Tower Of Babel part I

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל‎ Migdal Bavel Arabic: برج بابل‎ Burj Babil), according to the Book of Genesis,was an enormous tower built in the plain of Shinar (Hebrew: שנער‎).
According to the biblical account, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where they resolved to build a city with a tower "with its top in the heavens...lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth." God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do." So God said, "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth." (Genesis 11:5-8).
The Tower of Babel has often been associated with known structures, notably the Etemenanki, a ziggurat dedicated to Marduk by Nabopolassar (c. 610 BC).
The Great Ziggurat of Babylon base was square (not round), 91 metres (300 ft) in height, but demolished by Alexander the Great. A Sumerian story with some similar elements is preserved in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.


Narrative
German Late Medieval (ca. 1370s) depiction of the construction of the tower.
The narrative of the city of Babel is recorded in Genesis 11 1-9. Everyone on earth spoke the same language. (Genesis 11:1) As people migrated from the east, they settled in the land of Shinar. (Genesis 11:2) People there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be scattered over the world. (Genesis 11:3–4) God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. (Genesis 11:5–6) God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each another, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. (Genesis 11:7–8) Thus the city was called Babel. (Genesis 11:9)

Etymology
The phrase "The Tower of Babel" does not actually appear in the Bible; it is always, "the city and its tower" (אֶת-הָעִיר וְאֶת-הַמִּגְדָּל) or just "the city" (הָעִיר). According to the biblical etymology, the city received the name "Babel", from the Hebrew word "balal", meaning to jumble. Various English translations use different vocabulary sometimes with different meanings; usually this causes no important difference to the story: one speech/vocabulary/same words, plain/valley, asphalt/bitumen/slime, children/men, confound/confuse; and sometimes the difference is important to later interpretations of the meaning of the story: may reach unto heaven/in the sky/will be in the skies (examples from King James, Holman Christian, and R E Friedman versions).

Themes
The story explains the confusion of tongues: variation in human language. The story's theme of competition between the Lord and humans appears elsewhere in Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.The first century Jewish interpretation found in Flavius Josephus explains the construction of the tower as a hubristic act of defiance against God ordered by the arrogant tyrant Nimrod. There have, however, been some contemporary challenges to this classical interpretation, with emphasis placed on the explicit motive of cultural and linguistic homogeneity mentioned in the narrative (v. 1, 4, 6).[4] This reading of the text sees God's actions as not a punishment for pride but as an etiology of cultural differences, presenting Babel as the cradle of civilization (in contrast to the alternative Priestly traditions in Genesis 10).

Genre
The narrative of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) is an etiology or explanation of a phenomenon. Etiologies are narratives that explain the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other phenomenon.[5] The story of the tower of Babel explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. Yahweh was concerned that humans had too much freedom to do as they wished, so Yahweh brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, Humans were divided into linguistic groups, and unable to understand each other.
Authorship and source criticism
Tradition attributes the whole of the Pentateuch to Moses, however in the late 19th century, the documentary hypothesis was proposed by Julius Wellhausen.This hypothesis proposes four sources, J, E, P and D. Of these hypothetical sources, proponents suggest that this narrative comes from the J or "Yahwist source." The etiological nature of the narrative (see Genre above) is considered typical of J. In addition, the intentional word play regarding the city of Babel, and the noise of the people's "babbling," is found in the Hebrew words as easily as in English, and is considered typical of the "Yahwist source."

Historical

Hanging Gardens of Babylon (16th century), an engraving by Martin Heemskerck, depicts the Tower of Babel in the background.
The Greek form of the name Babylon is from the native Akkadian Bāb-ilim, which means "Gate of the god", which summarizes the religious purpose of the great temple towers (the ziggurats) of ancient Sumer (Biblical Shinar).[citation needed] In Genesis 10, Babel is said to have formed part of Nimrod's kingdom. It is not specifically mentioned in the Bible that he ordered the tower to be built, but Nimrod is often associated with its construction in other sources. The Hebrew version of the name of the city and the tower, Babel, is attributed in Gen. 11:9 to the verb balal, which means to confuse or confound in Hebrew. The ruins of the city of Babylon are near Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq.
The peoples listed in Chapter 10 of Genesis (the Table of Nations) are stated by 11:8-9 to have been scattered over the face of the earth from Shinar only after the abandonment of the Tower. Some see an internal contradiction between the mention already in Genesis 10:5 that "From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with his own language" and the subsequent Babel story, which begins "Now the entire earth was of one language and uniform words" (Genesis 11:1). However, this view presupposes a rigid chronological sequence of 10:5 and 11:1, whereas the traditional Judeo-Christian interpretation is that 10:5 refers to the same later scattering as mentioned more fully in 11:9. An alternative resolution to the apparent contradictory material of Genesis 10:5 and 11:8-9 is found in the documentary hypothesis which suggests different sources for those verses. The commonly held view of biblical scholars holding to the four-source origins of Genesis (J, E, P, D) is that 10:5 comes from the Priestly (P) text source and 11:8-9, and actually the entirety of the Babel narrative, from the Jahwist source (J). The final editors of Genesis were not concerned with the narrative continuity between sources.

Destruction
The account in Genesis makes no mention of any destruction of the tower. The people whose languages are confounded simply stop building their city, and are scattered from there over the face of the Earth. However, in other sources such as the Book of Jubilees (chapter 10 v.18-27), Cornelius Alexander (frag. 10), Abydenus (frags. 5 and 6), Josephus (Antiquities 1.4.3), and the Sibylline Oracles (iii. 117-129), God overturns the tower with a great wind. In the Midrash, it said that the top of the tower was burnt, the bottom was swallowed, and the middle was left standing to erode over time.