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.