The story of the Babel Tower is (grossly) true.

The Bible states (and historical evidence confirms) that the Hebrews of Judah were defeated by Nebuchadnezzar/Nabuchodonosor II, king of Chaldea, in 597 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar subsequently deported large parts of the population, thus following a common mesopotamian practice (the Assyrians had done exactly the same when they conquered the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel in 722). In 586, the kingdom of Judah technically ceased to exist, thus effectively depriving the deportees of their nation. David's temple was destroyed a few months later. This was the actual beginning of the Exile.

Now Nabuchadnezzar happened to be among the most powerful emperors of his time, almost equal to Pharaoh himself. He turned his capital Babylon into a magnificient city that, according to Herodotus, "surpasse(d) in splendor any city in the known world." The most famous monument of this time is of course the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (as any Civilization player will tell you), one of the seven Wonders of the ancient World.

We know that the Babel Tower was in fact the temple of Marduk, a gigantic ziggurat of approximately 295 feet (61 metres) in height, width and length. According to an inscription it was made of "baked brick" (the only abundant material in the region) "enameled in billiant blue".

Now imagine the deported Jews, in their unexplainable exile ("Has Yahweh forsaken us ? Didn't He give that land to us, and if so why have we been expelled ?"). Contrarily to the Assyrians, the Chaldeans had not scattered the Hebrews among their land : the Jews were settled in a single place, Babylon, and formed their own community. The extreme conditions led to a resurgence of faith ("we have been punished because of our impurity - let us be pious again") and to a radical change in the foundations of their beliefs : in the Lamentations and the book of Job (an upright man who goes through terrible sufferings), written respectively shortly before and after the Exile, the Jews admit the fact that God does whatever He pleases, and that humans should not question God's will. In this atmosphere, the building of the majestuous tower was seen by the Jews as a symbol of arrogance and lack of humility.

OK, so we know where the tower comes from, but what about the "counfusion of languages" ? The actual lingusitic explosion had happened a long time before, c. 2000 B.C., when the languages of Mesopotamia, Iran and Anatolia began to diversify into different branches of what we call the Indo-European and Semitic families of languages (see The Alphabet, Episode One). This diversificaton was later encouraged by the creation and the spreading of the Aramaic alphabet, the ancestor of both semitic and phenician alphabets (we use a latin version of the greek version of the phenician version of the aramaic alphabet). Interestingly enough, this alphabet began to spread in Chaldea in the 6th century, together with a massive increase of trade and migrations which turned Babylon into a cosmopolitan city.

It is easy to figure out how the Jews, who lived in a virtually closed society and had never been exposed to such a variety of cultures and languages, expressed their amazement through the myth of Babel, the tower of all langagues.


Note : If you want to have an idea of what the Babel Tower looked like, there is an older, smaller (but still impressive and remarkably conserved) version of it : the Ziggurat of Ur, Iran.