50 Fun Facts About Tower of Babel

What happens to the city when the builders are scattered?

Genesis 11:8 says they 'left off to build the city'; the phrase 'Tower of Babel' never actually appears in the Bible.

What does the Babel story set out to explain?

It is an etiology: God confounds one shared speech and scatters the builders across the earth.

In which land do the builders settle before starting the tower?

Shinar is the Hebrew Bible's name for southern Mesopotamia, the region of Babylon.

What did the builders use in place of stone and mortar, according to Genesis?

The detail matches real Mesopotamian construction, where bitumen from local springs cemented fired bricks.

What did the builders hope to avoid by making a name for themselves?

The irony is that scattering is exactly what God does to them.

How many verses long is the Tower of Babel story?

Modern scholars usually assign the passage to the Jahwist source of the Pentateuch.

According to Genesis, the name Babel comes from which verb?

It is a pun: the Hebrew words for Babylon and 'to confuse' sound alike, which is how English got 'babble' by folk association.

What did the Akkadian name Bab-ilim, from which Babylon derives, mean?

Even that is probably a folk etymology of an older, non-Semitic name, Babilla, of unknown meaning.

Which real Babylonian ziggurat is most often identified as the inspiration for the tower?

Its Sumerian name means Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth, and it was dedicated to Marduk.

To which god was Babylon's great ziggurat dedicated?

Herodotus called it the temple of Zeus Belus, Hellenising the god's title Bel.

Which two Neo-Babylonian kings famously rebuilt Babylon's ziggurat in the 6th century BCE?

Sennacherib of Assyria had destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE, and it took 88 years to restore the city.

How tall was Babylon's ziggurat according to the ancient Esagila tablet?

Seven storeys on a 91-metre square base; modern engineers doubt mud brick could bear that height, so scholars dispute the figure.

Who had Babylon's ziggurat demolished in 323 BCE for a rebuild that never came?

He died in Babylon that year; his successor Antiochus Soter never finished the project.

Which German archaeologist's digs after 1913 confirmed the ziggurat's mud-brick base?

The ruins lie about 90 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Which Greek historian described Babylon's ziggurat as the temple of 'Zeus Belus'?

Until the Esagila tablet was translated in 1876, his account was the only detailed description known.

Which Sumerian legend has a parallel tale of a great temple and a plea about languages?

Enmerkar of Uruk builds a ziggurat in Eridu and invokes Enki to restore — or, in Kramer's reading, disrupt — linguistic unity.

Which biblical king do Josephus and later tradition blame for ordering the tower?

Genesis itself never says he built it, only that Babel was part of his kingdom.

How does Genesis describe Cush's son, the king linked to the tower?

He was the son of Cush and great-grandson of Noah, and king in the land of Shinar.

In which work, around 94 CE, did Josephus name the tyrant behind the tower?

He wrote that God confused the people rather than destroying them, since the Flood had failed to teach them.

How tall does the Book of Jubilees say the tower was?

That is roughly 2.5 kilometres, about three times the height of the Burj Khalifa; the book also says it took 43 years to build.

3 Baruch's 463-cubit height beat every real building until which one?

That is about 212 metres; the Eiffel Tower of 1889 finally exceeded it at 324 metres.

In 3 Baruch, what tool did the builders use to try to pierce heaven?

They wanted to know whether the sky was clay, brass or iron; God struck them with blindness and confused speech.

Per one midrash, why did the builders believe war on heaven was possible?

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 109a) records that some of that generation wanted to fight God in heaven.

What are the tower builders called in Jewish sources?

One midrash has them planning to top the tower with an idol holding a sword against God.

Into how many languages was speech divided at Babel, by the usual medieval count?

The figure comes from adding up Noah's descendants in Genesis 10; the Mishnah's count of 70 reflects a shorter Hebrew list.

Does the Quran contain a Tower of Babel story?

Al-Tabari's 9th-century history has Nimrod build a tower in Babil and mankind's Syriac split into 72 tongues.

In the Book of Mormon, whose family prays not to have their language confounded?

God leads them to the Valley of Nimrod and then across the sea to the Americas.

Whose 1563 Tower of Babel painting in Vienna is the most famous depiction?

He painted a smaller version too, now in Rotterdam, and a lost miniature on ivory in Rome.

Which Roman building inspired the arches of Bruegel's tower?

Christians of the time saw the Colosseum as a symbol of both hubris and persecution; Bruegel had visited Rome in 1552-53.

Where is Bruegel's smaller 'Little' Tower of Babel displayed?

It is half the width and height of the Vienna panel; X-rays show it once matched the larger picture even more closely.

Which figure appears with his retinue in the foreground of Bruegel's Vienna painting?

The Rotterdam version leaves out the royal party and focuses entirely on the construction.

Later conical images of the tower, like Doré's, resemble which real Islamic monument?

Nineteenth-century explorers in Iraq saw the spiral minaret and the shape stuck.

Which 1927 Fritz Lang film retells the Babel story in a flashback about workers?

Its tower was modelled on Bruegel's painting; Maria uses the tale to warn of the gulf between head and hands.

What does the Babel creature in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy do?

Yahoo borrowed the name for its online translation service.

Which Argentine writer wrote the short story 'The Library of Babel'?

It imagines a universe-sized library holding every possible 410-page book.

Who directed the 2006 film Babel, set across Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the US?

It completed his Death Trilogy after Amores perros and 21 Grams and won him Best Director at Cannes.

Which composer wrote an opera called Der Thurm zu Babel?

The Russian pianist-composer set the biblical story as a sacred opera.

Which artist depicted the tower as a stylised geometric structure in a woodcut?

His 1928 print looks straight down at the top of the unfinished tower.

Which 1996 A. S. Byatt novel asks whether language can truly be shared?

It asks whether language can truly be shared between people.

Whose story 'Tower of Babylon' follows a miner climbing to the vault of heaven?

Asimov, meanwhile, speculated that Genesis was inspired by an unfinished ziggurat at Babylon.

Which Greek myth has giants piling mountains to reach heaven before Jupiter's thunderbolt?

Ovid tells how Pelion was heaped on Ossa before Jupiter fractured Olympus.

Which Mexican monument did James Frazer connect to the Tower of Babel?

A Dominican friar heard from an aged priest that giants had built it to reach the sky and were scattered by heaven.

Which 1688 Swedish satire had Adam speaking Danish, God Swedish and the serpent French?

Kempe was mocking nationalists like Rudbeck who claimed their own tongue as the original language of Eden.

Which language did medieval scholars widely believe God used to address Adam?

Dante argued in De vulgari eloquentia that this Adamic language was divine and unchangeable, then changed his mind in the Comedy.

Which New Testament event, in Acts 2, is often read as a reversal of Babel?

At Pentecost the apostles are understood in many tongues at once; the narrative echoes the Genesis story.

How high did J. E. Gordon calculate a parallel-walled brick tower could rise?

With tapering walls, he wrote, the men of Shinar would run short of oxygen before the bricks failed.

Which patriarch kept the original tongue for refusing to build, says Abu al-Fida?

That is why, in this telling, Hebrew survived; Eber's son Peleg was named for the 'division' of the earth.

Where in the Book of Genesis is the Tower of Babel story told?

The whole episode takes only nine verses, and Genesis never actually gives the tower's height.

Which work by Dante argues that the language of Adam is of divine origin and unchangeable?

He later softened the view in the Divine Comedy, concluding in Paradiso that Hebrew merely derives from Adam's tongue.

In a Toltec story recorded by Ixtlilxóchitl, why did people build a tall zacuali after the flood?

As in Genesis, their languages were then confounded and they dispersed to separate parts of the Earth.