Where was the Tower of Babel built? Where is the Tower of Babel located in which country?

After the end of the Flood, people again began to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. They all spoke the same language and understood each other well. And so they decided to build a tower that was supposed to rise to the sky. For what? To become equal with God and still remain together. This symbol of the divine power of man, people thought, was to be built in the valley of the Land of Shinar.

God decided to punish them for their arrogance by affecting people's ability to understand each other. So he created confusion by suddenly dividing humanity into seventy different nations and tribes, each with their own language (hence the name Babylon, which is similar to the word "confusion").

When this happened, the construction of the Tower had to be abandoned. Peoples began to separate from each other, dispersed in different directions, and thus settled in all corners of the world.

Interpretations of this story

There are many fascinating explanations in the classic commentaries on this topic. Let's start with the Talmud (Sanhedrin 109a), where we find three interpretations:

In the School of Rabbi Shelah, it was taught that the people built the tower with the intention of piercing the heavens with axes in order to drain all the water contained in them, and thus make it impossible for God, in the event of His wrath, to bring another flood upon the world. (Perhaps the reason for this is that they decided that their understanding of science and engineering was so great that they could rival God in ruling the world.)

Rabbi Yirmiya Bar Elazar taught that the people were actually divided into three groups, each with their own plans for the tower. The first group planned to climb it to be safe if another flood came. The second wanted to use the tower as a place from which it was most convenient to worship the stars. And the third group was actually going to climb up the tower, closer to heaven, and from there fight God.

Rabbi Nathan explained that all the thoughts of the people associated with the tower were exclusively about idolatry.

Targum Yerushalmi says that the tower was to be crowned with a statue of a man holding a sword in his hand - this is a real act of disobedience to the God whom people hoped to overcome.

The Midrash gives an interesting opinion. He explains that people were afraid that the heavens would fall on the earth regularly at intervals of 1656 years, because the Great Flood occurred in 1656 from the creation of the world. And people decided to simply build a kind of scaffolding to support the heavens next time.

Explains what was said in the Midrash and the teachings of the School of Rabbi Shelah, saying that people perceived the flood as a natural phenomenon that occurred as a result of the movement of the celestial spheres and their location in the sky. The purpose of erecting the tower was to somehow influence the potential threat of what they sincerely believed to be a natural weather event.

(15th-16th centuries) teaches that the plan for placing the idol on top of the tower was such that the structure would receive universal recognition as the highest temple and greatest god in the world, which would turn it into a center of worship for all mankind - and then the ruler of the tower would become to rule the whole world.

(13-14 centuries) also gives a number of explanations. At a basic level, he explains that the plan was to build some kind of monument that would be visible from a very long distance. People wanted to settle together and decided that they would all live next to the tower and never leave it. And anyone who gets lost and strays too far from the settlement will be able to return home, focusing on the tower. However, this was contrary to the plan of God, who created the world for us to fill it and make it better.

He also suggests that humans may have actually created the first lightning rod. They knew that God had promised not to bring another flood upon the world, and they feared that He would punish the rebels with fire instead. People hoped that the tower could save them from all such attacks using electricity that God could send. (Note that Rabbeinu Bachya lived many centuries before Benjamin Franklin.)

(Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, head of the famous 19th century Volozhin yeshiva) shares a fascinating and highly instructive perspective on the situation. He explains that the people of the Tower of Babel generation were the first social engineers who hoped to create a utopian society where everyone lived and thought as a single organism. They feared that if individuals formed their own colonies and cities, they would develop their own culture and unique way of life. And they wanted everyone to live in one controlled environment, where they could control that all humanity remained culturally homogeneous. The tower served as a base around which all the people of their planned colony could settle - no one would leave their immediate surroundings. The problem with this plan was that it was the first step towards a tyrannical government regime in which no freedom of speech or expression was allowed, and that is why God divided everyone into separate nations.

Some sages explained this episode of our history as follows: people planned to build a tower that would become a monument that would inspire them to a common goal - survival. They wanted to “make a name for themselves”—to ensure a lasting memory of themselves for generations.

Where did they go wrong?

It was precisely that they saw survival as an end in itself. Let's make a name for ourselves, they said, let's make sure future generations read about us in their history books. For these people, life itself was a kind of ideal, and survival itself was a virtue.

This was the beginning of the end. Nature abhors emptiness, which is also true for spiritual realities: if our soul or our intentions are not filled with some positive content, eventually the created emptiness will be filled with something negative. When something sacred is robbed of its true higher meaning, it inevitably leads to the creation of the Tower of Babel.

Tower of Babel.

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מִגְדָּל בָּלַל‎ Migdal Bavel) is a tower to which the biblical legend is dedicated, set out in chapter 2 “Noah” (verses 11:1-11:9) of the book of Genesis.

The Tower of Babel is not on the "official" list of wonders of the world. However, it is one of the most outstanding buildings of Ancient Babylon, and its name is still a symbol of confusion and disorder.

Jan Collaert 1579

According to the ancient biblical legend, after the Flood, more than four thousand years ago, all people lived in Mesopotamia (from the east people came to the land of Shinar), that is, in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and everyone spoke the same language. Since the land of these places was very fertile, people lived richly. They decided to build a city (Babylon) and a tower as high as the heavens to “make a name for themselves.”

Marten Van Valckenborch I (1535-1612)

To build a monumental structure, people did not use stone, but unfired raw brick; bitumen (mountain tar) was used instead of lime to join the bricks. The tower grew and grew in height.

Theodosius Rihel 1574-1578

Finally, God became angry with the foolish and vain people and punished them: he forced the builders to speak different languages. As a result, the stupid, proud people stopped understanding each other and, abandoning their guns, stopped building the tower, and then dispersed to different directions of the Earth. So the tower turned out to be unfinished, and the city where construction took place and all languages ​​were mixed was called Babylon. Thus, the story of the Tower of Babel explains the emergence of different languages ​​after the Flood.

A number of biblical scholars trace the connection between the legend of the Tower of Babel and the construction of high tower-temples called ziggurats in Mesopotamia. The tops of the towers served for religious rites and astronomical observations.

Fresco 1100

The tallest ziggurat (91 m high, one rectangular step and seven spiral ones - 8 in total) was located in Babylon. It was called Etemenanki, which means “the house where heaven meets earth.” It is unknown when exactly the original construction of this tower was carried out, but it already existed during the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC).

Assyrian king Sennacherib in 689 BC. e. destroyed Babylon, Etemenanki suffered the same fate. The ziggurat was restored by Nebuchadnezzar II. The Jews, forcibly resettled by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah, became acquainted with the culture and religion of Mesopotamia and undoubtedly knew about the existence of ziggurats.

During excavations in Babylon, the German scientist Robert Koldewey managed to discover the foundation and ruins of a tower. The tower mentioned in the Bible was probably destroyed before the time of Hammurabi. To replace it, another was built, which was erected in memory of the first. According to Koldewey, it had a square base, each side of which was 90 meters. The height of the tower was also 90 m, the first tier had a height of 33 m, the second - 18, the third and fifth - 6 m each, the seventh - the sanctuary of the god Marduk - was 15 m high. By today's standards, the structure reached a height of 30 - storey skyscraper.

Calculations suggest that about 85 million bricks were used to build this tower. A monumental staircase led to the upper platform of the tower, where the temple soared into the sky. The tower was part of a temple complex located on the banks of the Euphrates River. Clay tablets with inscriptions found by archaeologists suggest that each section of the tower had its own special meaning. The same tablets provide information about the religious rituals performed in this temple.

The tower stood on the left bank of the Euphrates on the Sakhn plain, which literally translates as “frying pan.” It was surrounded by the houses of priests, temple buildings and houses for pilgrims who flocked here from all over Babylonia. A description of the Tower of Babel was left by Herodotus, who thoroughly examined it and, perhaps, even visited its top. This is the only documented account of an eyewitness from Europe.

Tobias Verhaecht, The Tower Of Babel.

The Tower of Babel was a stepped eight-tiered pyramid, lined with baked bricks on the outside. Moreover, each tier had a strictly defined color. At the top of the ziggurat there was a sanctuary lined with blue tiles and decorated at the corners with golden horns (a symbol of fertility). It was considered the habitat of the god Marduk, the patron saint of the city. In addition, inside the sanctuary there were a gilded table and bed of Marduk. Stairs led to the tiers; Religious processions ascended along them. The ziggurat was a shrine that belonged to the entire people, it was a place where thousands of people flocked to worship the supreme deity Marduk.

The upper platforms of the ziggurats were used not only for cultic purposes, but also for practical purposes: for warrior-guards to view the surrounding area. Cyrus, who took control of Babylon after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, was the first conqueror to leave the city undestroyed. He was struck by the scale of Etemenanki, and he not only forbade the destruction of anything, but ordered the construction of a monument on his grave in the form of a miniature ziggurat, a small Tower of Babel.

Hendrick III van Cleve (1525 - 1589)

And yet the tower was destroyed again. The Persian king Xerxes left only ruins of it, which Alexander the Great saw on his way to India. He, too, was struck by the gigantic ruins - he, too, stood in front of them as if spellbound. Alexander the Great intended to build it again. “But,” as Strabo writes, “this work required a lot of time and effort, because ten thousand people would have had to clear the ruins for two months, and he did not realize his plan, since he soon fell ill and died.”

Lucas van Valckenborch 1594

Lucas van Valckenborch 1595

Currently, only the foundation and the lower part of the wall remain from the legendary Tower of Babel. But thanks to cuneiform tablets, there is a description of the famous ziggurat and even its image.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Tower of Babel 1564.

The story of the Tower of Babel is widespread in Christian iconography - in numerous miniatures, handwritten and printed editions of the Bible (for example, in a miniature of an English manuscript of the 11th century); as well as in mosaics and frescoes of cathedrals and churches (for example, the mosaic of the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice, late XII - early XIII century).

Fresco of the Tower of Babel from the Venetian Cathedral of San Marco.

Towers of this type still exist in Iraq - very tall, stepped or spiral-shaped. In Babylon itself, almost nothing reminds of the tower; only part of the wall and foundation have been preserved there, as well as beautiful ancient reliefs of the royal palace in excavations.

The current building of the European Parliament is designed after a painting of the unfinished Tower of Babel painted in 1563 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The motto of the European Parliament in French: “Many languages, one voice” distorts the meaning of the biblical text. The building was built to give the impression of being unfinished. In fact, this is the completed building of the European Parliament, the construction of which was completed in December 2000.

History of construction in the Bible Tower of Babel presented as a parable about the harmfulness of excessive pride. God punished the monolingual descendants of Noah, who wanted to reach heaven, by forcing them to speak different languages. The builders lost the ability to understand each other, quarreled, and the tower was never completed. But is this really so?

The Tower of Babel in the artist's fantasy

Let's start with the fact that historians now have no doubt: Babylon actually existed. It was one of the greatest and most powerful ancient cities. It was located in Mesopotamia, southwest of modern Baghdad. Its name (Bab-Eloi) translates as “Gate of God.” The city's population was more than a million people. From the 19th to the 6th centuries BC. - this city was the capital of Babylonia.

One of the greatest rulers of the Babylonian Empire was the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II (in Babylonian pronunciation - Nabu-Kudur-Utsur). He ruled in Babylonia from 605 to 562 BC. He rebuilt Babylon, destroyed by numerous raids by warlike neighbors, laid canals, dug lakes and reservoirs, and founded several cities. Died in Babylon in 562 BC.

It was under him that the Tower of Babel was built. It was a ziggurat, a temple of the god Marduk, and outwardly looked like a seven-step pyramid 90 m high. It is known that its ruins were seen by Alexander the Great, who conquered Babylon. He ordered the remains of the “tower” to be demolished in order to rebuild the main sanctuary of his empire on this site.

For which it seems he paid. There is a legend that all the conquerors who destroyed Babylon and stole the golden statue of Marduk from the temple died a violent death. The great commander did not escape this fate. Death overtook him at the age of just over 30, shortly after the remains of the ziggurat were dismantled on his orders.

Ziggurat at Ur

Such legends can be treated differently, but many researchers believe that such curses can work. We will not argue with them, but will only say that the Tower of Babel was not the only one of its kind.

In Mesopotamia, along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, on the fertile plain of Mesopotamia, flourishing states began to emerge about 5,500 years ago. Among them were Sumer and Akkad, inhabited by warlike and inventive peoples who created the world's first writing system and began to build impressive stepped stone structures tens of meters high. Each such tower served as a sanctuary for a local god with a temple at the top - like a landing pad for his travels from heaven to earth.

The largest was the ziggurat of Etemenanka on the banks of the Euphrates in Babylon, the capital of Nebuchadnezzar II (630-562 BC). This was almost certainly the prototype of the Tower of Babel.

The word "etemenanki" is translated as "house connecting earth and sky." The Bible derives the name Babylon from the Hebrew word "babel" - "mash." But in fact we are talking about the local phrase “Bab-Ilu” - “gate of God”.

So, perhaps, the very idea of ​​​​a confusion of languages ​​that prevented the construction of the tower appeared as a result of an incorrect linguistic interpretation, then played up by the authors of the Old Testament.

Ziggurats were built from bricks, since there was not enough wood or suitable stone in Mesopotamia. This is also said in the Bible: “And they said to each other: Let us make bricks and burn them with fire. And they used bricks instead of stones and asphalt instead of lime.”

Asphalt is a bitumen, binding and roofing material imported from the Iranian plateau and widely used in the region. Archaeological data and chronicles say that many ziggurats were brightly painted and decorated with tiles and gilded sculptures. A Babylonian text describes Etemenanki as "shining with blue glaze."

In total, about 30 ziggurats are known, built in different cities of Mesopotamia in the period from 2200 to 500 BC. However, if the Egyptian pyramids have hardly changed over the centuries, the Towers of Babel have not stood the test of time. Moreover, it is not so much nature that is to blame as people.

They simply stole the bricks for other buildings, and erosion did the rest. All that was left of Etemenanka was the outline of a stone foundation, covered with earth and overgrown with weeds.

The foundation of Etemenanka and its image on the tablet

However, during the era of its construction, Etemenanki was one of the greatest buildings in the world. Moreover, the pyramid was rebuilt several times, most recently under Nebuchadnezzar II in the 6th century BC. According to his testimony and reviews of other Babylonian kings, the sides of the base of the tower were up to 90 m long, and the height was the same. The surviving remains of the foundation confirm these dimensions.

According to ancient authors, at the top there was a luxurious temple of the god Marduk with his golden statue, which, judging by its size, weighed more than 20 tons. Marduk was originally a local deity of Babylon. But when this city became the capital of the entire south of Mesopotamia, Marduk became the supreme god of the entire region. Hence its majesty.

However, even Marduk did not protect the ziggurat from destruction when, at the end of the 5th century BC. Babylonia turned into one of the provinces of the Persian power that captured it. In 331, Alexander the Great, who drove the Persians out of here, wanted to reconstruct Etemenanki in its previous form. He razed the old building to the ground only because he was going to build a new tower in its place.

About 10,000 people spent two months preparing the site, but then the idea had to be abandoned. Alexander had more important things to do - he had to continue the war with the restless Persians. Having defeated the Persian army, Alexander returned to Babylon, but fell ill and died in 323.

In which country was the Tower of Babel located? Does it exist now and where are its remains? Let's figure it out together with EG.

The name of the city of Babylon is mentioned in the holy books - the Bible and the Koran. For a long time it was believed that in fact it did not exist at all, and the metaphors about the tower and pandemonium that are still familiar today came from legends.

For several centuries, the inhabitants of Iraq did not even suspect that the hills on the outskirts of the modern city of Al-Hilla, a hundred kilometers from Baghdad, hide the ruins of the world's first metropolis and that same Tower of Babel. But in the 19th century there was a man who revealed to the world the secret of the ancient ruins. It was an archaeologist from Germany Robert Koldewey.

Like a phoenix

Reference: Babylon (translated as “gate of the gods”) was founded no later than the third millennium BC, located in the south of Ancient Mesopotamia (between the Tigris and Euphrates), in the Akkadian region. The Sumerians, one of the oldest peoples who settled here, called it Kadingirra. The city changed hands more than once during the invasions of numerous conquerors.B - 1st millennium BC e. it became the main city of the Babylonian kingdom created by the Amorites, where the descendants of the Sumerians and Akkadians lived.

Tsar Hammurabi(1793 -1750 BC) from the Amorite dynasty, having conquered all the significant cities of Mesopotamia, united most of Mesopotamia and created a state with its capital in Babylon. Hammurabi is the author of, in fact, the first legislative code in history. The laws of Hammurabi, written in cuneiform on clay tablets, have survived to this day.

Under Hammurabi, Babylon began to grow rapidly. Many defensive structures, palaces, and temples were built here. The Babylonians had many gods, and therefore temples were erected in honor of the goddess of healing Ninisina, the moon god Nanna, the thunder god Adad, the goddess of love, fertility and power Ishtar and other Sumerian-Akkadian deities. But the main thing was Esagil - a temple dedicated to the patron god of the city, Marduk.

However, the gods did not save Babylonia from the invasions of invaders. At the end of the 17th century BC. e. The Babylonian kingdom was conquered by the Hittites at the beginning of the 16th century BC. e. it passed to the Kassites, in the 13th century the Assyrians began to rule it, in the 7th-6th centuries - the Chaldeans, and in the 4th century BC. e. the city of Babylon became the capital of the state Alexander the Great. The conquerors did not spare the city and therefore Babylon was destroyed more than once, only to eventually, like the Phoenix bird, be reborn from the ashes.

City of Wonders

It is believed that Babylon reached its greatest prosperity under the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned between 605 and 562 BC. He was the eldest son Nabopalassara, founder of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty.

From an early age, Nebuchadnezzar (“the first-born, dedicated to the god Nabu”) showed himself to be an excellent warrior. His army conquered several small states in the territory of the modern Middle East, and everything that was valuable there was taken to Babylonia. Including free labor, which turned the desert into an oasis with numerous canals.

Nebuchadnezzar pacified the rebellious Jews, who continually rebelled against Babylonia. In 587, the Babylonian king destroyed Jerusalem and its main temple of Solomon, took the sacred vessels from the temple and resettled the Jews under his supervision.

The “Babylonian captivity” of the Jews lasted 70 years - that was how long they had to realize their mistakes, repent of their sins before God and again turn to the faith of their ancestors. They were allowed to return home when the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylonia.

Oddly enough, in his memoirs Nebuchadnezzar noted that most of all he was proud of the rebuilt cities and the roads that ran through them. Babylon would be the envy of many modern cities. It became the largest metropolis of the Ancient World: it had a million inhabitants.

International trade was concentrated here, science and the arts flourished. Its fortifications were impregnable: the city was surrounded on all sides by walls up to 30 meters thick with towers, high ramparts, and water tanks.

The beauty of Babylon was amazing. The streets were paved with tiles and bricks cut from rare rocks, the houses of the nobility were decorated with huge bas-reliefs, and the walls of numerous temples and palaces were decorated with images of mythical animals. To connect the Eastern and Western districts of the city, Nebuchadnezzar decided to build a bridge across the Euphrates River. This bridge, 115 meters long and 6 meters wide, with a removable part for the passage of ships, is an engineering marvel of the time.

While paying tribute to the city, the king did not forget about his needs. According to an ancient source, he tried a lot to “build a palace for the dwelling of my Majesty in Babylon.”

The palace had a throne room, magnificently decorated with images of columns and palm leaves made in colored enamel. The palace was so beautiful that it was nicknamed “The Miracle of Humanity.”

In the north of Babylon, on specially created stone elevations that looked like mountains, Nebuchadnezzar built a palace for his wife Amanis. She was from Media and missed her usual places. And then the king ordered to decorate the palace with lush vegetation so that it would resemble the green oases of Media.

They brought fertile soil and planted plants collected from all over the world. Water for irrigation was raised to the upper terraces with special pumps. The green waves descending in ledges looked like a giant stepped pyramid.

The Babylonian “Hanging Gardens”, which laid the foundation for the legend of the “Hanging Gardens of Semiramis” (the legendary Asian conqueror and queen of Babylon, who lived in another period), became the seventh wonder of the world.

Belshazzar's feasts

Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylonia for more than 40 years, and it seemed that nothing could stop the city from flourishing further. But the Jewish prophets predicted his fall 200 years ago. This happened during the reign of the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar II (according to other sources - son) Belshazzar.

As the biblical legend testifies, at this time the troops of the Persian king Cyrus approached the walls of Babylon. However, the Babylonians, confident in the strength of the walls and defensive structures, were not very worried about this. The city lived luxuriously and cheerfully. The Jews generally considered it an immoral city where debauchery reigned. King Belshazzar gathered at least a thousand people for the next feast and ordered wine to be served to the guests in sacred vessels from the Temple of Jerusalem, which had previously been used only for serving God. The nobles drank from these vessels and mocked the God of the Jews.

And suddenly a human hand appeared in the air and inscribed on the wall incomprehensible words in Aramaic: “Mene, mene, take, upharsin.” The amazed king called the prophet Daniel, who, while still a young man, was captured in Babylonia, and asked to translate the inscription. It read: “Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided,” Daniel explained that this was God’s message to Belshazzar, which predicted the imminent destruction of the king and his kingdom. Nobody believed the prediction. But it came true that same October night in 539 BC. e.

Cyrus took the city by cunning: he ordered the waters of the Euphrates River to be diverted into a special canal and penetrated into Babylon along the drained channel. Belshazzar was killed by Persian soldiers, Babylon fell, its walls were destroyed. Later it was conquered by Arab tribes. The glory of the great city sank into oblivion, it itself turned into ruins, and the “gates of the gods” were forever closed to humanity.

Was there a tower?

Many Europeans who visited Babylon searched for traces of the tower described in the biblical legend.

Chapter 11 of the book of Genesis contains a legend about what the descendants of Noah, who escaped the Great Flood, planned to do. They spoke the same language and, moving from the east, came to the plain in the land of Shinar (in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates), where they settled. And then they decided: let’s make bricks and build “for ourselves a city and a tower, its height reaching to heaven, and we will make a name for ourselves before we are scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

The tower kept growing, rising into the clouds. God, who observed this construction, remarked: “Behold, there is one people, and they all have one language; and this is what they began to do, and they will not deviate from what they have planned to do.”

He did not like that people imagined themselves to be higher than the sky, and he decided to mix their language so that they would no longer understand each other. And so it happened.

Construction stopped because everyone began to speak different languages, people were scattered throughout the entire earth, and the city where the Lord “confused the language of the whole earth” was given the name Babylon, which means “confusion.” Thus, initially the “Babylonian PILLAR OF CREATION” is the creation of a high structure, and not a bunch of little things and confusion.

The story of the Tower of Babel would probably have remained a legend if traces of the colossal structure had not been discovered during the excavations of Babylon. These were the ruins of a temple.

In Ancient Mesopotamia, temples were built that were completely different from the usual European ones - tall towers called ziggurats. Their peaks served as sites for religious ceremonies and astronomical observations.

Among them, the Babylonian ziggurat Etemenanki stood out, which meant “House where heaven meets earth.” Its height is 91 meters, it had eight tiers, seven of which went in a spiral. The total height was about 100 meters.

It was estimated that at least 85 million bricks were needed to build the tower. On the upper platform stood a two-story temple, with a monumental staircase leading to it.

At the top there was a sanctuary dedicated to the god Marduk, and a golden bed intended for him, as well as gilded horns. At the foot of the Tower of Babel, in the Lower Temple, stood a statue of Marduk made of pure gold, its age was 2.5 tons.

It is believed that the temple existed during the reign of Hammurabi; it was destroyed and rebuilt more than once. The last time was under Nebuchadnezzar. In 331 BC. e. By order of Alexander the Great, the tower was dismantled and was going to be reconstructed, but the death of Alexander the Great prevented the implementation of this plan. Only majestic ruins and biblical legends remain as a memory for humanity.

THE TOWER OF BABYLON is the most important episode from the story about ancient humanity in the book of Genesis (11.1-9).

According to the biblical account, Noah's descendants spoke the same language and settled in the Valley of Shinar. Here they began the construction of a city and a tower, “with its height reaching to heaven, let us make a name for ourselves,” they said, “before [in MT “lest”] we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11.4). However, the construction was stopped by the Lord, who “confused the languages.” People, having ceased to understand each other, stopped construction and scattered throughout the earth (Gen. 11.8). The city was named "Babylon". Thus, the story about the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.9) is based on the consonance of the Hebrew name “Babylon” and the verb “to mix.” According to legend, the construction of the Tower of Babel was led by Ham’s descendant Nimrod (Ios. Flav. Antiq. I 4.2; Epiph. Adv. haer. I 1.6).

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel provides a symbolic explanation of the reason for the emergence of the diversity of the world's languages, which can also be correlated with the modern understanding of the development of human languages. Research in the field of historical linguistics allows us to draw a conclusion about the existence of a single proto-language, conventionally called “Nostratic”; Indo-European (Japhetic), Hamito-Semitic, Altai, Uralic, Dravidian, Kartvelian and other languages ​​were isolated from it. The followers of this theory were such scientists as V.M. Illich-Svitych, I.M. Dyakonov, V.N. Toporov and V.V. Ivanov. In addition, the story of the Tower of Babel is an important indication of the biblical understanding of man and the historical process and, in particular, of the secondary nature of the division into races and peoples for the human essence. Subsequently, this idea, expressed in a different form by the Apostle Paul, became one of the foundations of Christian anthropology (Col 3:11).

In the Christian tradition, the Tower of Babel is a symbol, firstly, of the pride of people who consider it possible to reach heaven on their own and have as their main goal “to make a name for themselves”, and, secondly, the inevitability of punishment for this and the futility of the human mind, not sanctified By divine grace. In the gift of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, scattered humanity receives the once lost ability of full mutual understanding. The antithesis of the Tower of Babel is the miracle of the founding of the Church, which unites nations through the Holy Spirit (Acts 2.4-6). The Tower of Babel is also a prototype of modern technocracy.

The image of the “city and tower” in the book of Genesis reflected a whole complex of mythological universals, for example, the idea of ​​the “center of the world”, which was supposed to be a city built by people. The historically attested temples of Mesopotamia did fulfill this mythological function (Oppenheim, p. 135). In the Holy Scriptures, the construction of the Tower of Babel is described from the perspective of Divine Revelation, in the light of which it is, first of all, an expression of human pride.

Another aspect of the story of the Tower of Babel is that it points to the prospects for the progress of human civilization, and at the same time, the biblical narrative contains a negative attitude towards the urbanism of the Mesopotamian civilization (Nelis J. T. Col. 1864).

The image of the Tower of Babel undoubtedly shows parallels with the Mesopotamian tradition of temple building. The temples of Mesopotamia (ziggurats) were stepped structures of several terraces located one above the other (their number could reach 7); on the upper terrace there was a sanctuary of the deity (Parrot. R. 43). The Holy Scripture accurately conveys the realities of Mesopotamian temple construction, where, unlike most other states of the Ancient Near East, sun-dried or baked brick and resin were used as the main material (cf. Gen. 11.3).

During the active archaeological study of Ancient Mesopotamia, many attempts were made to find the so-called “prototype” of the Tower of Babel in one of the excavated ziggurats; the most reasonable assumption can be considered the Babylonian temple of Marduk (Jacobsen. P. 334), which had the Sumerian name “e-temen” -an-ki" - temple of the cornerstone of heaven and earth.

They tried to find the remains of the Tower of Babel already in the 12th century. Until the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, 2 ziggurats were identified with it, in Borsippa and Akar-Kuf, on the site of ancient cities located at a considerable distance from Babylon (in the description of Herodotus, the city was so large that it could include both points). The Tower of Babel was identified with the ziggurat in Borsippa by Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Babylonia twice (between 1160-1173), the German explorer K. Niebuhr (1774), the English artist R. Kerr Porter (1818) and others. In Akar-Kuf, the Tower of Babel was seen by the German L. Rauwolf (1573-1576), the merchant J. Eldred, who described the ruins of the “tower” at the end of the 16th century. The Italian traveler Pietro della Valle, who compiled the first detailed description of the site of Babylon (1616), considered the Tower of Babel to be the northernmost of its hills, which retained the ancient name “Babil”. Attempts to find the Tower of Babel in one of the 3 tells - Babila, Borsippa and Akar Kufa - continued until the end of the 19th century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the borders of Ancient Babylon were revealed and neighboring cities were no longer perceived as its parts. After the excavations of K. J. Rich and H. Rassam in Borsippa (the site of Birs-Nimrud, 17 km southwest of Babylon, II-I millennium BC), it became clear that in connection with the Tower of Babel we cannot talk about her ziggurat, which was part of the temple of the goddess Nabu (Old Babylonian period - the first half of the 2nd millennium BC; reconstruction in the New Babylonian period - 625-539). G.K. Rawlinson identified Akar-Kuf with Dur-Kurigalza, the capital of the Kassite kingdom (30 km west of Babylon, founded at the end of the 15th - beginning of the 14th centuries, abandoned by the inhabitants already in the 12th century BC), which excluded the possibility of its ziggurat, dedicated to the god Enlil (excavated in the 40s of the 20th century by S. Lloyd and T. Bakir), considered the Tower of Babel. Finally, excavations of Babil, the northernmost of the hills of Babylon, showed that it does not hide a ziggurat, but one of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar II.

Finding the Tower of Babel inside Babylon was one of the tasks set for the German expedition of R. Koldewey (1899-1917). In the central part of the city, the remains of a foundation platform were discovered, which in 1901 were identified with the foundation of the Etemenanki ziggurat. In 1913, F. Wetzel carried out the cleaning and measurements of the monument. His materials, published in 1938, became the basis for new reconstructions. In 1962, Wetzel completed research on the monument, and H. Schmid conducted a detailed analysis of the materials collected over a century and published (1995) a new, more reasonable periodization and reconstruction of the Etemenanki ziggurat.