The Tower of Babel: the story, its meaning and what we know about it

What happened at the Tower of Babel?

The story is only nine verses long. Everyone spoke the same language and settled on a plain in the land of Shinar, in Mesopotamia. There they learned to bake bricks and use bitumen as mortar, and they had an idea:

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

With some irony, the text says God “came down” to see the tower meant to reach heaven. His response was to confuse everyone’s language:

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

What is the meaning of the Tower of Babel?

The most common reading sees the story as a critique of human pride: the problem is not building, but wanting to “make a name” and stay in one place, against the command to “fill the earth” given after the flood (Genesis 9:1). Right afterward, Genesis 12 begins the story of Abraham, to whom God promises: “I will make thy name great”. The name Babel tried to seize is given to Abraham as a gift.

What does the word Babel mean?

“Babel” is the Hebrew name for Babylon. In Akkadian, Bab-ilim meant “gate of the gods”. The biblical text makes a pun on the Hebrew verb balal, “to confuse”: the city that claimed to be heaven’s gate becomes the place of confusion.

Did the Tower of Babel really exist?

The tower of the story cannot be identified archaeologically, but it recalls the ziggurats, stepped temple towers built across Mesopotamia. The greatest stood in Babylon itself: the Etemenanki, “house of the foundation of heaven and earth”, dedicated to the god Marduk and rebuilt by Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC. Many scholars think memories of these buildings, seen by Jews in exile, shaped the story.

How is Babel connected to Pentecost?

Christian writers have long read Pentecost as Babel in reverse. At Babel, languages are confused and people are separated; in Acts 2, everyone hears the apostles in their own language, and different peoples are brought together.

How the traditions read the story

• Jewish tradition: the midrash and the historian Josephus credit the building to Nimrod, “the mighty hunter” of Genesis 10, who is said to have led a rebellion against God.
• Christian tradition: Augustine, in The City of God, sees Babel as the symbol of the human city built on pride, in contrast to the city of God.
• Scholarly reading: the text is seen as an origin story explaining the diversity of languages and, at the same time, a satire on the ambitions of Mesopotamian empires.

Fun facts

• The Babel story comes right after the “table of nations” in Genesis 10, which already describes peoples spread out “after their tongues”.
• The most famous painting of the tower is by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563), now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
• The verb “to babble” is often linked to Babel, though linguists say it comes from imitating baby talk.

Read next

• Noah’s Ark: the story, its size, the animals and its meaning
• What is Pentecost? Meaning, history and date