48 Fun Facts About Tower of Babel

In Genesis, what becomes of Babel once its builders can no longer understand each other?

It is left unfinished. Genesis says only that they 'left off to build the city'; the tower blown down by storm winds comes from a later prophecy quoted by Josephus.

In the Babel story, what does God do first when the builders start their tower?

Comes down to look at it. Genesis says 'the Lord came down to see the city and the tower', so the building meant to touch heaven is one God has to descend to inspect.

In which land do the builders of Babel settle before starting their tower?

Shinar. It is the Bible's name for southern Mesopotamia, so the story plants its overreaching city on the very plain where the real Babylon stood.

According to Genesis, what did Babel's builders use in place of stone and mortar?

Baked brick and bitumen slime. A rabbinic legend adds that the builders sat down and wept whenever a brick fell from the tower, but paid no heed when a man fell and died.

In Genesis, what did Babel's builders hope to avoid by making a name for themselves?

Being scattered over the earth. The story turns on the irony: the one fate they built the city to prevent is exactly the fate God hands them.

Genesis follows the Babel story with a family tree leading to which patriarch?

Abraham. Straight after the story, Genesis counts ten generations from Shem down to Abram, whose departure from Ur begins the Bible's next great journey.

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

Balal, to confuse. It is a pun rather than a true derivation, since the two words merely sound alike, and English 'babble', often linked to the story, probably began as baby-talk.

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

Gate of God. Even that may be the Babylonians' own folk etymology, laid over an older name, Babilla, whose meaning is lost.

Which real Babylonian ziggurat is most often identified as the inspiration for the Tower of Babel?

Etemenanki. The name means 'temple of the foundation of heaven and earth', and exiles from Judah, held in Babylon in the 6th century BC, could have seen it newly rebuilt.

To which god was Babylon's great ziggurat dedicated?

Marduk. He rose with his city: in Babylon's creation epic the storm god defeats the chaos-monster Tiamat, and the other gods make him their lord.

Which two Neo-Babylonian kings, father and son, rebuilt Babylon's ziggurat after the Assyrians sacked the city?

Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II. The father's foundation inscription boasts that he hitched up his royal robe to carry bricks on his head and set the young prince to hauling earth with the workmen.

In the DC Comics storyline 'Tower of Babel', whose secret plans for defeating his own Justice League teammates are stolen?

Batman. The villain Ra's al Ghul turns the stolen files on the League, then lives up to the title by broadcasting a signal that scrambles all written language into nonsense.

Which conqueror had the ruins of Babylon's ziggurat cleared for a rebuilding that his own death there cut short?

Alexander the Great. A Babylonian chronicle adds a coda: a later crown prince fell on his face while sacrificing on the ruin, and his troops and elephants hauled the last rubble away.

Robert Koldewey, who uncovered Babylon's ziggurat base, also unearthed which gateway?

Ishtar Gate. Its blue-glazed bricks went to Germany, and after the First World War the gate was rebuilt inside a Berlin museum.

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

Herodotus. He describes eight towers stacked one on another with a temple on top, and reports the priests' claim that the god himself came to rest there, adding that he does not believe it.

Which language's inventor wrote a five-act play about the Tower of Babel as a boy in his quarrelsome, multilingual home town?

Esperanto. Ludwik Zamenhof blamed the feuds of his native Białystok on its many tongues, and in 1887 he published a neutral second language for everyone under the pen name Doctor Hopeful.

Which 20th-century ruler rebuilt parts of Babylon on its ancient foundations, using bricks stamped with his own name?

Saddam Hussein. He cast himself as heir to Babylon's ancient kings, who had stamped their bricks too, and after his fall his own inscribed bricks became collectors' items.

How does Genesis describe Cush's son, the king whose realm began at Babel?

A mighty hunter before the Lord. Genesis gives him only a few lines and no tower at all; it was later legend that turned the hunter-king into the tyrant who ordered it built.

In which history of his people did Josephus name the tyrant behind the Tower of Babel?

Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus says the crowd thought it cowardice to submit to God, and built a tower so thick that it looked lower than it really was.

The Book of Jubilees makes the Tower of Babel 5,433 cubits high, about three times the height of which modern skyscraper?

The Burj Khalifa. Genesis gives the tower no height at all; Jubilees, written centuries later, supplies one of about 2.5 km and says the work took forty-three years.

One ancient text makes Babel's tower 212 metres high; which real structure first topped that?

The Eiffel Tower. The same text, 3 Baruch, shows the tower's planners in the afterlife looking like dogs, for forcing even a woman in labour to go on making bricks.

In the apocryphal 3 Baruch, what tool do Babel's builders use to try to pierce heaven?

A gimlet. They wanted to bore a hole and find out whether the sky was made of clay, brass or iron, and were struck blind for trying.

In one midrash, why did Babel's builders think they could wage war on heaven?

Arrows shot skyward fell back bloody. In the medieval Sefer ha-Yashar the builders see the blood and rejoice, sure that they have killed everyone in heaven.

In 1679 the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher calculated that no Tower of Babel could ever have reached which target?

The Moon. Kircher put it 25 Earth-diameters away, found the world held too little material for such a tower, and warned that its weight would have tipped the planet out of balance.

Medieval writers counted 72 languages born at Babel by adding up whose descendants in Genesis 10?

Noah. The Greek Bible lists 15 names under Japheth, 30 under Ham and 27 under Shem; the rabbis, whose text of the chapter is two names shorter, spoke of 70 languages instead.

The Quran has no Tower of Babel, but which ruler in it orders a tower built so he can look for God?

Pharaoh. He tells his minister Haman to fire clay bricks and raise a tower so that he can look at the God of Moses, whom he takes for a liar.

Which American scripture puts Jared at the 'great tower'?

Book of Mormon. Jared's family pray to keep their language when tongues are confounded, and are led across the ocean to a promised land in sealed, watertight barges, a voyage the text puts at 344 days.

Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was said to stand in Babylon, the city the Bible calls Babel?

The Hanging Gardens. Their site has never been conclusively found, and they may not have hung at all: one reading makes them roof gardens on stepped terraces, watered by pumps from the Euphrates.

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

The Colosseum. Bruegel had lived in Rome a decade earlier, and he gave his tower the amphitheatre's stacked arches and its stone skin over a core of brick.

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

Rotterdam. The panel in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is half as wide and half as tall as Vienna's, and Bruegel left out the visiting king, so the builders are specks alone with their tower.

Which biblical king, later blamed for the tower, is thought to stand in Bruegel's Vienna painting?

Nimrod. Genesis never says he built the tower; Josephus made him its tyrant, and Bruegel signed and dated the block of stone lying at the king's feet.

Later spiral pictures of the Tower of Babel, such as Gustave Doré's, resemble which real Islamic monument?

The Minaret of Samarra. Its 9th-century ramp winds up the outside in a spiral, the shape Doré gave his tower; he may have borrowed it from travellers' pictures of Mesopotamia.

Which Fritz Lang silent film retells the Babel story in a flashback about a tower's planners and its workers?

Metropolis. Maria tells it as a warning that the planners and the hands who build for them no longer share a language, in a city whose ruler works from a skyscraper called the New Tower of Babel.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where do you put a Babel fish so that it can translate for you?

In your ear. Once there it lets you understand anything said in any language, and in 1997 its name passed to Babel Fish, one of the web's first free translation services.

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

Jorge Luis Borges. His library holds every possible 410-page book, so every truth is on its shelves somewhere, buried in an ocean of gibberish that no librarian can sort.

Who directed the 2006 film Babel, set across Morocco, Japan and North America?

Alejandro González Iñárritu. The title fits the plot, in which families on three continents are caught up in one accident and keep failing to make themselves understood; it won him Best Director at Cannes.

Which British band won the Album of the Year Grammy in 2013 for a record called Babel?

Mumford & Sons. They had been road-testing its songs on stage since 2010, and the record went straight to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.

Which artist showed the Tower of Babel as a stylised geometric structure in a 1928 woodcut?

M. C. Escher. He looks down on the tower from above because, as he explained, the climax of the drama takes place at its summit, where the builders can no longer understand one another.

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

Ted Chiang. His miner breaks through the vault only to surface back on the ground near where he began: heaven and earth turn out to be joined like the two ends of a rolled-out cylinder seal.

In Ovid's telling of which Greek myth do the attackers pile mountains to storm heaven?

The Gigantomachy. Ovid hands the Giants a feat that older Greek stories give to two outsized brothers, Otus and Ephialtes: stacking Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa to climb at the gods.

In a 1688 Swedish satire on language pride, God spoke Swedish and Adam Danish; which language did the serpent speak?

French. Andreas Kempe joked that it moves the whole body so persuasively that even the cleverest listener is taken in; his real target was the claim that Swedish was the tongue of Eden.

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

Hebrew. One medieval Muslim historian explained how it outlasted Babel: the patriarch Eber refused to help build the tower, so he alone was allowed to keep the first language.

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

Pentecost. Jews 'out of every nation under heaven' each hear the apostles in their own language, so the many tongues that parted people at Babel here draw one crowd together.

According to J. E. Gordon, what would halt a tapering brick Tower of Babel before its bricks were crushed?

A lack of oxygen. With straight walls, Gordon worked out, brick would crush itself at about two kilometres; taper the walls, and the tower could climb until its builders struggled to breathe.

Whose 2022 fantasy novel Babel imagines Oxford translators powering the British Empire with enchanted silver?

R. F. Kuang. In her Oxford the magic comes from whatever is lost in translation between two words, captured on bars of silver by the scholars of a tower nicknamed Babel.

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

Chapter 11. Oddly, the chapter before it has already listed the peoples of the world 'every one after his tongue', as if the confusion at Babel had long since happened.

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

De vulgari eloquentia. Dante later changed his mind: in the Paradiso, Adam himself tells him that the language he spoke had died out before work on the tower even began.

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

To survive a second deluge. James Frazer, who collected the tale, suspected it was too close to Genesis to be purely native: its builders, too, end with their speech confused.