Tower of Babel Trivia
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48 free Tower of Babel trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Tower of Babel trivia quiz covers the nine-verse story in Genesis 11 and everything that grew from it: the plain of Shinar, brick and bitumen, the pun on balal, and what the tale was meant to explain. It then digs into the history behind the myth — the Etemenanki ziggurat of Marduk in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander, Herodotus, Koldewey's dig, and the Sumerian tale of Enmerkar. It also covers Nimrod and Josephus, the Book of Jubilees and its 2.5-kilometre tower, the midrash of bloody arrows, the 72 languages, Islamic and Mormon versions, Bruegel's Colosseum-shaped tower, Doré and Escher, Metropolis, the Babel fish, Borges, Ted Chiang and Iñárritu's Babel. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Enjoy this one? Try our Bible and Ancient Mesopotamia quizzes next.
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Q 01In Genesis, what becomes of Babel once its builders can no longer understand each other?
It is left unfinished
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.
Q 02In the Babel story, what does God do first when the builders start their tower?
Comes down to look at it
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.
Q 03In which land do the builders of Babel settle before starting their tower?
Shinar
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.
Q 04According to Genesis, what did Babel's builders use in place of stone and mortar?
Baked brick and bitumen slime
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.
Q 05In Genesis, what did Babel's builders hope to avoid by making a name for themselves?
Being scattered over the earth
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.
Q 06Genesis follows the Babel story with a family tree leading to which patriarch?
Abraham
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.
Q 07According to Genesis, the name Babel comes from which verb?
Balal, to confuse
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.
Q 08What did the Akkadian name Bab-ilim, from which Babylon derives, mean?
Gate of God
Gate of God. Even that may be the Babylonians' own folk etymology, laid over an older name, Babilla, whose meaning is lost.
Q 09Which real Babylonian ziggurat is most often identified as the inspiration for the Tower of Babel?
Etemenanki
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.
Q 10To which god was Babylon's great ziggurat dedicated?
Marduk
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.
Q 11Which two Neo-Babylonian kings, father and son, rebuilt Babylon's ziggurat after the Assyrians sacked the city?
Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II
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.
Q 12In the DC Comics storyline 'Tower of Babel', whose secret plans for defeating his own Justice League teammates are stolen?
Batman
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.
Q 13Which conqueror had the ruins of Babylon's ziggurat cleared for a rebuilding that his own death there cut short?
Q 21One ancient text makes Babel's tower 212 metres high; which real structure first topped that?
The Eiffel Tower
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.
Q 22In the apocryphal 3 Baruch, what tool do Babel's builders use to try to pierce heaven?
A gimlet
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.
Q 23In one midrash, why did Babel's builders think they could wage war on heaven?
Arrows shot skyward fell back bloody
Alexander the Great
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.
Q 14Robert Koldewey, who uncovered Babylon's ziggurat base, also unearthed which gateway?
Ishtar Gate
Ishtar Gate. Its blue-glazed bricks went to Germany, and after the First World War the gate was rebuilt inside a Berlin museum.
Q 15Which Greek historian described Babylon's ziggurat as the temple of 'Zeus Belus'?
Herodotus
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.
Q 16Which language's inventor wrote a five-act play about the Tower of Babel as a boy in his quarrelsome, multilingual home town?
Esperanto
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.
Q 17Which 20th-century ruler rebuilt parts of Babylon on its ancient foundations, using bricks stamped with his own name?
Saddam Hussein
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.
Q 18How does Genesis describe Cush's son, the king whose realm began at Babel?
A mighty hunter before the Lord
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.
Q 19In which history of his people did Josephus name the tyrant behind the Tower of Babel?
Antiquities of the Jews
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.
Q 20The Book of Jubilees makes the Tower of Babel 5,433 cubits high, about three times the height of which modern skyscraper?
The Burj Khalifa
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.
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.
Q 24In 1679 the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher calculated that no Tower of Babel could ever have reached which target?
The Moon
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.
Q 25Medieval writers counted 72 languages born at Babel by adding up whose descendants in Genesis 10?
Noah
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.
Q 26The Quran has no Tower of Babel, but which ruler in it orders a tower built so he can look for God?
Pharaoh
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.
Q 27Which American scripture puts Jared at the 'great tower'?
Book of Mormon
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.
Q 28Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was said to stand in Babylon, the city the Bible calls Babel?
The Hanging Gardens
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.
Q 29Which Roman building inspired the arches of Bruegel's tower?
The Colosseum
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.
Q 30Where is Bruegel's smaller 'Little' Tower of Babel displayed?
Rotterdam
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.