- What was the Tower of Babel?
- Characteristics of the myth of the Tower of Babel
- biblical myths
- Was the Tower of Babel real?
We explain what the Tower of Babel was according to the Old Testament and the characteristics of the myth. Also, what are biblical myths.
What was the Tower of Babel?
According to what is narrated in the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a gigantic building built by the descendants of Noah, the only survivors of the universal flood, on the plains of Senar or Babel, with the purpose of reaching the heavenly heights.
offended by the pride human, God (Yahweh) intervened and decided that each of the survivors would speak a idiom different, making it impossible for them to agree to continue the construction of the tower. The people then left the tower and spread throughout the world, which gave rise to the different languages that we know.
The story of the Tower of Babel is one of the myths best-known and most popular foundational texts of the Bible, described in the opening section of the Old Testament, Genesis. It has been the object of study by numerous specialists, many of whom suppose that some similar tower must have existed in the remote past, probably in ancient times. Mesopotamia. In fact, there are references to the same myth in the book of jubilees, and in the writings of Philo of Alexandria (70 AD) and Flavius Josephus (37 to 100 AD), as well as in many other religious sources.
Like all founding myths, however, the value of the story of the Tower of Babel lies in the fact that it offers a mythological explanation regarding the origin of the different human languages, at the same time as a allegory regarding human pride and the divine punishment that it engenders. In some versions of the myth the tower is simply abandoned, while in others God blows it down through the force of the wind.
Characteristics of the myth of the Tower of Babel
The myth of the Tower of Babel is characterized by:
- It is a biblical myth, narrated in the Old Testament, but which has a presence in numerous later texts. It is part of the biblical foundational myths, that is, those that explain the origin of things.
- It recounts the origin of human languages, but also the punishment inflicted by God on the descendants of Noah, when they wanted to build a tower that reached the sky.
- Similar myths exist in many other religious traditions, such as Sumerian, which tells of the enormous ziggurat of Enmerkar, one of the kings of Uruk; or in the Islam, about similar constructions of the Egyptian pharaohs.
- The Tower of Babel became an important symbol in Western culture, as metaphor of the disasters that human pride brings. With a similar meaning it appears among the arcana of the Tarot de Marseille (in the Tower card).
- Numerous archaeological efforts have been made to find the possible Towers of Babel in the sites of ancient Babylon, without finding any conclusive evidence regarding their real existence.
biblical myths
The stories of the Bible can be read as great metaphors or allegories.
When talking about biblical myths, reference is made to the stories contained in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. They are understood as myths because they are part of mythology christian (Y bean, too), that is, because they illustrate the meaning moral and the vision of the world of the peoples who wrote them, through stories that should not necessarily be taken literally, but rather as great metaphors or allegories.The Bible is an important source of this type of myths and narratives within Western culture.
Was the Tower of Babel real?
Many efforts have been made to attribute to the myth of the Tower of Babel a real historical reference. It is linked, for example, with the Etemenanki, the gigantic pyramidal temple that the Babylonians built in honor of the god Marduk around the 6th century BC. C., and that possibly required slave labor, much of it Hebrew. If so, the tower would have been located in the vicinity of Al Qasr, south of present-day Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.
However, there are no non-religious records on the Tower of Babel, which suggests that it is a myth whose value was more pedagogical than documentary, that is, that it had the purpose of teaching through an anecdote, and not Tell the story as it really happened.