Babel, tower of

The tower of Babel was a structure built by the post-flood human community on the plain of Shinar as an expression of unified ambition — a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven (Genesis 11:4). The project was motivated by the desire to make a name for themselves and to avoid being scattered abroad, in direct tension with the divine command to fill the earth. The tower is generally understood as a type of Mesopotamian ziggurat — a stepped temple-tower — though its exact nature and scale are unknown beyond the brief biblical account.

The divine response was to confuse the builders' language and scatter them across the earth — the etiological explanation for the diversity of human languages and the dispersal of nations. The name Babel (confusion) plays on the Hebrew root balal, to confuse, though in Akkadian Babylon means gate of god. The narrative of Babel frames the table of nations in Genesis 10 and establishes the condition of divided, dispersed humanity that the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 12) begins to address — eventually finding its reversal in the Pentecost event of Acts 2, where divided languages are momentarily transcended.