was a kid, my grandmother told me the family legend that John Kleinschmidt, her great-great-grandfather had died in Germany shortly after his son, John, was born. The widow, Mary Jokel Kleinschmidt, could not feed her son. This son, my 3-great-grandfather, John Jokel, came to America with his maternal uncle in the 1830s, taking the uncle’s family name rather than the father’s. More than 180 years after this event happened, I found a historian’s website about their tiny home village in the state of Hessen, Germany. I had very few details, no names of places, and it took years to trace them to the right place, but once I found this historian, I was able to verify these two-century-old stories. My family’s oral tradition left out the part about baby John Jokel keeping the mom’s name because he was illegitimate, but that’s the way it goes with “legends.”
I mention this to note the power of oral tradition. My family, not having an oral tradition, has nevertheless been able to keep these stories alive for 200 years, with only two narrators between me and the first-person witnesses to the original events. In an oral culture, cosmologies could be passed on for centuries with very little change. It seems strange to me that biblical scholars would doubt that the similarities in Biblical and Babylonian myth would not date primarily to Abraham rather than the exile.
Can you expand on reasons why F.F. Bruce’s understanding is rejected by the majority of O.T. scholars?
Good, thoughtful statements and questions, Jason. It’s good to see you here, and its a delight to see you took my post seriously. I love having conversations about this stuff; hence the blog.
So, first of all, let me affirm with you the durability of oral tradition. Anthropologists have demonstrated that oral tradition is actually less subject to alteration than texts are. In regards to the story of the Tower of Babel, although I think that the text as we have it dates from the post-exilic era, it surely preserves older traditions that had been passed down for centuries, if not millennia. Surely those traditions were preserved as handed down from Abraham, himself. And he probably received them from his forebears, who preserved cultural memories of old Enmerkar and his vain ambition to unite his empire with one tongue and this massive building project.
What I think is happening in Genesis 11 is that the later editors of the Torah (guided by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, of course!) have noticed how much Nebuchadnezzar’s building project and ambitions “rhymed” with Enmerkar. And so they have been careful to underline those rhymes and bring attention to them, turning the story into a politically subversive text.
There are all sorts of reasons that scholars have for dating Torah differently. Some of them are obviously motivated by various ideological concerns. Skeptics, and there are plenty of those in biblical scholarship, will probably deny that there even was a historical Moses who could have composed the Pentateuch. Political ideologies are becoming more and more prevalent in biblical scholarship, and certain scholars have political motivations for diminishing the evidence for robust historical links of the Jewish people with the Holy Land, or want to re-frame the biblical narratives as cynical political propaganda. On the other end of the spectrum, the Fundamentalist approach that you refer to (and Bruce certainly was a Fundamentalist, though an excellent scholar) has its own agenda and methods for carrying that agenda forward; i.e., it’s not an ideologically-neutral stance, either. I’m not entirely sure exactly when or why Fundamentalists became so invested in affirming the traditional ascription of authorship for the different books of the Bible, but I know that for most of them these questions are non-negotiable. Abandoning these views proved to be personally deeply painful for myself, as well. And then one day, when I was in the midst of a faith crisis, struggling with the abundant evidence for Deutero-Isaiah, I asked the question, “What difference would it make if Isaiah had more than one author? Couldn’t the Holy Spirit inspire those authors, too?” And a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. But most Fundamentalists can’t even entertain that possibility. I think that there is a supposition that to concede on this point would be to give the entire game to progressive biblical scholarship, but I’m not entirely sure, and I certainly don’t agree that this is a logical conclusion.
But I digress. The question as to the dating of the authorship of Torah is a bit of a wild goose chase, because it seems abundantly clear that different elements of Torah were authored at different times. The final edition was almost certainly compiled and published during the Persian era. (Ezra and his school of scribes probably deserve the most credit for that). But the texts that went into that final edition have their own individual and varied histories. Each text has to be taken on its own terms. For many, many texts, it is really difficult to establish a source at all. I don’t find the documentary hypothesis, at least as far as the Yahwist and Elohist go, to be terribly convincing. But the problem is not because the theory is too complicated. It’s not complicated enough. I think that it is probably hopeless to try and isolate and untangle the different sources of the Torah. I like canonical criticism, (and so does Pope Benedict XVI!), and it seems to make the most sense to focus on what the Holy Spirit has given us as a canonical text rather than speculate on where it all came from.
And part of that means receiving the Bible with a docile and childlike faith, but also using the reason that God has given us. Therefore, it seems problematic to me to reject the historicity of Moses, and to deny that he had anything to do with the original reception of the core text of the Torah. (From a more worldly, scholarly point of view, that creates all kinds of other problems, because then you have to imagine the kind of scenario in which a figure like Moses could be conjured up from thin air, and then universally received as an authentic historical figure by an entire nation). And Christians are simply not at liberty to deny the historical plausibility of a text simply because of supernatural elements. If miracles are not possible in our world, then there is no good reason to remain a confessing Christian. For Catholics, who are compelled to believe in the supernatural workings of grace through the Sacraments, this is doubly so.
But there might be other reasons for thinking that a text in the Torah comes from a date later than Moses. Of the three things you mention that Bruce argues against, I don’t find any of those to be compelling reasons for determining a late date for the Torah. The arguments over language are especially thorny, and I don’t find them helpful at all, either for arguing against Mosaic authorship, or for it. And, as you mentioned, most Fundamentalists are okay with the possibility of interpolations having entered into the inspired text by the hand of later inspired redactors. The second category of so-called literary dependence is a bit more compelling to me, but not on its own terms. Let me attempt to explain.
In my own biblical interpretation, I have developed an approach that I call looking for the “kerygmatic burden” of the text. “Kerygma” is the Greek word for “proclamation.” It is used in the New Testament in relation to the preaching of the Gospel. In determining the primary, literal sense of a biblical text, this kerygmatic burden is especially important. This is related to what my Bible college professors at Ozark Christian College called the “A.I.M.,” the “author’s intended meaning,” but it takes the original audience of these texts into special account. So, as I read a text, I ask myself, “What was the prophet or author trying to communicate to the people in his community, and why?” I.e., what is the kerygmatic burden? The Holy Spirit is communicating to the entire people of God throughout the ages through this text, it is true, but the Holy Spirit begins His work in the mouth of the prophet speaking to the community in which he or she lives. Some of the kerygmatic burden spills over into the canonical reception of the text, as well: what was the community’s motivation in recognizing this as inspired Scripture and including it in its liturgical library. Every time I give the kerygmatic burden of the text the deference that I feel that I owe, I begin to see new exegetical insights. One of those is what I have shared in this post on Genesis 11. The vocabulary in Genesis 11 and the vocabulary in Nebuchadnezzar’s stele are an important clue as to the kerygmatic burden of the text. It makes the most sense to me, using my God-given reason, to conclude that this text, at least as it stands in the Bible today, was composed with the purpose of encouraging the Jewish people in Babylonian exile by reminding them that God had brought down the emperors and tyrants of the world in the distant past, in the very country in which they were living. If He did it then, He would be faithful to fulfill the words of the prophets and do it to the Babylonians who were oppressing them in their historical moment.
So, that’s my personal motivation for accepting a post-exilic date for the authorship, or at least the redaction of Genesis 11. I can’t speak for the “majority of O.T. scholars,” of course. Most of us have rather sharp disagreements with one another on all sorts of things. We’re not as monolithic as Fundamentalists think that we are. The truth is, I am probably much more sympathetic to the Fundamentalists on most aspects of biblical interpretation, simply because they insist on the divine inspiration of the Bible, which is simply not brought up in the sort of polite company that I think you have in mind when you use the phrase “majority of O.T. scholars.” But I don’t see why accepting the likelihood that Moses didn’t write the entirety of the Pentateuch, or even the majority of it, should pose a threat to that belief.